At a Westminster party recently – in an immensely smart, oversized, Georgian house close to St James’s Park with the kind of crowd that features in Newsnight interviews – I saw one of my heroes. I fanboy rushed him and told him I agreed with everything he had been saying. He looked anxious, as careful lawyers do when people who haven’t been introduced to them start banging on. The subject of my new worship was Dominic Grieve.
Dominic Grieve! If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said I thought him a dry-stick bore (the sarky political sketch writer Quentin Letts once called him a fusspot). But now I see him as heroic for standing against his tribe – he’s one of the “outs” in the Tory party – in particular, for pushing against the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, to get the intelligence and security committee’s Russia report published.
