It used to be the hard left that were the enemy within the Labour Party. They made it unelectable.
Published: 27 February 2025
These days it’s human rights lawyers.
The party is led by one, and heavily influenced by others, and their ideology is storing up trouble for the leadership.
The general public don’t want to vote for people who are undermining the state, even as they claim to be the greatest defenders of the law.
There is a telling line in Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, which is an immensely well-informed account by political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund which I’m reading at the moment, in which they say “the hard left subjugated everything before ideology. Purity mattered before all else”.
Unfortunately the same is true of our prime minister’s best buddies Philippe Sands and Richard Hermer, lawyers “committed to nothing more than the sanctity and inviolability of international law.
“Both had signed a letter to the Financial Times 10 days after 7 October, urging Israel to abide by the laws of war — even if, as Jews, they were shaken to the ‘core’ by events.”
People with such principles can be admirable, but they’re often a menace.
And it is a great misfortune that Starmer appointed such a purist to be attorney general.
It’s not even as if there was any excuse for him. Hermer had form. He was a go-to defence lawyer for clients many lawyers wouldn’t touch.
Barristers who frequently defend palpably bad people often say piously that they are subject to the cab rank rule: no one can turn down a client just because they don’t like his politics.
However no such rule applies to solicitors, who choose the barristers.
Among the unattractive clients of the man who is now Lord Hermer, were Rangzieb Ahmed, a convicted terrorist associated with al-Qaeda and the London bombs of 2005, who unsuccessfully claimed that MI5 were complicit in his torture by the Pakistani authorities, Abid Naseer, another al-Qaeda operative who was deported despite Hermer’s best efforts and solicitor Phil Shiner, who was struck off for various kinds of fraud relating to unjustified claims against British soldiers which cost the taxpayer more than £30m.
Oh, and Gerry Adams, in a lawsuit brought by victims of IRA bombings where Hermer argued that the Provisional IRA was “an unincorporated association”.
Hermer was one of the lawyers who represented Kenyans suing the British government over torture during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.
That cost the state £6 million: lawyers made more money than the victims.
The recent appalling ruling by a coroner’s court that the SAS was not justified in using lethal force against four heavily armed IRA members in Clonoe in 1992 is catastrophic.
When you get to a stage that the armed forces no longer think the legal establishment and the government are on their side, you’re in trouble.
Morgan McSweeney, now prime minister Sir Keir Starmer‘s chief of staff, who so capably organised the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn and his mob of extremists, now has the delicate task of purging the party of several of his boss’s closest friends, beginning with the attorney general.
Is Starmer safe?
