What does Keir Starmer actually stand for? Will our new prime minister turn out to be a socialist (as Tories claim), an authoritarian (as the left fears) or a closet liberal? His legal background may hold some clues.
After university he applied to join my chambers, 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, which was at the forefront of the civil liberties battles of the day. In many ways it was not an obvious choice for an aspiring Labour MP, headed by the Welsh Liberal QC MP Emlyn Hooson, who had defended the Moors murderers, and had among its members John “Rumpole” Mortimer, the liberal Tory Joe Walker-Smith, and myself, by then a veteran of anti-censorship cases such as Mary Whitehouse’s crusade against Gay News, and author of the cumbersomely titled textbook, Freedom, the Individual and the Law.
