The simple fact is that the Tories' approach to the European Parliament is quite mad

Iain Dale is demanding that those who criticise the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski should apologise because the Chief Rabbi of Poland has been prevailed upon to say that the man is not an anti-semite these days and to criticise a headline run by the New Statesman suggesting he was asking the UK Tories to ditch their alliance with him.

Yet, as Toby Helm points out, Rabbi Schudrich said in an email to the New Statesman that he has not retracted:

"It is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of the NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi...Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre ... needs to understand with what, and by whom, he is being represented."

Moreover, Helm explains that the new comments come as a result of 'enormous pressure ' - bullying in plain terms - from Kaminski's Law and Justice Party to retract, but he has not done so. As Helm says:

I suspect that if one really wants to get to the heart of what Schudrich thinks, one should stick to the statement he originally gave to the New Statesman, before the row really got going. Cut through the political mud-slinging, go back to the time when he gave an opinion under no pressure at all. Then he raised questions about Kaminski's past association with a neo-Nazi leaning party, and said people needed to think clearly before getting alongside such individuals. The Tories want to portray Schudrich as a great supporter of Kaminski because they are in a mess over their new EU allies. The truth, I reckon, is rather more complex and less helpful to David Cameron's party.

However much the defenders of Cameron's mad Euro-policy may grumble, the simple fact is this: at a time when the Tories could (and if they were rational, should) have continued in the EPP, the party of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, they instead chose to ally themselves with a motley crew of fringe parties and MEPs well outside even the right-wing mainstream. They did this purely to satisfy a bunch of Eurosceptic fanatics who had backed Cameron as leader. And they were quite happy to ditch their own respected leader at Strasbourg in the process, preferring to see Kaminski as their leader.

That some of their new allies have pretty unsavoury pasts (to quote Rabbi Schudrich "Mr Kaminski was a member of the NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi") adds to the oddity of it all. And no amount of huffing and puffing can detract from the sheer idiocy of such positioning, both for the Conservatives and for a Britain they hope to govern again.

Hague shows his immaturity in Europe

It is quite extraordinary that William Hague is going around Europe bad-mouthing our former Prime Minister in a bid to scupper his chances of becoming European President. At the same time, despite the growing criticism at home and abroad, he remains doggedly wedded to his bizarre allies in Eastern Europe and further away from ever than the Christian Democrat mainstream in the European Parliament.

The more the facts show the extremism of Kaminski or the Latvian Fatherland party, the more those who raise them find themselves smeared and attacked. No wonder an experienced hand like Michael Heseltine has warned that they will have to be ditched pronto if the Tories win power.

The idea that a would-be future foreign secretary is leading campaign on behalf of the Luxembourg prime minister ahead of one of our greatest British prime ministers suggests a startling immaturity. We are not talking Nigel Farage or Nick Griffin here, after all, but someone aspiring to a great office of state. Yet Hague puts narrow Tory sectarianism first.

I had thought that Hague had become one of the more substantial figures on David Cameron's front bench. But his antics in recent months have shown how wrong I was. He is wholly lacking in the judgment required for the job, and prone to act in ways that are utterly at odds with the British national interest. It is no wonder that so many in the US and Europe are so bemused.

Cameron's Polish friends

Timothy Garton Ash, our foremost expert on Eastern Europe, has an absolutely riveting piece in today's Guardian, setting out in forensic detail the dubious anti-semitic, homophobic background of Michal Kaminski, the Polish Law and Justice party MEP who is now the leader of Cameron's Conservatives in Brussels. As Garton Ash relates, the late 1990s and early 2000s seem to have been a particularly busy time:

In the 1990s, he was a dynamic and ambitious young activist in a rightwing, nationalist, xenophobic party, the Christian National Union. In 1999, he visited Britain to present what is described as a gorget embossed with an image of the Virgin Mary to General Augusto Pinochet. "This was the most important meeting of my whole life. Gen Pinochet was clearly moved and extremely happy with our visit," Kaminski told the BBC's Polish service. In a short video clip from July 2000, he describes homosexuals as pedaly, a slang term roughly translatable as "queers" or "poofters". In 2001, he became involved in one of Poland's greatest post-1989 historical controversies, about the murder in July 1941 of almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish village of Jedwabne – a murder committed by Polish villagers. As the local MP, he denounced the post-communist president Aleksander Kwasniewski for his readiness to apologise in Poland's name for this crime.

It does rather put Cameron's lavatorial language on Absolute Radio in the shade.

Cameron's Anti-Semitic European leader

The total disinterest in European politics in this country means that there has been virtually no scrutiny of the new odds and sods group to which the Tories now belong in the European parliament. But the Observer today reveals more about the mindset of the Michal Kaminski, the man chosen by David Cameron to be its leader.

Over recent years a series of investigations have shown that Polish residents of Jedwabne, along with some German troops, rounded up the Jewish population in July 1941 and herded them into a barn which was set on fire. At a ceremony in Jedwabne on 10 July 2001, the then president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, called for the country to confront its past and apologised. But many in Jedwabne opposed the ceremony and apology, claiming that the Germans were mainly to blame and that Poland should not say sorry because Polish Jews had "collaborated" with the Soviet occupiers. An article in the far-right Polish newspaper Nasza Polska on 20 March 2001 quoted Kaminski as saying: "Maybe they try to suppress their own guilty conscience, those Jews who did a lot of harm to Poland during the Soviet occupation and during communism."

Kaminski denies making the comments though respected Polish newspapers report that he was part of this campaign. Either way, Rabbi Marcus is surely right to demand that Cameron dissociates himself from these views.