Keir Starmer has had a target on his back since he became the leader of the Labour party. So far, potshots taken by the Tories attacking his legal career before he entered parliament have made no impression on Labour’s poll ratings.
Next year, Conservative party HQ hopes to change that with a barrage of personal attack ads, newspaper stories and negative briefings all aimed at the Labour leader’s record as director of public prosecutions (DPP) and his time as a human rights barrister. The first port of call for the political diggers is Lord Ashcroft’s recent biography of Starmer, Red Knight, considered an encyclopedia of potentially incendiary material.
So does Starmer have anything to fear? While he can take some comfort from Labour’s consistently high polling, his own personal rating is not so robust.
Between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was responsible for criminal prosecutions in England and Wales. He oversaw many controversial cases, as well as many decisions not to prosecute. One of the most controversial cases during his tenure was that of Jimmy Savile, the DJ and TV presenter who escaped justice for the sexual abuse and rape of children even though a string of victims came forward to report his crimes.
When Boris Johnson was prime minister, he said the failure to take action against Savile proved the former DPP was soft on paedophiles. This was regarded as a particularly low blow as Starmer had no personal involvement in the case.
Nevertheless, the charge partly stuck. Asked whether they thought Johnson’s claims were true or false, one in five Britons said that they were “probably true”. About twice as many said “probably false” (42%), with 37% unsure.
The ends appeared to have justified the means. By repeatedly standing at the dispatch box proclaiming to be the tough lawman who put thousands of criminals behind bars, Starmer has invited public scrutiny. If he is happy to use his record as DPP to burnish his political credentials, he can’t then pick and choose which part of it is used against him.
Starmer was one of the more successful DPPs. But while the overall number of prosecutions went up during his reign, he still faced criticism. Earlier this year, the Tories unearthed a letter written by Emily Thornberry in 2012 when she was the shadow attorney general. Thornberry, today part of Starmer’s shadow cabinet, wrote to Starmer accusing the then DPP of “backsliding” on rape prosecutions. The letter is still on Labour’s website.
Starmer was in no position to criticise the attack as he had sanctioned a Labour ad campaign accusing Rishi Sunak of going soft on paedophiles. In April this year, a Labour tweet asked: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” It included a photo of the prime minister and his signature, and was denounced across the political spectrum as “gutter politics”.
Why did Starmer sink so low? One reason might be that he knows he can’t win the fight fairly. No matter how much he tries to plead the case that he was a senior civil servant performing his duty under a strict prosecutor’s code, the Tories and their media mouthpieces will continue to link him personally to individual cases.
And Savile is merely the tip of the iceberg. The stepson of Ian Tomlinson believes that Starmer’s initial failure to prosecute the police officer who “unlawfully killed” his father in 2009, after he was shoved to the floor at a protest, contributed to a culture of unaccountability in the Metropolitan police.
Harvey Proctor, wrongly accused of child abuse, has said that he believes his ordeal was the result of a change of culture on sexual offences at the CPS that began when Starmer was DPP.
And for the Murdoch press, Starmer is more than just a political figure. He was the lawyer who successfully brought phone hacking prosecutions against journalists and executives at the News of the World. He made himself an even bigger target by going on the Andrew Marr Show in 2014, the year before he entered parliament, to double down on his decision to prosecute Rebekah Brooks, now the chief executive of News UK, who after a trial was found not guilty of any wrongdoing.
But the attacks go beyond the Murdoch press and Starmer’s time as DPP.
This week the focus switched to his career as a human rights barrister. The Daily Telegraph reported how Starmer acted for the Islamic cleric Abu Qatada in his 2008 bid to avoid deportation to Jordan, as well as his work helping an Iraqi terror suspect to sue the government for compensation over breaches of his human rights.
Barristers are used to having their cases used against them. The standard response is to cite the bar’s “cab rank rule”, which obliges barristers to take the first case that comes along. The problem for Starmer is that by the time he has eloquently explained the finer points of the rule, the “Sir Softy” headline, just like the Savile charge, has already been firmly planted in the public consciousness.
Yet the cab rank principle is important, because it gives barristers cover to represent people accused of the most heinous crimes or holding the most odious views without having to defend their decision. Once lawyers start refusing to take these cases because they fear public censure, the right to justice is seriously harmed.
Starmer should stick to his guns by availing himself of the rule – not for the sake of his political career, but for his colleagues at the bar who are sometimes called upon to defend the indefensible. There is more at stake here than party politics.
Robert Verkaik is an author and covered legal affairs for the Independent and the Mail on Sunday
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