One of the things to watch as David Cameron maneuvers to form a government in England is the prospect that the Liberal Democratic leader, Nicolas Clegg, might end up in control of the foreign office. A correspondent of National Public Radio and CBS, Larry Miller, writing in Tablet magazine, has reported that during the run-up to the election, Liberal Democratic candidates distributed, in two parliamentary districts with what Mr. Miller called “a high concentration of Islamic voters,” leaflets calling “for Britain to ‘stop arming Israel.’” One leaflet, Mr. Miller reported, featured a photograph of a dead child “carried through the streets of Gaza with the words ‘The World watched in horror. . .’” Mr. Clegg likes to strike a high-minded pose. But Mr. Miller describes “the Cambridge-educated Clegg” as “the face of an increasingly undiplomatic disdain for Israeli policies that often crosses the line into open incitement against the Jewish state.”

This kind of thing may not come as a surprise to the British. Standpoint magazine has been on the story for some time, including with a wonderful dispatch, issued in December of 2009, by Douglas Murray. He describes trying to pin down the Liberal Democratic leader on the subject of Israel, particularly the party’s tolerance for Baroness Tonge, who is one of the British politicians most hostile to the Jewish state and who, at one point, declared that if she’d had to live in the situation faced by the Palestinian Arabs she might have become a suicide bomber. Mr. Murray quotes her as saying in 2006: “The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.” Mr. Murray recounts Mr. Clegg taking great umbrage at any questions in respect of his own bona fides, but dodging the effort at being pinned down on the substance.

Mr. Murray calls it a parable of British politics, and it is echoed in an interview with Mr. Clegg conducted by one of his former university pals, Adar Primor, and published May 5 in Ha’aretz. “Though Cleggmania is rife in the U.K., Jerusalem is sunk in a Clegg-pression,” is the way it was put by Ha’aretz, which quotes one unnamed official as saying point blank: “Clegg is bad news for Israel. His party is running on a human rights platform, and the atmosphere is hostile to Israel. We remind the Liberal Democrats of South Africa during apartheid. Even if Clegg decides not to take the foreign portfolio, the very fact that Liberal Democrats sit in the cabinet is likely to mean trouble for us.” It’s a situation that is combustible enough in its own right, but even more so at a time when a new administration in Washington is fairly inviting erstwhile allies of the Jewish state to take a more pro-Arab stance.