Following my appointment as unpaid chair of the commission on Building More, Building Beautiful, there has been a rash of out-of-context quotations designed to suggest that I am anti-Semitic, and also tarred with the brush of "Islamophobia". It even counts against my appointment that I once defended the Catholic Church’s attitude to gay adoption. So let me confess.

In a speech to the Hungarian academy in 2016, discussing the concept of the nation, I said the following:

The remnant of territory that [Hungarians] still enjoy is shared with a substantial minority of Roma, whose unsettled ways are often resented by their neighbours, but whose cause inevitably gathers support in the wider world. The Jewish minority that survived the Nazi occupation suffered further persecution under the communists, but nevertheless is active in making its presence known. Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews. Those are only some of the factors that stand in the way of a collective pre-political attachment in this part of the world…

By the "Soros Empire", I meant the NGOs set up by George Soros, which have proved a thorn in the flesh to the Hungarian government. Everything that I say is, I believe, true. Later, when Viktor Orbán moved against the Central European University, the most important of the institutions founded and supported by George Soros, I arranged to meet Orbán, in order to persuade him to recognize the great benefit to Hungary of having this university within its borders. At the same time I accepted an invitation to speak at the Central European University in the series of lectures devoted to the Open Society Idea.