From godfather of human rights to gearstick groper
He’s received a record suspension from the Lords for sexually harassing this heroine of forced marriage. So what on earth possessed the oh-so liberal Lord Lester to go...
stop. He just smiled. He continued to grope my thigh for the length of the journey, despite my protests.’
On arriving home, Lester introduced her to his wife Catherine, who made them a cup of tea, before he escorted Sanghera to a spare room.
‘Once we had reached where I would be sleeping, he said it was not far from his bedroom, which he insisted on pointing out to me,’ she added.
The comment so unsettled Sanghera that she went to bed clothed, and ‘scarcely slept’ all night. Instead, she phoned a friend (described in evidence as ‘T’) who told her to put a chair under the door handle to stop anyone gaining access. The friend was one of six people — including a judge, a senior lawyer and a senior civil servant — with whom she would share details of Lester’s alleged harassment over the coming months. All acted as witnesses during the recent Lords inquiry.
The next morning, when Sanghera went downstairs, Lady Lester had left. She recalled: ‘At some point, I went over to place the crockery in the sink, it was then that he came up behind me and put his arms around my waist.
‘I pushed him away. Again, he placed his arms around me and further up my body. I had to force myself away. He pursued me around the kitchen and I pleaded with him to stop. Once he stopped, I told him that I wished to leave. I wanted to call a cab, but he insisted he went with me.’
At the railway station, she says, the peer said ‘that he had strong feelings for me’. When Sanghera responded that she did not feel the same way, ‘he persisted and told me that he loved me and said he could not help himself’.
A few weeks afterwards, things took a yet more extraordinary turn during a meeting at the Lords to discuss Lester’s Bill. When she ventured outside for some air, he allegedly followed and propositioned her again, three times.
‘He questioned whether I was concerned that he would not be able to have sex, and told me that there were ‘‘things’’ he could buy for this. I was shocked and did not respond. He went on to make other inappropriate sexual comments,’ she recalled.
On their way back inside he then ‘declared if you sleep with me I will make you a baroness within a year’, added Sanghera. ‘He even spelt it out putting my surname in, and asked me how that sounded.’
Once inside, he started pointing to passers-by ‘and commenting on the reason they have reached the positions they held — including one individual who had slept with someone…’
Finally, she claims, he turned nasty: ‘He said that if I did not [sleep with him] he would see to it that I never had a seat in the House of Lords, and warned me that there would be other repercussions for me, which he did not specify. He said that if I was a “good girl” and did what he was asking, I would be in the House of Lords and could visit his house abroad with him.
‘He made a number of further inappropriate sexual comments to me, such as that he could see me becoming a demanding mistress. I was distressed and shocked.’
SHOrTLy afterwards, she says, she received a text message from Lester saying: ‘you want to think about my proposal.’ Though she shared her version of events with several friends, Sanghera says she did not file a formal complaint since she did not wish to derail his legislation.
She was also concerned that she would not be believed, and was unsure as to whether the Lords had a disciplinary process for members accused of sexual harassment.
However in November 2017, the ‘MeToo’ campaign persuaded her to speak out. A formal inquiry was launched in February, and its conclusions were published this week. In finding that Jasvinder Sanghera’s claims are likely to be true, the report’s authors, who include several eminent lawyers, point out that she has no obvious motive for making the claims up and is not seeking compensation.
Her case is also strengthened by the evidence of the six reliable witnesses to whom she reported the incidents at the time.
Lord Lester, for his part, has denied everything.
Among the evidence he cited in his defence are emails and messages Jasvinder Sanghera sent to him after the supposed events, in which she addresses him affectionately in her sign off. Sanghera argues that this is simply her usual way of ending emails.
The peer has also complained that the Lords disciplinary process did not afford him the opportunity to cross-examine his accuser, arguing that he has therefore been denied natural justice.
Interestingly, only a few years ago, he poured scorn on the idea that four peers accused of sleaze offences should be allowed to cross-examine their accusers, saying: ‘This isn’t a court of law.’
Now, the boot is on the other foot, and the hard-won legacy of this supposed ‘Godfather of human rights’ hangs in the balance.
ALLIES of Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester — who allegedly promised a women’s rights campaigner a peerage if she slept with him — are to mount a bid to block his suspension from the Lords.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill allegedly became ‘obsessively attracted’ to Jasvinder Sanghera, repeatedly pestering her for sex and groping her on a visit to his house. But his supporters last night claimed the inquiry into the accusations was ‘manifestly unfair’ because there was no cross-examination of the complainant.
