The ancient cobbles and archways of the Temple, home of English law since Chaucer’s time, welcomed in the mid-1980s a youth filled with dreams and ideals, a passion for football and a fanatical love of the Smiths.
Armed with his first-class law degree from Leeds and a bachelor of civil law from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Keir Starmer started a pupillage at 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings. John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and a noted liberal barrister, once practised there.
Starmer was a rebel against the conservative mood of the times. At Oxford, he had been a member of the “editorial collective” for a Marxist journal, Socialist Alternatives, affiliated with an obscure Greek Trotskyist, Michalis Raptis. It had a focus on green issues, women’s rights and gay equality.
“He was radical as a barrister, certainly, which in the Eighties was still a very conservative profession,” Gavin Millar, KC, a colleague throughout his legal career, said.
“We were doing what was called civil liberties work at the Bar during the Thatcher years when it was very difficult. It wasn’t terribly well paid, it was all legal aid or at best a trade union would fund you, or an NGO.
“He developed a strong academic interest in criminology and penology: why do people offend, how do we deal with them, how do we prosecute them and punish them, how to rehabilitate them — which is a very difficult and interesting area of the law and it’s really a sharp area of the law as far as human rights are concerned. That was his first love. He was very interested in the rights of criminal suspects and prisoners.”
The young Starmer joined and later became secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, named after Labour’s first Lord Chancellor, Viscount Haldane, who served in the 1920s.
Starmer proclaimed his idealistic views in the society’s magazine, Socialist Lawyer. He and a co-author argued for trade unions to aspire to “socialist self-management” and declared that collective bargaining was insufficient because it failed to involve ownership of the means of production.
“We could do worse than to begin by dismantling those common law rules governing the property entitlements of private parties which for almost a thousand years judges have been happy to regard as pre-political norms,” he wrote in 1995.
He called in 1987, while still writing for Socialist Alternatives, for a 35-hour week as a step towards “a different society in which people will have time and scope to develop away from the oppression of the workplace”.
A Labour spokesman said: “These articles are over three decades old and it is clearly nonsense to suggest they offer any insight into his thinking now. As leader, Keir Starmer has transformed the Labour Party and put it back in touch with the country.
“We’re proud of Keir Starmer’s record as the country’s chief prosecutor. While Keir Starmer was locking up terrorists who threatened our national security, Rishi Sunak was making millions profiting from the financial crisis.”
Starmer’s past views are highlighted in a three-part series on his legal career in The Times, beginning with a look at his early years, from becoming a trainee barrister in 1986 to taking silk in 2002.
The Labour leader is unusual in politics as someone who had an extensive career before seeking office. The series traces how he matured over his decades in the law from a young radical to a trusted adviser to the police in Northern Ireland, rising to become head of the prosecution service for England and Wales.
Starmer was a legal observer at Wapping when mounted police charged demonstrators during protests against Rupert Murdoch moving his print works, which produced The Times, from Fleet Street amid the dismissal of thousands of printworkers. The future Labour leader also helped to monitor demonstrations against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax.
Despite this, Professor Bill Bowring, who met Starmer in the 1980s, doubts whether the future Labour leader ever truly held radical views.
“He never uttered the words Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky,” Bowring said. “Socialist Alternatives was a Trotskyist magazine [but] Keir, to my knowledge, never subscribed to Trotskyism or even knew what it was particularly.”
Starmer joined a trip to Moscow and St Petersburg shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, organised by Bowring for students he taught at the University of East London.
“Keir and Haldane colleagues came along and I thought it would be good for the students to meet some left activist lawyers,” Bowring said. “The students were slightly shocked at the amount they drank.”
They visited courts and met lawyers and judges as high up as the chief justice of Russia, Vyacheslav Lebedev.
A short while later, Starmer led a delegation of Haldane Society lawyers to Northern Ireland during the Troubles. “What we observed were grave miscarriages of justice and things which had not been happening in the rest of the UK,” Bowring said.
The lawyers stayed in a hotel close to Queen’s University, Belfast, and one evening asked in the bar for directions for a drink.
“We all trooped off for the pub and sat down,” Bowring recalled. “We were then in terror because we didn’t know whether it was a green or orange pub.
“Only when somebody came around collecting money for [IRA] prisoners did we breathe a sigh of relief.”
Although they were English, the left-leaning barristers and solicitors were considered friends of the nationalist cause.
