RICHARD KAY: How Starmer’s closest authorized buddy, who netted share of £8million from Chagos give up, discovered his courtroom tips from spymaster Le Carre in his native pub

Somehow it is hard to imagine the costly and symbolic legal case that has led to Britain’s ‘surrender’ of the Chagos Islands without the earnestly reassuring face of human rights lawyer Philippe Sands.

It was a smiling Sands who was pictured in sunglasses as a Mauritius flag was provocatively hoisted over the Indian Ocean territory in 2022 and it was Sands who, a year later, spoke with lip-smacking satisfaction about the joy of winning in an international court against his own country which, as he put it, ‘humiliated them – [in other words Britain] – completely.’

That humiliation, we now know thanks to yesterday’s Daily Mail, has been especially lucrative for the 65-year-old barrister who can perhaps lay claim to being among the most famous – if not always the most celebrated – lawyers of his time. His former position as chief legal counsel to Mauritius has left him with a share of an £8 million pot.

Even in the moneybags world of international jurisprudence that is a considerable financial reward. ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ as one fellow lawyer observed.

Sands also received Mauritian citizenship, not much of a hardship one suspects, and was showered with civilian honours.

It was Sands who helped secure the controversial deal which will see Britain hand over sovereignty of the Chagos, while at the same time leasing the strategically important Diego Garcia military base for 99 years at a cost of an eyewatering £35 billion.

The decision has caused consternation, not least because of the sinister influence of China in the affairs of Mauritius.

But while he has made paying Mauritius billions of pounds, which will have to come from our already depleted defence budget, to take the Chagos Islands off our hands something of a personal crusade, friends say Sands has been ‘surprised’ by the uproar the news of his own payout has created, as though it was some frivolous diversion.

As he loftily told a House of Lords committee investigating the transfer of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands: ‘I was remunerated, as I am for almost all my cases. It was not done pro bono.’ Perish the thought. Ridding Britain of what he has called its ‘last colony’ seems to have been an equally motivating factor.

But then Professor Sands – he also holds an academic post at University College London – has made his name as a devotee to a doctrine in which the concept of Britain’s national interests is subordinated to the vision of a world without borders governed by a panel of international jurists.

He has also enjoyed his position among a troika of legal minds at the top of the human rights tree. The others are Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, and, of course, our Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Sands volunteered to work on Starmer’s campaign when Sir Keir ran to be Labour leader and has described him as ‘great friend… generous, humorous and empathetic’.

All three men are cut from the same ideological cloth and unremarkably spent time at Matrix Chambers, the influential firm of mainly Left-wing civil liberties barristers which rarely misses an opportunity to burnish its credentials as a bastion of high-minded political correctness.

Sands was one of the founders of Matrix, set up in 2000 with top names, among them Cherie Booth, which must have made things tricky in the chambers tea room when, in 2005, he effectively accused her husband and then prime minister Tony Blair of being a war criminal over the invasion of Iraq.

The fact that working at Matrix in those days was said to be less a job and more a noble calling probably helped smooth things out.

These days when he isn’t lecturing or writing – he won the UK’s top prize for non-fiction for East West Street, a book about genocide and crimes against humanity – Sands can be found at another achingly fashionable chambers, 11 King’s Bench Walk, where he is modestly trumpeted as ‘very prominent, influential, extremely good and one of the big names of his age’.

For all his undoubted brilliance, however, Sands is a man who divides opinion. As news of his Chagos payment broke, he was branded a ‘mercenary’ by a Labour MP who accused him of ‘pretending to care about rights’.

Graham Stringer may be one of Starmer’s awkward squad of maverick MPs but his words will have stung. ‘Philippe Sands is making a fortune representing the interests of a foreign country,’ said the veteran MP, who has held his seat since 1997.

‘Sands, the Prime Minister and the Attorney General all believe that international courts, dominated by judges from China, are more important than our own democracy.

‘The sooner we take control back for the people of this country and not for foreign courts with lawyers to make millions, the better.’

Stringer added the lawyer ‘pretends to care about rights but in actual fact is trying to regress the Chagossians who don’t want Mauritian control’.

The MP’s timely intervention was a powerful reminder that one of the judges who ruled on the Chagos in the International Court of Justice was a former Chinese government official who backed Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.

