Wrapped against the November chill, Luciana Berger strode up the front steps of a terraced house in north London.
The harassed woman who answered the door was doubly torn: between a political conversation and the egg congealing in her children’s pasta carbonara, and between two parties in next month’s general election.
“The trouble is, I’ve always been Labour,” she said. “So was I,” Ms Berger shot back.
Ms Berger, 38, was a Labour MP for nine years, representing a constituency 200 miles away in Liverpool. She was hounded out of the party by local activists after repeatedly denouncing the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for his failure to get to grips with a surge in anti-Semitism. Now she is running as a Liberal Democrat in Finchley and Golders Green, deemed to be the most Jewish constituency in the UK.
Mr Corbyn’s alleged impassivity over anti-Semitism rebounded this week when Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, launched a blistering and highly unusual attack on the Labour leader’s suitability for high office. “A new poison — sanctioned from the very top — has taken root in the Labour party,” Rabbi Mirvis wrote in The Times.
Mr Corbyn has riled the Jewish community for many years with his support for extremist Palestinian causes and tolerance of leftwing allies using anti-Semitic tropes in their criticism of Zionism. A 2016 party review of anti-Semitism was widely seen as a whitewash and the UK’s human rights watchdog has launched a formal probe into the party’s handling of anti-Semitism cases.
Ms Berger, who is Jewish, joined the Lib Dems in September. A few weeks later she was selected to stand in Finchley and Golders Green. It is a mountain to climb. The party won only 3,463 votes in the 2017 election, far behind Mike Freer of the Conservatives, who won with 24,599, and his Labour runner-up with 22,942.
But Brexit is scrambling party allegiances here as elsewhere in Britain. Finchley and Golders Green is a relatively affluent but diverse constituency. It has some of the biggest mansions in London but also a child poverty rate of 35 per cent. Margaret Thatcher held the seat, under different boundaries, for three decades. It flipped to Labour in 1997 and back to the Tories in 2010. In the 2016 referendum it voted strongly in favour of remaining in the EU.
A backlash against Brexit should in theory tip this marginal Conservative seat to Labour. But Mr Corbyn’s handling of the anti-Semitism issue, coupled with his ambivalence over Brexit, gives Ms Berger a fighting chance.
A Deltapoll survey conducted in the second week of November for The Observer newspaper suggested Labour support in the constituency had slumped by 25 percentage points, to 19 per cent, while the Lib Dems had shot up by the same amount, into second place, albeit 14 points behind the Conservatives. A YouGov MRP analysis this week suggested the seat would remain in Conservative hands.
Ms Berger has to persuade centre or left-of-centre voters angry about leaving the EU that she is the only one who can thwart Mr Freer, a pro-European Tory who, as a government whip, nonetheless backed prime minister Boris Johnson’s push for a hard Brexit.
“I’m the only real Remain candidate,” said Ms Berger. It is first and foremost a Brexit election, she added, while decrying Mr Corbyn’s record on anti-Semitism.
“If the Labour party can’t contend with that issue, how on earth can they be in charge of the country?” she asked.
Ross Houston, a well-liked local councillor who is standing for Labour, insisted the party’s core vote was holding up. But he conceded Labour would lose votes because of anti-Semitism. It had been handled badly, he said. “We need to become exemplary.”
He acknowledged that the party could only count on the support of 8 to 10 per cent support in the Jewish community. Even in this constituency, Jews only make up about a fifth of the electorate. But feelings are running strong.
“He’s a terrorist sympathiser,” said Effi Kay, manager of Fleishmans, a kosher butcher in the Temple Fortune neighbourhood. “What more is there to say?”.
“If you talk to the Jewish community under 50, they are angry,” said Mr Freer, who is quietly confident of being re-elected. “They have a bag packed. What I found most upsetting was doing a coffee morning at a Jewish care home with people in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and they were more terrified. They said to me, this is how it started in Nazi Germany.”
Some Jews, while appalled by the Labour leadership’s handling of anti-Semitism, said such fears were overblown and Brexit was a bigger worry.
Avi Freeman, a lawyer who has switched from Labour to Lib Dem, said: “These things come from the top. I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn and his team recognise the situation and are not doing enough to deal with it. But an existential threat? Some of the tone is a little shrill, without calling into doubt the reality of the issues.”
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Adam Fagan, an academic from east Finchley, was a Labour member for three decades before quitting the party in 2015. He said he felt especially wounded by Mr Corbyn’s claim that Zionists lacked a “British sense of irony”. “I remember those moments at school when I was told I didn’t belong. For me it was like a dagger.”
But he added that he was still more concerned about Brexit. Had Mr Corbyn been more staunchly pro-Remain, Mr Fagan said he would probably have voted Labour. “For me, remaining in the EU is paramount. Brexit is the biggest folly ever,” he said, but added he had not yet decided how to vote.
Left-leaning, pro-European voters in Finchley and Golders Green face an agonising choice: a vote to put Mr Corbyn in Downing Street may be hard to countenance but a vote for Ms Berger could hand victory to a Brexit-backing Conservative.
“Lots of people feel politically homeless, in a way that hasn’t been the case before,” said Rabbi Josh Levy at Alyth, a progressive synagogue. “It is probably an experience beyond the Jewish community. But it is a particularly acute experience within the Jewish community where there has been a failure to deal explicitly with a particular issue of real concern.”
Photographs by Charlie Bibby/FT and Rex/Shutterstock
