Keir, Labour’s (very) quiet knight

AFTER the misguided pursuit of journalists for paying public officials was left in ruins — as prosecutors dropped a raft of cases last week — there’s been a conspicuous silence from Labour’s Keir Starmer.

Starmer, a close friend of Red Ed Miliband, is standing in the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras and is the party’s would-be Attorney General, the government’s chief legal adviser.

And it was Starmer who was running the Crown Prosecution Service when it began its tainted witch-hunt of tabloid journalists.

He controversially pushed the use of an obscure 13thcentury law — misconduct in public office — to go af t er people f or what amounted to them simply doing their jobs pursuing the public interest.

Starmer has since been reminiscing about his time as the Director of Public Prosecutions. ‘When I was DPP, everyone called me “director” and I said: “Please don’t call me director, call me Keir Starmer.” I have never liked titles,’ he told a local newspaper. This is the same Keir Starmer, QC, who last year accepted a knighthood, no less.

Yet he is just plain Keir — as in Keir Hardie, the first Labour Party leader — in his election literature, and his aides have asked people not to address him as Sir.

They fear the knighthood will alienate voters in the urban constituency.

If the knighthood doesn’t, perhaps the £ 20 million wasted prosecuting the journalists will . . .