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He left school at 16 and became an accountant, gravitating towards the record industry. By 1973, when he was 29, he was setting up Magnet Records, whose highly commercial roster of artists included such unashamedly middle-of-the-road names as Alvin Stardust and Chris Rea. What the label lacked in credibility it more than made up for in turnover, and in 1988 Levy was able to sell the business to Warner Bros for £10m.Levy was now in a position to put something back into the community that he had sprung from, and he did it by turning round the fortunes of the once struggling charity Jewish Care His powers of persuasion were legendary. A man of immense personal charm, he has fundraised and entertained to the point where Jewish Care’s £36m annual income puts it in the big league of Britain’s charities.It was the kind of transformation that was bound to impress Blair as he sought to effect something as dramatic in the Labour party. As Blair rewrote decades of Labour tradition by taking a positive rather than a suspicious approach to big business, Levy became a hugely important ally. In return, he enjoyed the frisson of power that came with the association, although he stopped well short of taking the step into politics itself.

Given such access to Blair, and responsibility in return, why did he need to bother? Married with a son and daughter, and enjoying a comfortable life at his home in Totteridge in north London, Levy had what he wanted. It is there that Blair would stop off on his way back from his northern constituency for a quick game of tennis.Lord Levy’s roles have expanded over the years His bread-and-butter is consultancy work He fundraises for Labour He does his work in the voluntary sector. And before he was given the task of cleaning up party donations, he had been appointed by Blair as his envoy to the Middle East in yet another example of how the Prime Minister prefers to bypass government agencies – in this case the Foreign Office – and take his advice from outside.Which is not to say that Lord Levy has not worked wisely and assiduously on Blair’s behalf. The natural sympathy he has with the Jewish cause is said not noticeably to have coloured his view of the terrible events that have unfolded in the region over the past 21 months.

He prides himself on having just as good contacts with Yasser Arafat as he does with Ariel Sharon, and his diplomacy is of the highest order. “They are the elected leaders,” Levy was quoted as saying last week “And we have to work with them But we have to look beyond them. We have to control the level of hatred that has developed.”Lord Levy likes to be in control, and he hasn’t enjoyed the fallout from his latest appointment. It has thrust him much further into the public spotlight, and forced him to answer questions such as how he could justify accepting a £100,000 consultancy contract with an Australian property company that wants to set up shopping centres in Britain. (“That was a commercial deal, and there was never any question of government lobbying.”)Now the pressure is on him to remove any potential conflict of interest and step down from his role of Labour’s chief fundraiser.

That would be a blow both to the party and to Lord Levy, who badly wanted his ethics role but not at the expense of his other one. There’s a lesson in all this, perhaps: you can flit around the edges of politics for only so long before you are dragged into its maw.. Humans will probably find numerous planets like Earth in the next 10 to 20 years, greatly increasing our chances of discovering alien life, the Astronomer Royal has predicted. And the next big step – “photographing” those planets using the Terrestrial Planet Finder telescopes now being planned – could take only until 2010, moving us much closer to detecting planets capable of sustaining intelligent life.”Within 20 years we may be able to hang on our walls a telescopic image of another Earth, orbiting some distant star,” Sir Martin will tell a joint meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine and Royal Society for the Arts on Wednesday.Despite this prediction, Sir Martin, of King’s College Cambridge, insists he is still unsure that extraterrestrial life exists. But unlike sceptics who believe that life on Earth is a freak occurrence unlikely to be repeated, he said: “My view is that, until we know, we should be open-minded.”His remarks foreshadow an upsurge in astronomers and biologists searching for extraterrestrial life, and a growing belief that some form of very simple life could soon be discovered in our solar system.