“I wrote the introduction to the report but he helped to write it,” Bowring said. “The report calls for a united Ireland and he didn’t disagree at the time. Keir was secretary and he wouldn’t have had his name put to something he radically disagreed with.”
A few years later, Starmer organised a 45-strong delegation to the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, where they met President Mandela.
Starmer had been called to the Bar in 1987 and until 1990 Liberty employed him as legal officer. He spoke out against infringements of civil liberties such as laws targeting acid house parties.
The young barrister quickly developed an interest in bringing cases against Britain in Strasbourg. In June 1989, Starmer told PR Week that Liberty would consider taking a test case to the European Court of Human Rights if a local government and housing bill was passed prohibiting some council officers from being politically active.
For Liberty he attended an appeal by the Winchester Three: Irish nationals who were found guilty of plotting to murder Tom King, who was the Northern Ireland secretary, but who later had their convictions quashed. Starmer was there because of Liberty’s opposition to government proposals to remove the “right to silence” for criminal defendants and instead allow guilt to be inferred.
Starmer and a pack of libertarian barristers moved outside the Temple to found a new style of chambers. “We went off and formed Doughty Street in 1990 and we ended up with him working as head of chambers and me as deputy head of chambers,” Millar said. “To do those sort of roles in a big set of chambers with 100 barristers you have to be pretty sociable and relate to people and hang out with people and go to the pub.”
The young Starmer’s activism crossed over with his legal practice. Protest rights were a theme. He successfully defended an unemployed man accused of trying to attack police during a poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square.
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Under the cab-rank rule which forbids barristers from rejecting clients, Starmer represented defendants challenging the Tory government’s offence of “trespassory assembly” such as a lecturer and a student arrested under the new law after taking part in a commemoration of a clash between Wiltshire police and New Age travellers heading to Stonehenge. The case became an important test. Starmer won in the House of Lords when a three-to-two majority held there was a legal right to assemble for peaceful demonstrations on public roads.
He also successfully defended in the High Court a protester charged with aggravated trespass after occupying land at a Derby opencast mining site.
In 1993, Starmer represented campaigners placed under an injunction obtained by the government to prevent them going to Twyford Down, near Winchester, where the new M3 was being built across the landscape.
A Labour spokesman said: “Prior to entering politics, Keir’s legal career saw him appointed as the country’s most senior prosecutor, working under both Labour and Conservative governments.
“In this country, everyone is entitled to a defence. A lawyer can no sooner choose who they represent than a doctor can choose their patients or a firefighter choose which fires they attend. That’s how our justice system works and why it is the envy of the world.
“Keir has fought for people’s rights across the world, prosecuted terrorists as our country’s chief prosecutors and put victims at the heart of our criminal justice system.”
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Starmer was part of a legal team that successfully challenged the Conservative government’s scheme to close numerous coal mines.
He often found himself junior to one of the Bar’s living legends, Edward Fitzgerald, KC, who has represented despised criminals ranging from one of the boys who killed two-year-old James Bulger to the murderous gangster Kenneth Noye.
Starmer and Fitzgerald represented the former MI5 officer David Shayler, who was charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act for disclosing information to The Mail on Sunday.
Starmer’s interest in prisoners’ rights is reflected in him being chosen in 2005 to represent the lifer Thomas Tangney, who had shot dead a woman during a burglary. The murderer objected to being disciplined by his prison governor instead of an independent adjudicator. Tangney, who once stole silverware from Margaret Thatcher’s home, lost his appeal. Again, Starmer acted under the cab-rank rule that forbids barristers from rejecting clients.
Fitzgerald was also Starmer’s “inspiration in particular for all the work he did on prisoners and the death penalty”, Millar said.
The idealistic Starmer worked pro bono for the Death Penalty Project, a charity run out of the law firm Simons Muirhead Burton that receives funding from the Foreign Office, European Union and charitable foundations and fights the death penalty around the world.
Parvais Jabbar, who co-founded the project and became Starmer’s friend, said: “He never, ever said no to us. Whatever work he had, he always committed to doing this.”
Starmer travelled to see clients in difficult circumstances. “Death rows are not very nice places. In Belize, where we used to go, death row was just a row of cells and the bars were open to the outside, they weren’t enclosed,” Jabbar said.
“So we would be interviewing clients standing with the bars between us. We’re standing outside in the heat, the dry dust [and] soaring temperatures. And they’re in these very hot cells. It’s noisy. It’s not a kind of interview room with a glass of water.”
