What did Tzipi Hotovely make of the LSE protest?

Footage of Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, being confronted by pro-Palestinian protesters outside the London School of Economics spread around the world this week. A video shared on Twitter showed the Ambassador, who was giving a speech at the university, being rushed into a car by her security team as police held back protesters. But what did Hotovely make of it?

Speaking on Spectator TV this week, Hotovely said her team were told about ‘a big pressure to cancel the lecture’ beforehand, and that the protests were ‘outrageous’ and ‘shouldn’t have happened’.

Hotovely is on the right of Israeli politics, but the grim scenes that unfolded outside the LSE united the Tories and Labour here. Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was ‘disgusted’ at the protests, and gave her backing to a police investigation into what happened at the LSE. Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, said the ambassador’s treatment was ‘appalling’.

The Ambassador told Kate Andrews:

‘I’m very proud of the fact that the British government was so clear with condemning the people using violence to intimidate representatives of a democratic government.’

Hotovely was encouraged into politics by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2006, when she was a law student and a university debating champion, who had become well known as a panellist on a political debating TV show. She was, in her own words, ‘the only woman, the only religious right-winger among the panel’. Hotovely impressed Bibi, and he asked her to join his party.

The new Israeli government, which removed Netanyahu from office after 12 years, was apparently keen to pull Hotovely back from her post when they first came to power – she is an appointee of their political enemy, not a career diplomat. But the Ambassador pushed back, and reports of her being moved have gone away.

Now, Hotovely is in the headlines again – and the protests at LSE have succeeded in making a divisive figure more popular.