Fiona Ivison was 17 when she was strangled and battered to death by a man who had paid her for sex. He then left her body in a freezing car park.
She was only 14 when she was groomed by an older man into what she thought was a loving relationship, and then became a victim of sexual exploitation. Although the killer was caught, her mother, Irene, felt strongly that things should not end there; she wanted social workers and police held accountable for what she considered their failure to help Fiona, or recognise the relationship was abusive.
But this was in the 1990s, before the idea of grooming was well understood, and the lawyer she approached couldn’t see a route of legal challenge. It was his colleague, a young barrister called Keir Starmer, who eventually devised a way of petitioning the European court of human rights, although sadly Fiona’s mother herself died before the case could be completed.
The lawyer who told me that story is sadly dead now himself. But when I started hunting through Starmer’s old cases two years ago for a podcast, tracking down QCs he’d worked with and clients he’d defended, I found plenty like this. As a young human rights barrister, Starmer wanted to push the boundaries of what the law could do; his colleagues described a creative, gifted problem-solver, capable of finding ways through cases that others couldn’t. Later on, as director of public prosecutions, those traits would help him through the complexities of putting two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence on trial, or prosecuting the former tabloid editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks over offences linked to phone hacking. (Brooks was found not guilty but Coulson went to jail, a shock Fleet Street has not forgotten.) But the problems he seemed most interested in solving were ones affecting vulnerable people, like Fiona.
Starmer had a thorough early feminist training from his pioneering head of chambers, Helena Kennedy. As DPP he set out to challenge the rape myths and misogynistic beliefs that so often lead women to be disbelieved; guidance he drew up challenged the idea of a “model victim”, pushing Crown Prosecution Service lawyers to persevere with cases previously thought doomed to fail because the victims had led lives that jurors might judge harshly. Nazir Afzal, the senior CPS prosecutor whose tireless efforts eventually brought the Rochdale grooming gangs to justice, has credited his then boss Starmer with supporting him when others didn’t: what both men saw was the vulnerability of the teenage victims, initially dismissed by police. A review Starmer triggered after that verdict, asking prosecutors to re-examine other historical sex abuse cases where something might have been missed, led to a string of prosecutions and a public reckoning with the past.
There are serious critiques to make of Starmer’s time at the CPS, obviously: he didn’t bring a single successful prosecution over deaths in police custody despite several efforts, presided over what some saw as a rush to justice after the 2011 riots resulting in harsh sentences, and the cuts he authorised to CPS budgets (as a result of Conservative austerity measures) went deep. But being soft on sex offenders ain’t one of them.
Forgive the history lesson. But this is the context against which Tory-friendly newspapers run stories accusing Starmer of being “soft on criminals”, on the head-scratchingly convoluted grounds that three years ago the Labour leader signed a post-Windrush letter backing an end to deportation flights, and that it’s somehow therefore his fault that a convicted rapist who later won a legal challenge against being flown back to Jamaica is still in Britain.
The Tories will say, of course, that Labour started it; that after those hideous attack ads claiming Rishi Sunak doesn’t think sex offenders should go to jail and blaming him for things that happened years before he was even an MP, the party can’t complain. Labour in turn will say it started even before that, when Boris Johnson shocked even Tory MPs by accusing Starmer of spending his CPS days failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a repetition of a far-right smear. (There’s no evidence that the Savile decision, taken by a CPS lawyer, ever crossed Starmer’s desk.) Expect more of this, much more, all the way through to the general election.
Rake through anyone’s life for long enough, and you’ll find something to make them squirm: that’s politics. And stories that reveal a broader truth about a politician’s character can indeed be illuminating. But twisting the facts this grotesquely, on issues this emotive, is a dangerous game. In an election fought increasingly on social media, where disinformation is rife and most people barely read beyond the headline, unscrupulous people will have a field day.
The conventional wisdom is that so-called negative campaigning doesn’t work because it makes the campaigner look bad, but memories of all the times a dirty trick hit home are burned on to political psyches. Attack ads are perhaps most effective when they reinforce an existing belief held by target voters: that you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS; that Labour is soft on crime; or that they’re probably all as bad as each other, so why bother? If Sunak can’t win back disillusioned Tories in “red wall” marginals, the next best outcome is ensuring they boycott the polling booth, rather than actively voting Labour.
Like judo players, the parties are circling each other looking not just for weaknesses but ways of turning their opponents’ strengths against them. Why is Labour targeting Sunak so horribly personally? Because polling shows he’s more popular than his party. Why are the Tories attacking Starmer’s time as DPP? Because it’s his trump card, showing he’s a serious figure who can run big organisations – but it also leaves him wide open to being blamed for crime on his watch, regardless of whether it was his fault. Well, if you had this government’s record to defend, wouldn’t you point the finger at someone else’s?
But in response, Starmer may feel forced to double down on being “tough on crime”, triggering an aggressive bidding war on criminal justice in which useful insights from his old life can no longer be deployed for fear of his sounding like (shock, horror) a liberal.
The Labour leader’s old cases still tell an interesting, nuanced story: that of a strategic thinker, good at seeing a question from all sides, committed to social change but happy working towards it from within the establishment. Like it or not, it’s consistent with his political career so far and thus a reasonable indicator of how he might govern. Just don’t expect to hear about it, at least not this side of the election.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist