On Tuesday Guardian writer Jonathan Freedland asked why Labour was not in more of a fighting mood over the relationship between David Cameron and his colleagues in the new European Conservatives and Reformists grouping in the European Parliament. Though it cannot be said that most of the media is joining in this argument, the Observer today vigorously returns to the matter including with an article by the Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

Miliband writes:

The latest revelations – the Hague letter about his party’s “good friend” Kaminski, the latter’s disgraceful calls for apologies “by the Jewish nation” to balance Polish ones and his hair-splitting about how bad it is to burn 300 Jews in cold blood – are devastating.

This is in part a reference to an interview with Michal Kaminski, the Polish leader of the right wing grouping the Tories have formed in Europe, in the current edition of the Jewish Chronicle. Clearly an exercise in attempting to recover lost ground, it has blown up in Kaminski’s face. It further condemns Kaminski and by extension the Conservative party for their willingness to associate with their new European allies.

In some quarters Kaminski has been presented as a more moderate and acceptable face of the Conservatives’ European grouping – as opposed to, say, the Latvian Freedom and Fatherland Party.

Yet, despite hiding behind some weasel words, Kaminski stands by his opposition to the apology issued by Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski for the atrocity against Jewish people at Jedwabne, where hundreds were killed in anti-Jewish pogrom. The apology divided Polish opinion and Kaminski was and remains on the wrong side of the divide.

In his interview he says that if Poles must apologise so too must the “Jewish nation”, and equates the actions of Jews who sided with the Soviet Union during the war with the atrocity carried out at Jedwabne.

“My position is that there were acts of collaboration of the Jewish people with the Soviet army when the Soviet army came to Poland. It’s a fact. It’s a historical fact… If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime made in Jedwabne, you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish Communists did in Eastern Poland.”

This is part of the discourse of relativising – as Jonathan Freedland has put it with regard to the Tories’ new friends in Latvia – the events of the Second World War.  In the case Cameron’s allies in Latvia, all part of the same European parliamentary grouping with Kaminski, the Tories have offered the defence that the Latvian Waffen-SS contained conscripts fighting for their country, and say that critics are indulging a Soviet-era smear.

As Freedland wrote in response:

They too tried to relativise away the crimes of the Nazi era, constantly telling us that the Soviets also did terrible things, that Hitler’s eastern European collaborators were freedom-loving patriots and all the rest of it. What is shocking is that this garbage is now coming from those defending the party poised to form the government of Britain.

Now we have the leader of the Tories’ grouping in the European parliament claiming that those Jews who sided with Britain’s allies during the Second World War were guilty of a crime equivalent to a murderous pogrom against Jewish people, and saying that if the Poles must apologise for the anti-Semitic massacre at Jedwabne (and he thinks they should not) then the Jewish nation must apologise too.

It is a grotesque position.

Each time this controversy unfolds it brings fresh embarrassment to David Cameron who should never have entered into this squalid alliance.

Kaminski’s latest interview condemns him from his own mouth even as he rushes to put a gloss on his political opinions.