Better Smear Keir

You might quite like Keir Starmer. But wait until you hear this: he once wrote a book. It gets worse: he didn’t write just any book, but a book called European Human Rights Law. Specifically, “a detailed analysis of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the case law of the European Court and Commission of Human rights [which] draws on all 1500 cases (reported and unreported) from Strasbourg which affect UK civil and criminal law… set out in a way designed to enable practitioners and advisers to concentrate on those cases most relevant to their area of practice”.

Now, this book isn’t for me. I won’t be reading it. For one thing, I’m not a practitioner or adviser for whom any of it is relevant to my area of practice, and for another, Amazon tells me it’s 938 pages long. Life’s too short. But its existence, despite my laboured and obvious “Wait until you hear this” set-up in the previous paragraph, does not perturb me. Law is complicated, lawyers need textbooks, Keir Starmer wrote one, fine.¹

This reaction is not the one Rishi Sunak wants you to have to the bald fact that Keir Starmer once wrote a boring-sounding legal textbook. We know this because at PMQs today Sunak produced a prop. “I know that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has always been more interested in what leftie lawyers have to say”, said Sunak. “I even have in my hands the textbook that he authored for them - it is called European Human Rights Law by Keir Starmer”.²

The weird thing about this attack is that that is as far as it went. It wasn’t a claim that Starmer had written a book about European human rights law which praised European human rights law in some way, or which revealed anything at all about his views other than that he knows a fair bit about European human rights law - an area which many lawyers in 1999, when the book was published, would have needed to know about whether they liked it or not. It wouldn’t surprise me if the book does have positive things to say about European human rights law, which might have provided more of a gotcha moment if Sunak had read some of them out. But I don’t know, because I haven’t read it, and if the researchers in CCHQ can’t be bothered to read it then I’m sure as hell not going to.

Now, you can take this insouciance too far, and it’s tempting to do so. See for example this tweet by former Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal:

This seems to me to fall into the trap Sunak and the Tories are trying to set, which can be only slightly unfairly summed up as “lawyers defend Keir Starmer for being a lawyer because lawyers think lawyers are brilliant”.³ And that trap, in turn, is bound up with the broader attack on Starmer the lawyer, which is about the fact that, as a lawyer, he sometimes acted on behalf of some pretty horrible people, and the consequent insinuation that this calls his moral compass into question. I don’t personally find this attack persuasive but, like European Human Rights Law by Keir Starmer, it isn’t aimed at me.

It’s worth reflecting, if you’re tempted by the “Starmer was an eminent lawyer” defence, on the fact that Labour itself tends to lean much harder in its pro-Starmer comms on “Starmer prosecuted absolute bastards” than on either “Starmer stood up for human rights” or “Starmer was simply very good at being a lawyer”. You might personally feel uncomfortable with Labour choosing to emphasise this part of the picture, and they might be misleading and partial in doing so, but they are trying to win votes and they have made a judgement that this way of deploying Starmer’s biography is the most effective. They don’t actually want you doing the “He knows loads about European human rights law” defence, which is why Sunak did the “He knows loads about European human rights law” attack.

Which brings us to this graphic, tweeted by the Tories this afternoon, with the caption “When @RishiSunak sees a group chanting jihad on our streets, he bans them. Keir Starmer invoices them”:

That’s a reference to a story, also mentioned by Sunak at PMQs, about Starmer having acted for the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2008 when it was seeking to overturn a ban on its activities in Germany. The Government has just announced, this week, that it is going to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terror group. As it happens, David Cameron used Gordon Brown's first PMQs as Prime Minister in 2007 to criticise Brown for not banning Hizb ut-Tahrir. “The Leader of the Opposition forgets that I have been in this job for five days”, said Brown. Well, that was nearly 17 years ago, and the Conservatives have been in office for nearly 14 years. It can take a long time to get around to things.

One can quibble with the legitimacy of attacking a lawyer for his clients,⁴ and one can ask how familiar most people in the UK actually are with cultural references derived from the Netflix show Better Call Saul, and one can note that “Better Call Saul” is, in the show, a marketing slogan for a lawyer whose first name is Saul and who we are supposed to think would have chosen it precisely because of the catchy rhyme of “Call” and “Saul”, a rhyme which vanishes when you replace “Saul” with “Keir” and is insufficiently compensated for by the consequent alliteration, and at this point I’m pretty sure I’m overthinking it.

The reaction to the Tory tweet has been overwhelmingly negative, admittedly from people who are inclined to have a negative reaction to Tory tweets, but I don’t think this is an attack that crosses the line of unacceptability. It isn’t a very strong attack, but at this point it may be the best the Tories have and there’s not much point complaining about it.⁵ Labour have been preparing for it and, according to one official quoted by Patrick Maguire in the Times last week, are relatively unconcerned:

“Nothing has come out that we didn’t already know about… Voters know lawyers defend people accused of terrible things. And if Sunak wants to have a fight over how people spent the last decade, voters will get to hear about him betting against Britain in the City.”

The failure of the Tories’ attacks on Starmer to have any kind of impact so far is what makes some people worry that they may yet seek to weaponise the bogus claim that he was involved, as Director of Public Prosecutions, in the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Rishi Sunak has, in the past, distanced himself from this particular smear - which caused significant disquiet in many parts of the Conservative Party when Boris Johnson made it in 2022.

“I wouldn’t have said it”, Sunak said then. But he said a lot of things then. Desperation can make people reach for things they would never previously have considered. And after all, he’s going to have to do a lot better than “Keir Starmer once wrote a book”.

1. I wrote a book once too, and you can buy it here. Always be closing.

2. This was a lie. As you can see in this video, Sunak did not have the textbook in his hands. He had a colour print-out of the cover. We know this because it was a single piece of paper, not a 938-page book. I don’t think this untruth matters very much, and I certainly don’t think there’s a case for giving Sunak a community note.

3. You can overstate all of this. There’s clearly an audience that finds Nazir Afzal’s tweet persuasive, and that audience has provided Afzal with thousands of retweets and likes. That audience is a really important part of the electoral coalition Labour needs if it is to win but, broadly speaking, it’s an audience of people who were already persuaded that Keir Starmer is a good thing anyway and who were already going to vote Labour anyway. Labour’s messaging, by and large, is not aimed at these people.

4. There’s already a community note on the Tories’ tweet, saying that “While Sir Keir did represent Hizb ut-Tahrir he also went on to prosecute terrorists with links to Hizb ut-Tahrir as director of public prosecutions. There’s is [sic] no evidence he invoiced them. Barristers may not withhold services based on a client's conduct.” Christ, this is tedious. Did I mention how much I hate community notes?

5. I also wrote about this line of attack last month, and ever since then I have been chased around the internet by ads for Michael Ashcroft’s book Dirty Politics, Dirty Times - surely the most niche targeted ad ever targeted at anyone.