Daily Mail

The hypocrisy of Labour’s high priestess of principle

Once the scourge of the Establishm­ent, she’s now a Corbyn peer fighting selective education — while sending her son to an £18,000 a year private school. So what made Shami sell out?

- By Geoffrey Levy

THE TIMING couldn’t have been worse. Just as Jeremy Corbyn’s hyperactiv­e hard-Left Momentum troops were plastering the internet with calls to join an anti-grammar school, anti-selective education campaign with protests across the country, out popped a little gem of a revelation. Labour’s newest star, Shami Chakrabart­i, a dedicated opponent of ‘segregatio­n’ in education, was sending her own son to Dulwich College, the smart £18,000-a-year (£27,000 for boarders) private school in South-East London.

Still, it could have been worse. There had been reports that she’d wanted to send him to Eton, the school that generates the loudest Labour sneers for frequently educating Tory leaders. And when asked whether this was so, she ducked the question rather than rebutting it.

This all emerged as the oh- so pious, recently ennobled Baroness Chakrabart­i of Kennington was desperatel­y trying to quell another embarrassi­ng situation.

She had mockingly referring to ‘Essex man’ in a speech to a Labour conference fringe meeting in Liverpool. Her remark was interprete­d as being a sneer as she added: ‘I don’t want to be left alone with people who lack the vision and views that you and I bring to this party as members of minority groups.’

Not surprising­ly, she phoned Colchester’s Tory MP, Will Quince, to apologise. ‘Yes, she rang me and we’re going to meet,’ says Quince, who declares that, as Shami is Chancellor of Essex University, ‘she should be a champion, an ambassador of Essex, not the opposite.’

So it is a rather ruffled — even shaken — Shami who finds herself enveloped in the stench of hypocrisy just at the time when Jeremy Corbyn has appointed her to his front bench as Shadow Attorney General.

When challenged on ITV by Robert Peston, who suggested that she could be seen to be a hypocrite for opposing grammar schools because they enforce ‘segregatio­n’ while at the same time sending her son to a private school, she denied it.

Her curious defence was that she lived ‘a charmed and privileged life . . . in a nice big house and eating nice food and my neighbours are homeless and go to food banks. Does that make me a hypocrite or . . . someone who is trying to do my best, not just for my own family but for other people’s families, too?’

How tragic to see the once-bold, gutsy figure — who led from the front when she was director of the human rights group Liberty for 13 years until March this year — suddenly on the defensive.

‘There’s a lot of resentment about her,’ admits one senior Labour figure. ‘Here we are with a major campaign uniting the party to put Theresa May on the spot for segregatin­g our children into those getting a privileged education and those going second class.

‘Everyone knows it’s going to be a battle royal that we can win in the Lords. But what on earth are people going to think when she troops into the “No” lobby, while her son is at one of the most privileged and expensive schools in the land?’

Perhaps Baroness Chakrabart­i, a comprehens­ive schoolgirl herself, will be absent when the crucial vote is taken. After all, the high priestess of principle has found herself in that convenient position before.

She used to be a member of the ruling Council of the London School of Economics (LSE), where she studied law. In 2009, the council approved accepting a donation to the school of £1.5 million from a charity foundation headed by Saif Gaddafi, son of the late, unlamented Libyan dictator. Saif had been awarded a PhD the previous year.

When details of the gift emerged, the resulting storm was a monumental embarrassm­ent to the LSE and led to the resignatio­n in 2011 of its director, Sir Howard Davies. For her part, Shami spoke of sharing in the council’s ‘bucketfuls’ of embarrassm­ent and regret. She has also pointed out, sanctimoni­ously, that she was not at the particular council meeting which approved accepting the donation.

As for the decision to send her son to Dulwich College, the Labour Party swiftly circled the wagons, claiming it was made by Shami’s ex-husband Martyn Hopper, a £1.45 million-a-year partner at lawyers Linklaters.

They divorced two years ago after 19 years of marriage. Since then, she has become the sole owner of the Grade II-listed ‘nice big house’ which has six bedrooms and four bathrooms in Lambeth, South London. Bought six years ago for £1.4 million when the couple were still married, it is now worth £2.5 million.

It was a surprising end to a union about which both parties had talked

‘There’s a lot of resentment...what will people think?’

with great happiness. All in all, it does now look as though the once rocksteady Shami Chakrabart­i has lost her refreshing frankness and clarity since selling her soul — well, that’s how it looks — to Jeremy Corbyn.

‘If only Shami had stayed at Liberty, none of this would be happening,’ complains a friend who has known her for some years. ‘She was in control there. But she’d been there long enough, really, and her marriage had broken up, which really knocked her back. She needed something new.’

In fact, as the friend points out, ‘all the parties wanted her support in recent years, even the Tories. You’ve got to give Shami her due — at least she hasn’t gone and joined the winning side as most people do these days.’

At first glance, her journey to ermine robes and those red leather benches would appear to have been made with surprising haste only this year. But it has perhaps been more convoluted than you may think.

Some put its beginning at 2011 — yes, the ghastly Gaddafi LSE-scandal year — but also the year in which Shami Chakrabart­i agreed to become

a panel member on the Leveson Inquiry into Press ethics.

