I mentored the next British PM. Here’s what Australians need to know about him

It is a racing certainty that Britain’s prime minister for the next five years – probably 10, given the wipeouts predicted for the Tories – will be Sir Keir Starmer KC. He is hardly known here, but as the Australian most closely connected with his career, I offer some thoughts about his likely governance.

It will be based on principles that Australian conservatives vehemently reject, namely those that would be enshrined in a charter of human rights. Were Starmer ever to meet Peter Dutton, the mutual incomprehension would be palpable.

British Labour leader Keir Starmer has some of the qualities of that greatest of all liberal reformers, William Gladstone.Credit: Getty

Starmer came from humble Labour stock (named after Keir Hardie, a socialist founder of the party) and from a redbrick university, and was clever enough to obtain a recondite Oxford degree – a bachelor of civil law – much valued by legal intellectuals. He then applied to join chambers, not the kind sought by aspiring Labour politicians which acted for trade unions, but one headed by a liberal MP and John “Rumpole” Mortimer and myself, author of the civil liberties textbook Freedom, the Individual and the Law.

Starmer did not interview well, and he did not look the part of the traditional English barrister. “How can we possibly take a man who wears a cardigan?” one colleague remarked. But we could because I too had a bachelor of civil law and was in need of a bright junior. We both look back on this first meeting as proof that appointments should never be made on perceptions from a face-to-face interview.

Our first case was against the government of Denmark, and I took Starmer to Strasbourg to help argue it, in the European Court of Human Rights, where Denmark had never lost. Starmer forgot his passport and was held in custody by the gendarmes until, with the help of the British consul, we secured his release in time for his debut in court.

The Danes were so confident they had offered free trips to law students to watch them win again, but we showed that their court system, in which judges who denied bail to defendants would then sit as their trial judge and find them guilty, breached the rule that defendants must have impartial judges. Starmer gave the students a seminar about their government’s mistakes, and went on to write several important textbooks on human rights law in Europe.

He joined me to establish Doughty Street Chambers, now Europe’s largest human rights practice, and acted in many of our leading cases. He was not, like a typical “QC MP”, a red-faced jury tub-thumper; his style was to write erudite but precise submissions and speak to them softly but persuasively, often prompting appeal judges to make decisions they would not, initially, have thought likely. This was the way to win cases we brought when the Blair government legislated a British Bill of Rights in 1998.

His style was most effective in conferences and consultations: he is a good listener, and is quick to find acceptable compromises. Typically, when he became director of public prosecutions and was left by a pole-axed parliament to sort out the vexed question of euthanasia, he issued “guidelines” for his prosecutors which removed much of the cruelty of the common law.

As head of his chambers for 20 years, I can attest that Starmer’s integrity was beyond reproach. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak accused him in their first TV debate of acting for terrorists, which of course he did, arguing their points of law on appeal. Under the “cab rank” ethical rule, barristers are bound to take anyone who wants to hire them. Sunak was taken to task by The Times, which pointed out that I was a stickler for the rule and would not have allowed him to flout it by refusing to act for the demonised.

Sunak is a desperate man: even his ministers (most of whom are likely to lose their seats) are accepting defeat. But wait: he has one champion who has ridden to his rescue. None other than Tony Abbott, who writes in The Times that Britain, under Starmer, will have “the worst government in its history” (has he ever never heard of Liz Truss?) based on Starmer’s “emissions obsession” (that is, he wants to tackle climate change), his “compassion for the poor” (only Abbott could think that a bad thing) and that he might “slink back into the EU”. Since Brexit has been the source of so many British woes, most voters would welcome some slinking.

In reality, 14 years of Conservative governance have left the country unimpressed and depressed. An obsession with appointing “people like us” to all public bodies has left the nation run by amateurs, incompetents and some who are visibly corrupt (for example, with the COVID  contracts). Tory ministers, now jostling to succeed Sunak when he resigns after “Starmaggedon” next month, are all second rate while that genial racist Nigel Farage is doing his best to destroy the party by standing for its right-wing rival.

How will Starmer’s government begin to repair the damage? It will have much more respect for expertise and professionalism, and for a civil service free from political preferment. Starmer will continue to be cautious on foreign policy – he alienated many in his own party by supporting Joe Biden over Gaza, but he is likely to follow other European countries (and infuriate Israel) by accepting Palestinian statehood. And he will certainly not criticise the International Criminal Court prosecutor for seeking an arrest warrant against Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He might even agree to the return of the Parthenon marbles, in a deal offered by the Greek prime minister whom Sunak stupidly refused to meet.

At every level, Starmer’s decision-making will be informed by a fidelity to human rights principles, which he believes to be “capable of contributing to the realisation of progressive change”. Indeed, he credits the Human Rights Act as leading him into politics – “it gave me a method, a structure and a framework by which I would test propositions”. Perhaps he would explain these and other advantages to Australian conservatives who virulently opposed Australians having their own human rights charter.

Starmer does not have the charisma of Boris Johnson or Tony Blair, but charisma in politicians is much overrated. He has something of the workaholism of former Labour PM Harold Wilson and the intense seriousness of another ex-PM, Clement Attlee, but dare I suggest that he has some of the qualities of that greatest of all liberal reformers, William Gladstone. That possibility should terrify the Tories. Gladstone was elected as prime minister four times.

Geoffrey Robertson is author of The Statute of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights.