How tough on terrorists will our impeccably liberal new prosecution chief be?
After a series of highly contentious statements about IS fighters...
AMONG fellow legal eagles, the newly appointed Director of Public Prosecutions is referred to as ‘Tv’s own Max Hill’. The nickname – never used to his face – represents a rather disobliging dig at what some regard as the balding, bespectacled 54- year- old QC’s insatiable appetite for self-publicity.
In 16 headline-grabbing months as the Government’s Terror Watchdog, Hill not only gave a seemingly endless string of newspaper, Tv and radio interviews, but also found time to star in a Channel 4 reality programme called The Trial.
It saw a genuine judge, jury and collection of barristers try a fictional murder case, before a studio full of cameras. Hill led the prosecution, but lost.
He also ran not one, but two Twitter accounts, plus a personal blog, in which he occasionally made highly provocative announcements that invariably placed him at the centre of a political furore.
The blog was used, for example, to announce last October that Hill had seen fit to meet with representatives of CAGE, the highly controversial Muslim pressure group that had notoriously described the ISIS murderer Mohammed Emwazi – otherwise known as Jihadi John – as ‘a beautiful young man’.
The 90-minute meeting came a month after the organisation’s international director, Muhammad Rabbani, was convicted of a terrorism offence and fined for refusing to give police the PIN number of his mobile phone when he was stopped and searched at Heathrow Airport.
Hill justified his decision to break bread with this outfit by arguing that he had a duty, as independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, to ‘engage with anyone who is affected in any way by the legislation’.
Critics, such as Professor Anthony Glees, the eminent security expert from Buckingham University, saw things differently. They argued that the meeting with CAGE typified the sort of muddled liberal thinking that has given the UK a terror problem in the first place.
‘I do not believe it is part of his job to meet with such an organisation,’ said Glees. ‘It gives out a signal he is open to discussions… He should not be sending out a message that he is open to lobbying from a group that has an extremist position totally at odds with mainstream British attitudes towards Islamist extremism.’
A fortnight earlier, Hill had used a BBC radio interview to argue that many British jihadis returning from Iraq and Syria ought to be given ‘space’ to reintegrate into society.
‘We should be looking at reintegration and moving away from any notion that we are going to lose a generation from this travel,’ he declared, suggesting such youths who had been brainwashed ‘possibly in their mid-teens’ were now ‘disillusioned’ with Islamic terrorism, and should therefore be ‘ diverted away from the criminal courts’.
Again, critics saw things differently. Tory MP Philip Davies, for example, dubbed Hill a ‘politically correct snowflake’.
WHATEVER one’s point of view, Max Benjamin Rowland Hill boasts impeccable liberal credentials.
An academically gifted grammar school boy, who was raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, he became the first member of his family to attend university when he won a scholarship to St Peter’s College, Oxford, in the late 1970s.
After graduating with a degree in Jurisprudence, he was called to the Bar in 1987 and spent the 1990s acting in a string of fraud, corporate crime and violence cases, before achieving prominence in the early 2000s during a string of high-profile terror trials.
He secured Britain’s last IRA prosecution, of the terrorists who planted a car bomb outside the BBC’s White City studios in 2001, and that of the three so-called ‘21/7’ bombers, who targeted three Tube trains and a bus with bombs (they failed to explode) a fortnight after the 7/7 attacks in 2005. He also acted for the Crown in the trial of Kamel Bourgass, an Al Qaeda suspect who stabbed to death a policeman in 2003 while plotting ricin attacks, and in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopan national in Britain who was detained in Guantanamo Bay between 2004 and 2009.
Away from terror trials, he prosecuted the killers of schoolboy Damilola Taylor, who was stabbed to death in Peckham in 2000.
HAVING
taken silk as a QC, Hill became head of Red Lion Chambers in 2012. He was also chairman of the Criminal Bar Association from 2011 to 2012 and leader of the South Eastern Circuit from 2014 to 2016.
Hill is also director of High Stakes Persuasion, which appears to be a corporate training company.
His burgeoning reputation – not to mention unbridled ambition – is believed to have encouraged him to apply (unsuccessfully) for the DPP’s job in 2013, when it was given to his predecessor Alison Saunders.
On the home front, Hill is married to Heather Coombs, an actress a decade his junior, whose Cv includes walk- on roles in Call The Midwife and Silent Witness, along with a video game spin- off of Wallace and Gromit.
They have two teenage daughters and own a large family home in – where else? – Islington, on a leafy street where properties change hands for almost £2million.
Like another famous Islingtonian, Tony Blair, Hill is a fan of Newcastle United.
At weekends, the family escape to a converted barn near Halstead in rural Essex. Free time is spent playing tennis, or visiting the theatre.
Last year, they attended the mo dish Latitude Festival in Suffolk, where Hill tweeted a blurry image of the star act, Mumford & Sons.
Perhaps inevitably, given this lifestyle, Hill’s politics appear to be progressive, too.
Days after the Brexit referendum, he used Twitter to circulate a petition calling for a second referendum, before launching an outspoken attack on Boris Johnson, saying: ‘If Johnson prevails and becomes leader and PM, we must hope someone does to him what he did to Cameron.’
The post carried the hashtag #trait ors are losers. Hill has also used social media to signal opposition to Scottish independence, and
random use of stop and search by police.
He’s tweeted critically about Donald Trump, and circulated tweets by Jeremy Corbyn (when the Labour Leader has attacked Trump). He was a fierce critic of the Government’s austerity driven reform of legal aid, too, joining protests at Parliament in 2014.
All of which provides intriguing background to the Leftish tubthumping he indulged in following his appointment in March 2017 as independent reviewer of terror legislation.
Hill sparked controversy almost straight away by criticising plans to prosecute disciples of online hate preachers on the grounds that ministers would be ‘criminalising thought’ if they outlawed those who watch extremist speeches online. Government sources described the intervention as ‘breathtakingly naive’.
Shortly afterwards, in an interview in The Times he said that while he agreed with the increase in jail terms for the ‘most serious terrorism offences’, he questioned the wisdom of long sentences in ‘more modest or middle-ground’ cases.
He also courted controversy by claiming the phrase ‘Islamist terrorist’ should not be used to describe all bloodthirsty jihadi killers. Instead, he insisted, ‘Daesh-inspired terrorism’ is better (Daesh being the Arabic equivalent of ISIS).
THEN, just three months ago, Hill said police should review how closely terrorism suspects were questioned on their religious beliefs in the wake of the investigation into last year’s Westminster terror attack by Khalid Masood in which five people died before he was shot and killed.
Twelve people were subsequently arrested, but all released without charge.
Hill said that while Masood’s extremist views were a ‘ justification’ for such questions, every interview is case specific ‘and it does not follow that it would be appropriate to ask very detailed religious questions in every case where a Muslim has been arrested on suspicion of terrorism-related activity’.
However, perhaps the most unsettling contribution to public debate, given Hill’s new role, came at a security conference last year where he claimed it wasn’t necessary to create specialist laws to target extremists because jihadists could be prosecuted under existing legislation.
He argued that Britain ‘has the laws we need’ to intervene, adding: ‘We should review them and ensure they remain fit for purpose, but we should have faith in our legal structures, rather than trying to create some kind of new situation where the ordinary rules are thrown out.’
Those remarks earned a public slap- down from Sue Hemming, head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service (who now, awkwardly enough, finds that Mr Hill is her new boss).
In an interview with The Independent, published at the time, Max Hill upped the ante, adding that the Government should consider abolishing existing anti-terror laws, since many of them are ‘unnecessary’ and could undermine civil liberties. Now, of course, as the £204,000-a-year Director of Public Prosecutions, he must zealously enforce the very same laws that he was recently so critical of.
Doubtless ‘TV’s own Max Hill’ will, like any public servant, attempt to do this crucial job to the best of his ability. Whether that’s good enough remains to be seen.