London Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone seems to have completely lost the plot. Under pressure from all sides to apologise for comparing a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a concentration camp guard and then refusing to do so -- to the astonishment and consternation of London Assembly members -- he has now renewed his attack on the Daily Mail, sister paper to the Evening Standard (and for which I happen to write). According to the online Guardian, he said today that the Mail would have been

'"at the front of the queue of collaborators" had the Nazis won the war and branding its papers among "the most reprehensibly edited" organs in the world' ".

He was referring to the fact that in the 1930s, the Mail supported Oswald Mosley's fascists. Now, he implied, the Mail was continuing in that tradition:

'He said the Mail had continued to discriminate against minorities since the war, demonising first Irish immigrants and now asylum seekers'.

The claim that those who are concerned that Britain has lost control of its borders are therefore fascists is not just a smear which seeks to demonise a perfectly legitimate concern. Imputing to it a prejudice of the same type as anti-Jewish hatred grossly belittles that hatred, and implies a profound contempt for all who hasve suffered from it. Similarly, by absurdly calling such concerned citizens -- who probably comprise the majority of the population -- 'fascists' reveals a refusal to acknowledge the true reality of fascism.

This is therefore all of a piece with the Holocaust denial implicit in Livingstone's deeply offensive comparison between the Standard journalist Oliver Finegold and a concentration camp guard. But it leaves open the question of why Livingstone should have alighted upon such a comparison at all, when confronted with an inoffensive journalist door-stepping the Mayor's party to celebrate the anniversary of Labour MP Chris Smith's coming-out as gay. Why exactly has London's uber-pc Mayor so completely lost it?

I think it all goes back to Livingstone's embrace of Sheikh Qaradawi, the Islamic jurist who has expressed poisonous and even murderous prejudice against Jews and gays (an embrace of somewhat more urgent concern than the political agenda 70 years ago of a newspaper magnate who has long been dead). That incident achieved the extraordinary feat of uniting against the mayor a coalition of orthodox Jews, gays, Sikhs, lesbians, Hindus, extreme feminists and others who were appalled by Qaradawi, and who produced a dossier laying out Qaradawi's agrenda in his own words.

Ken hit the roof at this, and no wonder. For among those now ranged against him -- and accusing him, no less, of condoning the most violent prejudice, the pc crime of crimes -- were the very constituencies on which he had constructed his entire political platform. The rainbow coalition of minorities had now turned against their erstwhile patron.

Without these minorities, Livingstone has no power base. That is surely why he threw the party for Chris Smith, to mend his fences with the all-important gay rights lobby (who, incidentally, seemed happy to ignore his support for Qaradawi) -- the party which was door-stepped by Oliver Finegold, at whom the Mayor famously blew his fuse.

But there is one other factor. As I have already remarked in an earlier post, Livingstone's counter-dossier about Qaradawi contained some demented language -- about his accusers being Mossad agents, for example -- of the kind routinely used by Islamists. The Mayor is said to be very close to precisely such Islamists.

And this illustrates an issue far wider than Livingstone -- that the left, of which he is such a shining ornament, has got into bed with radical Islamism and, subscribing to its twisted narrative of 'oppression', routinely libels the Jews of Israel as 'the new Nazis' has breathed life into Muslim Jew-hatred (which itself borrows deeply from Nazi propaganda), and prompted a terrifying increase in anti-Jewish feeling ranging from muttered social prejudice through public accusations of the 'global Jewish conspiracy' to rising physical attacks on Jews, synagogues and cemeteries.

In other words, it's open season on the Jews. Given all these pressures and influences, it therefore surely becomes far more explicable that, when Livingstone saw the Standard journalist come to (as he probably thought) make mischief over his gay festivity, he not only suggested the journalist had been a German war criminal but merely dug himself even further into the hole after being told that the Finegold was Jewish. Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish offensiveness is in the political air that Livingstone breathes.

The Qaradawi affair proved it; now this ouburst reinforces it. The Mayor of London is not fit for public office.