What does Keir Starmer actually stand for? Will our new prime minister turn out to be a socialist (as Tories claim), an authoritarian (as the left fears) or a closet liberal? His legal background may hold some clues.

After university he applied to join my chambers, 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, which was at the forefront of the civil liberties battles of the day. In many ways it was not an obvious choice for an aspiring Labour MP, headed by the Welsh Liberal QC MP Emlyn Hooson, who had defended the Moors murderers, and had among its members John “Rumpole” Mortimer, the liberal Tory Joe Walker-Smith, and myself, by then a veteran of anti-censorship cases such as Mary Whitehouse’s crusade against Gay News, and author of the cumbersomely titled textbook, Freedom, the Individual and the Law.

Keir interviewed badly, lacking both confidence and dress sense. (“How can we take a man who wears a cardigan?” expostulated one of my colleagues). But I needed a junior, and so we took Keir on. We look back at this as an example of why selections should not be made only on the basis of interviews.

I took him to Strasbourg for his first case in the European court. He forgot to bring his passport, and the gendarmes were about to put him on the next plane home until, with the help of the British consul, he was freed in time for his human rights debut. It was against Denmark, which had never lost a case before and was so confident of its success that it offered a free trip for its law students to hear it win again. The case was brought against its legal system, which allowed judges to refuse bail and then to go on, as trial judges, to convict the defendant. But, as the court ruled,........

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