Much ado about Liew at the Guardian

Guardian staff are split over an opinion piece on a London café by star sportswriter Jonathan Liew that has managed to embroil the title in another antisemitism row.

Liew’s story focused on a Cafe Metro, a small Palestinian restaurant in Archway, and a branch of Gail’s Bakery that has opened two doors down. “It feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression,” he wrote, pointing out that Gail’s parent company Bain Capital “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.”

Liew described repeated acts of vandalism at the new Gail’s – including smashed windows and graffiti messages about “corporate Zionism” – as merely “small acts of petty symbolism”, a phrase that has now been edited out of his article. The reference to “high-street aggression” has also been moved, which the Guardian says is “to clarify it meant to refer to the described fears about the chain’s impact on small traders” – an explanation that some staff do not find credible.

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Insiders said editor Kath Viner was deciding how to deal further with internal complaints and office disquiet about the piece. One staffer told Jewish News they were “absolutely sickened”, Liew’s sports desk colleague Jacob Steinberg responded by posting on social media photos of challah bread he had bought from Gail’s, and Guardian staff arrived at work on Wednesday to find a sizeable protest outside their office in London’s King’s Cross, some of the crowd attempting to persuade security to pass on bread and pastries bought at Gail’s Bakery to Viner.

Even staff supportive of Liew”s piece are unhappy – some that it was edited at all, others that the row has overshadowed publication of a Guardian series on questionable Cameo videos made by Reform leader Nigel Farage.

But why is Liew, signed at great expense from the Independent sport team in 2019 after years of success writing about sport for the Telegraph, writing about café proxy wars in the first place? The answer, says a Guardian insider, is that the award-winning journalist received a big offer from a rival newspaper group last year and was tempted to stay by a package that included extra money for non-sport columns.