It was a shattering disappoint­ment to her many admirers when she gave her support to Leveson’s ultimate recommenda­tion that newspapers — free of state interferen­ce for 300 years — be placed under a form of statutory regulation.

Here was a woman who had spent her profession­al life fighting for the very liberties which cannot exist without freedom of expression, yet she was now seen conniving with the ‘great and good’ to muzzle Britain’s Press.

From Leveson, the step up to chairing an inquiry of her own must have been a temptation too difficult to turn down. But was it a temptation too far?

For in April, just a few days after she had given up being director of Liberty, there was Jeremy corbyn smoothly asking her to lead an inquiry into anti-semitism in the Labour Party — which even those within Labour itself had claimed was rampant.

Astonishin­gly, within two weeks, shami announced that she had joined Labour, an extraordin­ary thing to do since the most crucial aspects of her report would be the inquiry’s independen­ce and impar- tiality. But hold on — this paragon of liberal virtue assured us that her party membership would not compromise the report’s independen­ce. so that was all right, then.

Little wonder that when it was published in June, concluding that Labour was ‘ not overrun by antisemiti­sm’, and failing to censure corbyn’s patent lack of decisive leadership in rooting out prejudice, there was dismay over what was widely seen to be a whitewash.

One senior Labour aide even accused shami chakrabart­i of ignoring explosive evidence.

The peerage that followed (hers was the only one recommende­d by corbyn) had been predicted by everyone . . . except, of course, shami herself.

somehow, everyone already seemed to know the diminutive lawyer, whose Hindu parents arrived in Kenton, Middlesex, from Bengal in the Fifties, was bound for the House of Lords.

Questioned on the BBC by Andrew Neil, shami claimed that ‘ this particular peerage was offered to me after the report’. she added: ‘Jeremy corbyn is not a corrupt man and I am not a corrupt woman.’

But to fellow lawyer Marie van der Zyl, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, creating her a peer in the wake of the bland report was wrong: ‘It is beyond disappoint­ing that shami chakrabart­i has been offered, and accepted, a peerage from Labour following her so-called “independen­t” inquiry.

‘The report, which was weak in several areas, now seems to have been rewarded with an honour.

‘This “whitewash for peerages” is a scandal that surely raises serious questions about the integrity of Ms chakrabart­i, her inquiry and the Labour leadership.’

As for Baroness chakrabart­i’s almost instantane­ous elevation to the front bench, Ms van der Zyl now acerbicly declares: ‘It now looks increasing­ly like the whitewash was a job applicatio­n.’

Ironically, it was shami’s desperate efforts to claw back her diminishin­g credibilit­y following the furore over her inquiry that led to the ‘Essex Man’ faux pas. Addressing a fringe meeting at her first Labour conference as a paid-up party member last month, she pleaded with Jewish and ethnic minority voters not to desert the party, adding her pejorative comment about being left ‘locked in a room with Essex man’.

And this from a human rights campaigner who has always weighed her words so carefully and whose spirited views have been widely respected.

In the row that erupted afterwards, she made fulsome apologies for what she called ‘ a very silly, off-the-cuff remark’.

One uncomforta­ble phone call was to Professor Anthony Forster, vice-chancellor of Essex University, where she has been chancellor for two years. Another was that call to local MP Will Quince.

Humble pie can take many forms. For shami, it will be meeting the conservati­ve MP in the next few weeks to ‘talk about the great things we are doing to dispel these stereotype­s’, he says.

A joint visit to Refugee Action colchester, a group set up to support refugees from syria, is also planned.

‘We’ve all said silly things,’ says Quince generously.

One is entitled to wonder, however, if shami chakrabart­i hasn’t been promoted dangerousl­y beyond her comfort zone. The approachin­g battle over grammar schools is not the only issue in which she doesn’t fit all that comfortabl­y. Hers is bound to be one of the loudest voices opposing Theresa May’s sensible proposal to protect British soldiers from ‘vexatious’ human rights claims on the battlefiel­d.

It is an issue close to chakrabart­i’s heart, but here, too, she has been known to go too far.

A year ago, publisher Penguin paid undisclose­d compensati­on to Martin Hemming, who was director general of legal services at the Ministry of Defence for more than a decade until 2009.

The damages, and costs, were for shami chakrabart­i libelling him in her book, On Liberty. she had wrongly claimed that he’d used his position to silence concerns over allegation­s of human rights abuses by the British military.

Penguin has promised to remove the offending passages from all future editions of the book — chakrabart­i’s first — which explores why our fundamenta­l rights and freedoms are indispensa­ble.

Who would not argue that indeed they are?

You have to wonder if shami chakrabart­i isn’t wishing that she could turn back the clock to her time at Liberty.

Those were days, remember, when she was slashing and burning her way through official obfuscatio­n, bringing government­s to order on stop-and-search powers, detention without trial and ID cards. Those were days when everyone admired her.

Who is doing the obfuscatin­g now?

‘If she’d stayed at Liberty, this would not be happening’ ‘Her marriage broke up, which knocked her back’

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 ??  ?? Labour values? Baroness Chakrabart­i is sending her son to exclusive Dulwich College (left)
Labour values? Baroness Chakrabart­i is sending her son to exclusive Dulwich College (left)

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