In Mary Ann Sieghart's Times article yesterday about her visit to the conservatively-minded rural hamlet of Chipping Sodbury to take the election temperature, she records en passant the following:

'The vicar of Badminton, the Rev Christopher Mulholland, who hunts with Beaufort, has joined us in the pub. Reputed to be the Prince of Wales’s favourite priest, he met Michael Howard at the Prince’s wedding and was not impressed. “I shook his hand and wished him well and he barely acknowledged me. He was as cold as a bloody fish counter.”

'Maybe that explains his anti-Semitic comment when a BLT sandwich arrived. The waitress asked who it was for and the vicar said: “Well, it’s certainly not for Michael Howard! I always say I couldn’t trust a man who has not tasted pork.” '

The authentic voice of polite, genteel, and now utterly respectable and mainstream English Jew-hatred -- and from a vicar of the Church of England, which never loses an opportunity to vilify and demonise Israel.