Lord Pannick QC, a friend of Lord Lester’s for nearly 40 years, will lead the attempt to block his suspension when the matter is debated by peers tomorrow.
Here, GUY ADAMS examines the details behind this extraordinary case.
PERHAPS the strangest thing about Lord Lester’s allegedly very strange seduction technique is that this outwardly sane, worldly and highly distinguished man could have possibly envisioned it ending in success.
The 82-year-old married Liberal Democrat peer not only seemed to think an elegant women’s rights campaigner three decades his junior could be talked into becoming his mistress, but also decided the best way to pursue this ignoble aim would be to crudely proposition her.
That, at least, is the claim made by Jasvinder Sanghera, whose testimony to the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards has mired the veteran parliamentarian in a sex scandal.
She has accused Lester, to quote the conclusions of a nine-month investigation, of being responsible for multiple incidents of ‘unwanted touching’, including groping her in his car and the kitchen of his £3million South London house, and of persistently making sometimes revolting ‘sexual comments and offers’ to her, ‘even after she clearly objected’.
After repeatedly rebuffing him, Sanghera says he then decided to offer her a ‘corrupt inducement’ to submit to the creepy advances, saying: ‘If you sleep with me, I will make you a baroness within a year.’
Finally, when all else had failed, Lester stands accused of turning nasty: threatening to ‘see to it that I never had a seat in the House of Lords’, before using his power and influence to ensure she was dropped from the guest-list for important parliamentary meetings.
For any public figure to indulge in such sleazy behaviour would be deeply unedifying.
For the supposed perpetrator to be a distinguished Left-wing barrister — an architect of the famous 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, and a man regarded (in the words of a newspaper profile) as the ‘Godfather of human rights legislation’, who has spent his life campaigning for minorities, especially women — it is surreal.
Yet just such a conclusion was this week reached by the powerful Lords Committee for Privileges and Conduct, which found that Lord Lester of Herne Hill became so ‘obsessively attracted’ to the younger woman that ‘he completely lost all sense of judgment and propriety’.
It recommended that he be suspended from the Upper House until June 2022, the longest parliamentary suspension of the modern era.
Its decision was laid out in a 130page report concluding the claims made by Sanghera, who has waived anonymity, are ‘more likely than not’ to be true, on what was described as ‘the balance of probabilities’.
Before coming to this ruling, the Committee spoke to ten witnesses. Six of them helped prop up the case against Lord Lester, who continues to dismiss every allegation of impropriety as a ‘pack of lies’. Four spoke in his defence.
The events in dispute date back to 2006 when the peer contacted Sanghera to ask for help to pass a Private Member’s Bill that would make forced marriage a civil offence.
On paper, it represented a terrific opportunity. Jasvinder Sanghera, who grew up in a strict Sikh family in Derby — before running away as a teenager to escape such a marriage herself — has spent 25 years campaigning relentlessly on the issue. In 1993, she set up a charity called Karma Nirvana to champion the rights of women in minority communities, having seen her sister Robina commit suicide in order to escape an abusive spouse.
The award-winning organisation set up refuges in Derby and Stoke, runs a helpline which offers advice to around 600 women a month, and has lobbied against everything from socalled honour killing, to female genital mutilation, to the failure of authorities to deal with Asian grooming gangs for fear of ‘rocking the multicultural boat’. For her tireless work Sanghera, now 53, was awarded the CBE.
Lord Lester’s proposed Bill seemed like a victory for her campaigns, so Sanghera travelled to London to help draft it. Yet almost immediately, she sensed a second agenda.
AFTER their first meeting, at Lester’s barristers’ chambers, she was invited to accompany him to Wildy’s, an antiquarian bookshop in Lincoln’s Inn, where, she says, he bought her valuable copies of two classics: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Anna Karenina.
Initially, Sanghera, who has three children from two marriages and lives with a long-term partner, assumed the gesture was eccentric rather than romantic. But according to a statement she gave to the Commissioner, things darkened significantly a few weeks later when she met him in Parliament for a series of meetings, plus a dinner, with supporters of the proposed Bill.
By the time proceedings finished, Sanghera had missed her train home from London. When Lester found out, he invited her to spend the night at his six-bedroom home in Herne Hill, South London, saying that ‘his wife wanted to meet her’.
There followed an extraordinary journey in the elderly peer’s car.
‘He kept repeatedly missing the gearstick with his hand and instead very firmly placed his hand on my right thigh,’ she claimed. ‘The first time it happened, I thought it must have been an accident, but when it continued, I realised it was not. I removed his hand and asked him to