What this actress said to the bishop about avoiding broiges

I find myself an “influencer”. Last week on this very page I challenged Sir Keir Starmer to give back the winter fuel allowance and, lo and behold, in one week, Rachel Reeves’s climbdown is suddenly Maureen’s weird prescience. I won’t let it go to my head but I might suggest in print he retract the other gift he gave last week to Hamas.

I was sitting in a tiny, crowded fish restaurant in Belsize Park with David, my partner, and Bishop Ken Nowakowski of the Ukrainian cathedral in Mayfair, (I love writing that sentence) when Ken said something that really made me think. It concerned a mistake he had made at a regular meeting with his staff. A person he had inadvertently wronged told him he felt he’d been thrown under a bus.

Ken realised his subordinate was absolutely right and immediately said so. A lot of people, it struck me, in a similar position of power, would have justified their action, told the guy to man up or at least said nothing but harboured a broiges (my words not his) for thereafter.

Nobody likes being wrong-footed by someone lower down the pecking order. My problem was always with authority. In the acting world I have often been infuriated by the pupil-teacher attitude of some directors who are dictatorial or bullying and equally infuriated by some actors who, in their middle years, still put up their hands and say, “Would it be all right if I try standing up here?” Because yes, of course, you can stand up, or sit down, or leap-frog over two aspidistras without asking permission, because it is all part of the rehearsal process. Make the mistakes in a warm, embracing atmosphere then choose the best path.

I accept that I am often opinionated and lack the skills to keep my temper when I am crossed. Yet I am equally embarrassed to tell my cleaning lady to lift things up and clean under them, because, somewhere in my hierarchical world, I think I should be doing my own cleaning.

I find it hard to ask strangers not to poke and pat my arms when they stop me in the street. I clench my entire body but lack the words to say, with gentle humour: “Do you mind if I ask you not to treat me like the back of a labradoodle?” It is the duty of every Jew, as I understand it, to correct the behaviour of others when necessary. But it is only a mitzvah to do it in the right way. “Better,” the Talmud tells us, “to be tossed into a furnace than to embarrass another person in public.” 

Bit extreme, I query Ken, nervously thinking of all those jokes and stories at my late mother’s expense. Does it still count if the embarrassed person is the one goading you to tell the stories? I would have loved her to meet Ken. “How do you mean he’s your friend? She would have scoffed. “How can anyone have a bishop for a friend?”

Bishop Ken has been over for Friday night dinner and parties and accompanied me to a pro-Israel demonstration. I have fronted Ukrainian fund-raisers for him. We are the vanilla version of the bishop and the actress. He worked on a kibbutz in Israel when he was a young man. Fresh off the farm in Saskatchewan, he had no Hebrew and was amazed when he heard his name being called out every few minutes. Finally, he realised that Ken in Hebrew meant yes and he was not just the most popular guy in town, so he took the name Adam, his middle name, for the rest of his sojourn. He has done wonders for the Ukrainian cathedral, often housing 15,000 congregants or more at their major feast day celebrations and a few thousand at their four Sunday settings. Good shines out of him and mischief too, but mostly he just manifests love.

Meanwhile, the Co-op, the Lineker, the BBC, Ben and Jerry, leftie actors and grizzled pop stars and the propaganda machine that is academia, thunder on, ignoring facts and historic antisemitism and giving me fitful sleep.

Between ourselves, I am told on very good authority that there were several meetings – at least nine – between the theocracy in Iran and Putin prior to October 7 and that the Islamist terrorists who paraglided out of Gaza to commit their atrocities were trained by the Wagner Group.

The aim was primarily to remove the Russian war of attrition on Ukraine off the front pages and how superbly it has worked. Since the Gaza war began, there have been few front pages on Ukraine, no students march against the Russian invader.

Meanwhile, Israel under Netanyahu has slavishly responded to Hamas in exactly the way Hamas primed them to. The world has supported the attacker not the victim. In addition, there is virtually no mention of the Palestinians in Gaza marching daily against Hamas. Macron, presiding over, some might say, a highly antisemitic country, has lectured them, Starmer has thrown Israel under the 67 bus and the rest is just same old same old…

Some of my Corrie colleagues were secretly amused when I started walking to work with a security man. “Clare’s Jewish,” one said, referring to one of the script team, “and she’s not feeling threatened.” I could have quoted the old Schnozzle Durante song, “It’s not where you start it’s where you finish,’ but what would have been the point?

I could dwell on Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, whose lives were cut off at their constituency surgeries, or Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischkinsky, who were shot dead at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC – and I do dwell on it and it wakes me up at three in the morning. It is immaterial, in my eyes, whether Netanyahu is a dreadful, crooked leader or not – it wouldn’t make any difference if Mother Teresa was in charge… they’d say the same, just add criticism of her dress sense. This is the oldest hate of all with a different head on.

Heigh-ho, meanwhile, I’ve planted two Montana clematis, a white jasmine and a Passiflora against the new fence, bought a new bird feeder, reminded myself I’m in love with a wonderful guy and am preparing for a night of climate change-inspired cabaret at Crazy Coqs on Wednesday. My intro reads:

“The world’s in flames and our actions fan it

So let’s have a knees up to save the planet.”

Pablo Neruda it ain’t, but it’s marginally funnier than Juliet Stevenson and Greta Thunberg.