For those of us who first entered higher education in the 1990s, David Baddiel will always be one half of Newman and Baddiel, the first comedians to sell out Wembley Arena and the men behind the wonderful History Today sketches, which punctured those obscure academic debates that are pumped up way beyond their true value. Later, we watched him as one-half of the Fantasy Football League duo with Frank Skinner and listened to him sing Three Lions. Today, we buy his children’s books for our kids.
Baddiel’s newest non-children’s book, published in paperback in February 2022, is much less funny than all of these – and designedly so. It argues ‘progressives’ often leave Jewish people out in considerations of racism. For example, it ends by discussing a Tweet from the actor Robert Lindsay that said Jeremy Corbyn ‘certainly isn’t racist’. Referring to Lindsay’s most famous character, Baddiel closes with the words: ‘on realising that for Wolfie Smith, Jews didn’t count, a tiny part of me died.’
