Farewell Shami Chakrabarti, leading figure of the New Establishment

So farewell, Shami Chakrabarti. The woman is stepping down as boss of Liberty, for whom – whatever your political views – she has been a hugely effective campaigner. And, further credit: for a comprehensive school girl from an ethnic minority to have achieved so much is pretty laudable, I would argue.

I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much less of her. She holds more job titles than an African dictator. Here’s her CV entry from Wiki:

Chakrabarti is Chancellor of the University of Essex, Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple. She has served as Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, a governor of the British Film Institute, and was a member of the Council and Court of Governors of the London School of Economics until April 2013.^[26] She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours.^[37]

She received honorary doctorates from the School of Law at University of Southampton in 2010^[38] and the University of Glamorgan^[39] and Middlesex University in 2011.^[40] In 2014 she was made an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Manchester^[41]

She was one of eight Olympic Flag carriers at the London 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony (the announcer incorrectly described her as “the founder of Liberty”).^[42] She was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4,^[43] and in 2014 she was included in The Sunday Times‘ “100 Makers of the 21st Century” list.^[44][45]

Lordy. That’s because, with her bien-pensant views, she has become a leading figure of the New Establishment, the people who run everything. In my book I had a section on ‘Eight Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti’ – you can get from every quango, charity, government body to Shami in actually two moves, rather than eight.