Five years ago, the man who is now Lord Hermer gave an interview to the Times. The then QC was asked how he’d want to be remembered. The answer he gave was curious. ‘The world will be a better place,’ he said, ‘when privileged men like me stop seeking a place in history.’ I’m not sure who Lord Hermer thinks should be seeking a place in history, though I assume he was just paying lip service to the spirit of 2020 and wanted to be read to mean that in future most of the running should be done by underprivileged transsexuals.
While I cannot agree on the substance, I can agree on one specific. The world would certainly be a much better place if people like Lord Hermer stopped seeking historic roles. For although he is now the Attorney General of England and Wales, there is little to suggest that his noble lordship has any love for this country. Indeed, he appears to have spent his career defending anyone who literally wants to attack us.
In their recent efforts to explain the Attorney General’s unfortunate list of past clients, Hermer’s defenders claim that as a barrister he had to obey the ‘cab-rank’ rules of the job. It was for this reason, they say, that Hermer spent his career defending such clients as Gerry Adams and almost every variety of Islamic terrorist. Yet the claim is demonstrably daft. To have represented one al-Qaeda terrorist might be a duty, but to represent at least five would seem to be a habit. Never mind that your other clients include the families of Isis members and so on.
Even if his client list wasn’t a giveaway, Hermer’s history of political pronouncements tells us everything about where his prejudices lie. Over recent years he has said that if there was one law he’d enact it would be to take Britain back into the EU, and he has called the British empire ‘deeply racist’. He has collaborated on a writing project with the Electronic Intifada: a group who are not as nice as they sound. And he has repeatedly praised Phil Shiner, the shyster lawyer recently given a two-year suspended sentence for fraud after spending decades using lies to persecute British soldiers through the court system.
But then Hermer, like Shiner, is one of those lawyers who pretends that recently invented international laws and human-rights laws are the most important of all, far exceeding such things as laws enacted by the will of the people.
Consider the advice Hermer has given on the Chagos Islands. There is no world in which handing over billions of pounds and strategically important territory to a foreign state is a good deal. But Hermer’s argument is that the government has no choice because of ‘international law’.
One rather hopes the government would favour the interests of this country over any others
In fact, with the Chagos Islands, as with so many other issues, ‘international law’ and ‘human rights law’ are simply political warfare by other means. People like Hermer defer to the principle of international law only in order to push their existing agenda. And if you don’t approve of it then you are a Nazi, as he so brilliantly argued last week.
Another friend of Sir Keir Starmer’s, Philippe Sands – who’s been happily enriching himself by representing the government of Mauritius in the Chagos case – also holds himself out as a moral advocate of immutable laws. And yet the advocacy of people such as Sands and Hermer only ever goes in one, anti-British direction. During a recent talk at Cambridge university, Sands even boasted about how he had ‘humiliated’ Britain in the international courts. He went on to crow that it is a ‘special’ thing to be able to humiliate your own country and be celebrated in that country because of it.
It is true that the same courtesy would not be extended in Mauritius – nor communist China, the power most likely to benefit from the Chagos deal. But Hermer, Sands and, indeed, Starmer have sussed out the system as it is – or as they have helped make it. Only in a country like this one could someone spend a career advancing the cause of the country’s enemies and then be enriched and ennobled for doing so.
After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Hermer could be found asking: ‘How can courts, when patently motivated by politics, command public respect?’ It’s a good question. He went on to assert that the Supreme Court was making decisions ‘in the face of public opinion supporting contrary views’.
So which is it? Hermer and co are perfectly happy to warn of ‘politically motivated courts’ when a court does not follow their own political bent. But when it does, its decisions are apparently sacrosanct. And while everyone – even lawyers – doubtless has their biases, one of the great mysteries of our age is why these people’s biases should always be against us.
It would be understandable if the British government ignored the decisions of international courts when they act against our interests. One rather hopes that the British government would favour the interests of this country over any others. But why should there be a legal and political elite which seems to approve of court decisions only if this country comes out worse?
I would, for instance, expect the government, and its legal advisers, to try to work out how to use international law to stop our borders being invaded on a daily basis. What’s confounding is that we should be run by people who have spent their careers caring for those who have most abused those borders – and all the other laws and courtesies that used to exist in this country.
Still, perhaps the day will come when privileged men like Hermer stop seeking a place in history. That day cannot come soon enough.
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