QUENTIN LETTS: The Attorney General has a delight within the sound of his personal voice, his beachball face beaming with insincere unction
Meet Attorney General Lord Hermer KC, FOK. The second acronym, if you were wondering, stands for ‘Friend of Keir’.
That is how Lord Hermer landed his Cabinet job. He was Sir Keir Starmer’s best buddy at the bar.
A paradox with this furtive fellow is, for all his talk of the rigour and purity of the law, he himself is the product of manky patronage. We used to call it the old-boy network.
A self-basting little capon. Fluting and breathy in the larynx, laughter-free eyes, shirt cuffs a size too big, Lord Hermer has a delight in the sound of his voice.
He appeared yesterday at the Commons justice committee. Immense, grammatically flawless paragraphs ended with a smack of tongue against teeth as he punctiliously hit his closing consonants.
At which his beachball face turned to the committee with a smile no brighter than the sidelights on a Wolseley Hornet.
Insincere unction: it’s what Silks do.
The select committee, mainly Labour, was stuffed with lawyers. Declarations of interest lasted as long as the Grand National. Eventually they got round to some questions. Did it matter that His Lordship was an old chum of the PM and that, unlike any attorney since 1922, had no parliamentary experience?
That is how Lord Hermer, pictured, landed his Cabinet job. He was Sir Keir Starmer’s best buddy at the bar, writes Quentin Letts
A lawyer of reasonable kidney should be able to negotiate any political rapids with ease, writes Quentin Letts
Lord Hermer considered the cuticles of his stubby thumbs. A sentence started to rise out of him like a cobra from a snake charmer’s basket. He believed his parliamentary inexperience would, on reflection, be more advantageous than problematic. A lawyer of reasonable kidney should be able to negotiate any political rapids with ease. ‘My personal relationships with individuals has no bearing on the legal advice I give.’
These words were not supported by his facial reactions. As he made this (questionable) assertion, his eyelids closed and he raised his chin, grinding his jaw in apparent irritation. Then he glared towards some point on the floor about 12ft distant.
Law may be hard but politics can be harder. In politics you sometimes need to disguise your arrogance. Lord Hermer has yet to acquire that skill. His lips parted, yet there was no warmth in what one could technically call his smile. He was by now lecturing the committee on the rule of law. All MPs should be instructed on ‘the importance and centrality of law to all that the Government does’. More lawyers? Sounded like it. More power for them, too.
He wanted the rule of law taught in schools. He wanted it taught in youth clubs. Scout huts, where boys once went to tie reef knots and build catapults and store tadpoles in jars, may in future be where the poor scamps will be given earnest citizenship lectures on Hermer’s Rule of Law.
A proper select committee would have snorted derision at this lunatic idea. The bozo MPs just sat there worshipping this zealot.
Lord Hermer dilated at husky length on the convention that law officers could not discuss their advice to ministers. How convenient. We thus cannot know if he, who once represented Gerry Adams, was behind a proposed change of law that could see the former Sinn Fein president being given compensation, writes Quentin Letts
Lord Hermer dilated at husky length on the convention that law officers could not discuss their advice to ministers. How convenient. We thus cannot know if he, who once represented Gerry Adams, was behind a proposed change of law that could see the former Sinn Fein president being given compensation.
Sir Ashley Fox (Con, Bridgwater) roughed up Hermer on this a little, wanting to know about the money he was paid for defending Adams. Sir
Ashley also accused him of ‘hiding behind a piece of paper’, by which he meant that gagging convention.
His Lordship’s temper was tested. He convulsed twice in his chair before regaining control of his fake smarm, hissing
sibilants and over-emphasising vowels. Controlled rage is always more sinister than an explosion.
He started venting forth, greasily, about how lawyers had to blind themselves to clients’ moral failings and how in some countries lawyers were assassinated for doing their job. Indeed they were. It happened in Northern Ireland in the Troubles, when judges and magistrates were blown to bloody smithereens by the IRA.
Maybe Gerry Adams could tell the revolting Lord Hermer about it when next they have a chinwag.