Shadow foreign Secretary Dame Priti Patel was no less blunt. ‘Like Starmer and everyone else associated with the Chagos scandal, I believe that Sands is happy to sell out our country,’ she said. ‘Labour and their Lefty lawyer friends cannot be trusted.’

As important as these interventions are, they also show how contentious the decision to hand over sovereignty has been. ‘Decolonialisation has been used as a justification for this move,’ says a figure close to the negotiations, who disparages Sands as ‘Starmer’s legal buddy’.

He adds: ‘Certainly, not all Chagossians wish their homeland to remain in British hands but it seems that a majority do. They all have the right to British citizenship and recent months have seen a surge in arrivals of Chagossians to the UK. The Chagossian people are not Mauritian. They have a different history, faith and culture.

‘Mauritius, for them, is just as much a colonial power as the UK.’

Donald Trumps’s see-sawing view has hardly helped. Last month he called the decision an ‘act of great stupidity’ then said the deal was ‘the best’ the prime minister could make – perhaps rather damning Starmer with faint praise.

Yet last night, only hours after the US State Department had officially backed the deal, the President said Starmer was making an ‘extraordinary mistake’ in handing over the base.

All of which seems to be a matter of supreme indifference to Sands who was swooningly if unoriginally described by the barristers’ in-house Counsel magazine as ‘a man for all seasons’, who has been ‘propelled… from obscurity to public intellectual’.

This gushing profile listed his myriad successes as a writer, podcaster, documentary-maker and expert on the global lecture circuit as well as praising his legal brain.

It is perhaps revealing therefore that Sands makes an intriguing omission in his Who’s Who entry.

While describing himself as being educated at Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) he makes no mention of his years at fee-paying University College School, in Hampstead, North London.

Left-wingers view such excellent schools as temples of Tory elitism and is not hard to see why having gone to one might conceivably be a trifle embarrassing for Sands.

Yet he was born into a middle-class family (he lost 80 relatives in the Holocaust), his father was a dentist and mother ran an antiquarian bookshop. And today he lives in the same Hampstead enclave where he grew up, with his New York-born wife Natalia, also a lawyer, and their three children.

In interviews he credits a politics teacher who took the then 15-year-old and his class to visit a Yorkshire coalmine as the inspiration behind his crusade for justice. And while he made his name destroying Blair’s claim that he had clear and unequivocal legal backing for the war against Saddam Hussein in 2003, he has missed few opportunities to criticise Tories, reserving particular scorn for Boris Johnson and his support for Donald Trump.

After Trump’s first electoral win, Sands said: ‘I object deeply to the characterisation by Boris Johnson of Trump as a decent, liberal guy from New York.’ Scandalously, he added: ‘Boris Johnson would basically welcome the election of Adolf Hitler on that standard and you can imagine the words, ‘We can work with him,’ ‘He’s going to be good for Britain.’ For a man of liberal pieties one issue has occupied him more than any other – the consequences of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As he wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘I’ve followed the evolution of this dreadful story since it began in the hours after the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001.

‘I was in New York that day, less than a mile from the World Trade Center. I saw what happened, smelt the acrid fumes that lingered over the city for weeks and witnessed the pictures of the missing family members stuck to hundreds of walls around the city.

‘Today, I can still feel the consternation, horror and fear. Such an awful act of killing cannot be allowed to pass without a response. Yet it is now painfully obvious that the US – with Britain’s support – took the wrong path during the years ahead. Early decisions following 9/11 – to wage a ‘war on terror’, use Guantanamo [the US base in Cuba] as a permanent place of detention, use torture, invade Iraq – have left legacies that will haunt us for years.’

Naturally the advocate, who was called to the bar in 1985 and took silk in 2003, is happiest with those who agree with his world view.

One such was spy writer John le Carre whom he befriended in his local pub. They shared a scepticism of the Iraq war and he became friends with the lawyer asking him to review his manuscripts. ‘There was always in every Le Carre novel an appalling lawyer and my job was to check the awfulness,’ he said.

In return the author taught Sands how clever plotting could help in court. ‘There are all sorts of tricks I nicked from him,’ Sands said. ‘He understood his readers were intelligent and liked to work out where he was taking them.

‘It was exactly the same with judges. You want them to come to the conclusion you like but leave them feeling they’ve cracked it.’

It will be interesting to see if the same closure is reached in the Chagos sell-out.

Or whether it will remain an act of political and strategic vandalism that will live on in memories long after this Government’s time is up.