The maxim “play the ball, not the man” is a pretty good basic rule. All too often an argument which is really about policy is discussed instead in personal terms – as if two people can’t have a disagreement about an issue without one being portrayed as some kind of closet devil-worshipper.
The left is especially guilty of this. The ease with which so many resort to screaming “fascist” or “Nazi” doesn’t so much devalue the term – the words have real meaning – as devalue the person using them. Which brings us to Lord Hermer.
The Attorney General is clearly an intelligent man and deeply committed to his Jewish faith. You don’t get to be a KC without serious brainpower. And he is, I am told, a genuinely nice man, too. I have spoken to other barristers who speak extremely well of him – colleagues with very different politics.
But one of the oldest observations in history is that one can possess a brilliant mind and still lack basic judgment. Lord Hermer has had to apologise after comparing his political opponents to Nazis. You will recall how David Lammy, now the foreign secretary, compared the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Conservative MPs to Nazis (and, for good measure, supporters of apartheid).
In a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) last week, Lord Hermer said that both Nigel Farage’s Reform and Kemi Badenoch’s Tories had adopted Nazi ideology by asserting that national law supersedes international agreements, in reference to their discussing the idea of withdrawing Britain from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): “The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany, most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was, in essence, the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.”
Fascinatingly, Lord Hermer’s fellow KC Richard Ekins, who also happens to be Professor of Law and Constitutional Government at Oxford, has described Hermer’s argument as “preposterous, first because Lord Hermer has set up a straw man in the ‘pseudo-realist’ position, and second because he very obviously is a ‘romantic idealist’ about international law”.
Since being appointed Attorney General last July, Lord Hermer has developed a reputation for being politically inept. Some of his previous clients are, shall we say, controversial. But it is true that barristers do not necessarily share the views of their clients. More worrying has been his involvement in the deal handing over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Hermer has asserted that is about “honouring our obligations under international law” – even though the advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the issue was not legally binding.
But of more concern is that Hermer appears to be the embodiment of a particular type of liberal-lefty who behave as if they alone hold the moral high ground, and who throw their supposed moral superiority around as if they are better people, but whose politics are actually deeply dangerous - not just for the country, but specifically for Jews.
In 2023, for example, Hermer advised Labour to oppose a bill put forward by the then Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, to prevent public bodies from boycotting Israel. Hermer wrote that it would have “a profoundly detrimental impact on the UK's ability to protect and promote human rights overseas”.
One of his first acts as Attorney General was to support the decision of the new government to scrap the UK’s support for Germany’s objections to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, and then in September he played a pivotal role in suspending export permits for some weapons to Israel.
But all of this is dwarfed by a video which emerged a few days ago of Lord Hermer heaping praise on the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque in Liverpool. In it, Lord Hermer gushes over how, “It’s been inspiring learning about the work of this mosque. I came here as a member of the government to talk about what we have tried to do to make things safe for our amazing Muslim communities but I come away with many ideas.”
I wonder who he spoke to. Perhaps it was one of the imams, Adam Kelwick, who, in a Twitter post on 11 October 2023, wrote: "David beats Goliath!" followed by an Instagram post on 28 October in which he wrote: "Pray for peace, pray for mercy, pray for justice, pray for victory, pray for the deceased, pray for those still alive..."
Or maybe it was another of its imams, Haroon Hanif, who said in a video about the Israel-Hamas war that Muslims should "continue waging your war for Allah and his messenger…We're large in numbers right now, two billion. If the two billion just marched on Israel it's all over, if they spat in the direction of Israel, it's all over." He added: “no British Army can overpower you”. In a sermon at the mosque he told congregants that Jews and Christians “will never be happy with you until you abandon Islam”.
Harmer is the archetype of someone who believes himself to be on the side of good and peace, yet whose inability to grasp the reality around him renders him not just mistaken, but dangerously so.