One of Starmer’s earliest death penalty cases involved four men convicted of murder who had spent more than a decade on death row in Jamaica.
It was heard alongside a similar case involving two other death penalty prisoners. In both cases, legal teams appointed by the Death Penalty Project argued that the mental torment during the prisoners’ long time awaiting execution was inhumane and therefore violated Jamaica’s constitution.
Although the privy council ruled in the case Starmer worked on that it lacked jurisdiction because the men hadn’t exhausted the appeals process in Jamaica, it held in the accompanying case that a delay of more than five years in carrying out a death sentence was cruel and inhuman and therefore unconstitutional. This established a legal precedent that would save condemned prisoners.
Jabbar said Starmer, one of the lead juniors, “really made his name in that case”. It established a legal precedent that would save condemned prisoners.
In December 2000, Starmer was named the Liberty/Justice human rights lawyer of the year. Judges singled out his work representing murderers facing execution as well as training their lawyers in the Caribbean.
Starmer has said of his fight against executions he had become “frustrated that we were only going about them case by case” when what was needed was wider change.
“So then I got into sort of strategic litigation,” he told the alumni magazine for the University of Leeds, from which he graduated in 1985. “Can we pick cases that will change the law for a whole class of people?”
Starmer and Fitzgerald were instrumental in looking at “how we might try to change the law or get countries to develop their systems”, Jabbar said.
“In some jurisdictions you couldn’t just challenge the death penalty per se. So what we tried to do was look at systemic issues.”
They hit upon the idea of challenging the mandatory nature of the death penalty, arguing that it was arbitrary and unfair because mitigation could not be taken into account.
The strategy proved successful. In 2001, the Eastern Caribbean court of appeal ruled that an automatic death sentence was cruel and inhuman unless judges could consider extenuating circumstances. The sentence was declared unconstitutional. The Privy Council took the same view in 2002, sending death penalty cases back to courts in Belize, St Lucia and St Kitts for re-sentencing. Jamaica and the Bahamas followed suit. By 2006 Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados were the only holdouts among English-speaking Caribbean nations.
Hundreds were previously on death row in the West Indies. Now the punishment was all but gone.
“Once we abolish[ed] the mandatory death penalty, very few people were being sentenced to death,” Jabbar said.
The idea was used by lawyers in Africa and “fundamentally changed the system in those jurisdictions too”.
Starmer helped Ugandan lawyers secure a ruling from the Constitutional Court in 2005 declaring the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional, saving the lives of more than 400 prisoners. In 2007, the Malawi High Court scrapped the mandatory death penalty.
Starmer did advocacy work with politicians and governments, requiring him “to develop those skills and have them many, many years before people saw him as a politician”, Jabbar said.
Although Starmer earned a reputation as a diligent young barrister, he was more comfortable making dry technical arguments in appeal cases heard by judges rather than having the showman-style skills needed for trials by jury.
He was “incredibly hard-working” and “would never take a shortcut, would always take the long route in order to get things right … he was quite bookish and academically inclined”, Millar said.
“Helena Kennedy was in our chambers and was a great friend of ours and there was a probably apocryphal story about Helena’s cases at the Old Bailey in the Eighties and Nineties where the ushers would say when Helena walked into court to defend somebody that they needed to leave tissues in the jury box for tearful jurors.
“Keir would not be that type of advocate. He’s much more clinical and careful and methodical and less emotional and emotive. What you would choose to employ him for would be to argue points of law and appeal, which he did a lot. He wasn’t in the trial. He came in later on to argue as a matter of law.”
Among lawyers at the Bar, his agreeable manner earned him the fond nickname “Starmer the charmer”.
While still a young lawyer, Starmer co-edited the definitive textbook on miscarriages of justice with his former university tutor, the eminent law professor Clive Walker from the University of Leeds.
Justice in Error is still used by students and academic researchers. “It really has stood the test of time,” Hannah Quirk, reader in criminal law at King’s College London, said. “It was the first academic attempt to look from a scholarly point of view as to why these mistakes happen and what can be done about them.”
When Doughty Street chambers organised a conference on miscarriages of justice, one guest was Simon McKay, a solicitor who was struck by Starmer as an “idealistic but pragmatic lawyer”.
McKay mentioned a case he was working on defending a young British soldier in Northern Ireland who had been accused of murder after firing at teenage joyriders at a security checkpoint.
