LONDON — With Kemi Badenoch settling in as the new leader of the Conservative Party we might spare a thought for Suella Braverman, who may well go down in history as the great lost leader of the United Kingdom. Mrs. Braverman withdrew from the contest in the summer on the grounds that her party did not want to hear the truth about why it had lost the election, much of which she believed was down to its failure to stop the out-of-control level of illegal immigration now affecting this small island.

As the daughter of two immigrants of Indian origin fleeing to London from Mauritius and Kenya, Ms. Braverman knew that racism is not as simple as black and white; a Buddhist married to a Jew, she spoke out against the dangers inherent in the growing political clout of British Muslims, expressed in the pro-Hamas hate marches which made Central London a no-go zone for Jews most weekends since the October 7 massacre last year.

Watching the events which took place at Amsterdam this week — just over an hour from London by plane — it’s hard to believe she was exaggerating. The attack on Jews at Amsterdam happened not only as we approached the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, but also 20 years after the murder of Theo Van Gogh at Amsterdam (on November 1, 2004) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s subsequent self-imposed exile from the Netherlands in order to avoid the same fate.

The evil we thought had ended at Nuremberg only paused to regroup and reconfigure, it increasingly appears, eventually to shape-shift into something new, as antisemitism invariably has throughout history. It is the cockroach of politics, able to live without a head — or a brain — and to regrow new limbs; in the case of 21st-century Europe, the modish monster which I dubbed “Fresh’n’Funky Antisemitism” has emerged as something between a dance craze and a children’s crusade. 

In Britain, this takes the shape of an unholy alliance between the most educated (though not, needless to say, the most intelligent) and the most ignorant, whose vastly differing views on everything from women’s rights to homosexuality can be easily overcome by the power of their shared Jew-hatred. In these uniquely atomised times, this is more attractive to weird people than ever; antisemitism is called the socialism of fools because, in a terrible way, it acts as a uniting force between vastly different groups.

It’s the Secret Santa of racism, the poisonous gift that keeps on giving people who identify as good a license to be bad; as Aldous Huxley wrote in “Crome Yellow,” “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

British Jews looking across the water to mainland Europe cannot feel as secure as they might have done in the past, even when the Nazi tanks could be heard on Dover Beach, for now the island that gave them sanctuary is also home to millions whose holy book tells them that Jews must be eradicated. There are around 290,000 Jews in the UK: around 4 million Muslims. Even if we didn’t have the official statistics — which seems entirely likely soon, the way things are going in this country — we’d be able to guess this by the two-tier policing.

The very loyalty of the British Jewish community seems to actively count against them in a country intent on indulging in an endless cycle of performative self-abuse. Everything is deemed “racist” by our commentariat — Trump being a “fascist” —   except the spectacle of Jews being beaten to the ground by mobs of masked men, which apparently was just a bit of rough-and-tumble football hooliganism.

There’s a feeling here that whatever happens in the Middle East, the second front of Jew-hating has opened up properly in Europe; stealthily-occupied Europe, as it increasingly seems. British Jews, if they feel that their situation here is untenable, can go to Israel; where will the rest of us go? What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.

First they come for the Saturday people, then they come for the Sunday people. Will the British people continue to sleepwalk into this dismal end-game the way great civilizations have in the past — or will the day of reckoning come when we have had enough? Whatever, it seems likely that we will look back and understand that Suella Braverman was right.