The case of Lee Clegg provoked outrage in Britain and was taken up by the Daily Mail, with supporters arguing that the soldier was being scapegoated for political gain and had just been following army orders in difficult circumstances. Starmer said “he would be interested in considering the brief if it was ever on offer”, McKay recalled. By the late 1990s, it was.
The case was a big challenge for him to take on, McKay recalled, “because a lot of the left wing of the profession were of the view that he shouldn’t be acting for a British soldier who was accused of murder while serving in Northern Ireland”. But Starmer, like McKay, took the view that human rights “extend to everybody”.
Starmer once even played with the Parachute Regiment in an 11-a-side football “grudge” match against the Royal Military Police at JHC FS Aldergrove, a military base 20 miles from Belfast.
In March 1999, the soldier was acquitted of murder as a result of Starmer’s pleadings. “In terms of his skills as an advocate, they were exceptional. And anyone who suggested otherwise is really guilty of professional jealousy in my opinion because he was as good as anyone that was around,” McKay said.
Clegg, now in his 50s, said Starmer was “extremely professional, really comforting, really reassuring and from my perspective as a young man [he] knew the law inside and out and knew the flaws within my case”. He had “total admiration for the man”.
Starmer was becoming a high-profile figure. Two years earlier, he had scored a historic victory for freedom of expression when he provided legal advice, without charge, to the environmental campaigners Helen Steel and David Morris who were sued for defamation after distributing leaflets attacking McDonald’s. The defendants were a part-time barmaid and an unemployed postman. The verdict, in favour of McDonald’s, was delivered in June 1997 at the High Court.
Starmer represented Steel and Morris at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg where judges accepted that the pair’s lack of access to legal aid breached their right to a fair trial.
Starmer argued that it was contrary to freedom of expression for the law to presume damage without McDonald’s showing any loss. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s Defamation Act 2013 is credited as being the antidote to the problem Starmer raised in Strasbourg. It prevents companies from suing for libel unless serious financial harm is caused or is likely.
Starmer’s expertise in human rights law and increasing public profile meant he was well placed to take advantage of growing interest in the field in the 1990s.
Labour pledged to bring in a British bill of rights in its victorious 1997 general election manifesto and Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act was passed in 1998.
In an article for The Independent in early 1999, Starmer wrote of hopes that the act would “create a human rights culture in the UK”. The start date had been delayed until 2000 so judges and tribunal members could be trained in human rights law — training he helped deliver.
“The idea of Doughty Street training magistrates and police is bizarre,” Starmer would later remark. “But we are writing the manuals.”
That year, he wrote a guide to the act, analysing the law in 1,500 Strasbourg cases that affected the UK. The textbook “kind of took the legal world by storm”, McKay recalled. “This was a book with academic and forensic rigour but inherently pragmatic for this new wave of lawyers that would be working with the Human Rights Act.”
The act was controversial from the start because of fears that laws would be made by judges instead of parliament.
The Conservatives now suggest that they would defy the European Court of Human Rights if necessary to send migrants to Rwanda. Reform UK wants to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Scottish National Party are all committed to the convention.
Starmer scored an early victory for the right to protest in Blair’s new era when representing Lindis Percy, a peace campaigner who defaced the United States flag at an air base in Norfolk. She wrote “Stop Star Wars”, referring to a missile defence system, on a flag and stood on it. Her action was seen as desecration by service personnel.
Instructed by the solicitors Birnberg Peirce, Starmer convinced the High Court in 2001 to quash her conviction because it breached her European right to freedom of expression.
Starmer represented protesters against the Brighton weapons manufacturer EDO Technology, which they accused of providing arms for Israel although the company denied this. The business was seeking an injunction for harassment. Starmer referred to what he called Israel’s “assassination policy, which was condemned throughout the world” as he argued in the High Court in 2005 that the protesters’ long-term aim was to prevent what they considered to be war crimes. He took on the case under the cab-rank rule.
Starmer took silk after just 15 years, in 2002. He was hailed by The Observer alongside Ben Emmerson and colleague Philippa Kaufman as one of the “new legal crusaders” — a group “united by a commitment to civil liberties and a willingness to represent the sort of clients that high-flying barristers once wouldn’t have dirtied their hands with”.
At last, a Labour government was in power. Human rights were encased into British justice like the letters in a stick of rock. What could possibly go wrong?
