KAVANAGH STARMER

FROM THE SPECTATOR

When Keir Starmer went to war on journalism

By TREVOR KAVANAGH, former Political Editor of The Sun

Through the winter of 2011-12, police dragged dozens of journalists from their beds in terrorist-style dawn raids. It was the beginning of a four-year nightmare; a politically motivated witch-hunt triggered, I believe, by a former state prosecutor who today presides as Britain’s Prime Minister.

So I was astonished when Sir Keir Starmer popped up in my old newspaper, the Sun, recently to say: “This is a government that will always champion press freedoms.”

Starmer did not think twice before putting innocent journalists in the dock. Yet he claims now that journalism “is the lifeblood of democracy”

It was news to the men and women he dragged through the highest courts in the land, all of whom were declared innocent. Their “crime”, it seems, was to publish true stories that were embarrassing to the Labour governments of Tony Blair and, especially, Sir Keir’s pal Gordon Brown.

Every story was checked and verified. Many, including the government’s neglect of soldiers fighting for their country, were invariably in the public interest. No state secrets were involved.

The Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) case hung on the link between the published stories and payments to public officials: a so-called conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. It led to the longest, costliest and most humiliating investigation in the history of Scotland Yard.

The prosecution collapsed in the Appeal Court when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Justice Thomas, caught the CPS barrister by surprise. “Have you at any stage considered the freedom of the press?” he asked in 2015. Silence from silver-tongued silk brought proceedings to a standstill.

Every Sun journalist in the dock, or awaiting trial, was ultimately released without a stain on their character. Yet the question from Lord Justice Thomas – aimed like a dart at Starmer as the State Prosecutor who launched Elveden – remains unanswered to this day.

Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). The now PM’s supporters have insisted it was impossible, on his watch, to prosecute sex predators Jimmy Savile or Mohamed al-Fayed, because of the uncertainty of a conviction.

Starmer did not think twice before putting innocent journalists in the dock. Yet he had the gall to claim, in the very newspaper he once tried to destroy, that journalism “is the lifeblood of democracy”.

“Journalists are guardians of democratic values,” he preached in October last year. “These simple facts are so woven into the fabric of our society that we often take them for granted. We stand with journalists who endure threats just for doing their job.”

His words cut no ice with journalists past and present who bear the scars of Starmer’s bid to incarcerate them, literally, for “doing their jobs”.

Their acquittals were a triumph for British justice – and a savage rebuke to Starmer for the sort of crackdown familiar in Putin’s Russia.

It is astonishing that until now – and thanks to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union – this travesty is entirely unknown to the British public. We are all aware of the Post Office scandal portrayed so brilliantly on ITV. And we know about the foot-dragging betrayal of tainted blood victims. Yet the sensational collapse of Operation Elveden was a tree falling in a forest.

The prosecution took four years, the longest and, at £15million, among the costliest police investigations in the history of Scotland Yard – including those into the Great Train Robbers, the Yorkshire Ripper or the 7/7 terrorists.

Innocent journalists were kept on police bail, a form of non-custodial sentence, some with tags which kept them under virtual house arrest. The police treated them like real criminals: terrorists, murderers and rapists. At worst, this was a white-collar crime. Nobody was hurt in the publication of the stories, apart, perhaps, from petulant Gordon Brown.

Paying for stories is an established and legitimate practice. No crime was committed. So how does Starmer explain his decision to inflict the full might of the law against journalists he now vows to protect?

He doesn’t. Starmer, as we have learned after nine months in office, is a peevish, thin-skinned politician who doesn’t like questions. His shabby conduct over women’s rights and his claim that 1 per cent of “women” have a penis, says it all.

Starmer has been exposed repeatedly as a small man with too much power. Only when his hypocrisy is revealed, as on biological sex, does he change tack – and then, like a chameleon, only until the risk has passed.

Indeed, it is unlikely that Lord Justice Thomas’ question about press freedom ever crossed his mind. So why did he take such a risk to put my tabloid colleagues in the dock in the first place?

The story began in September 2009 when the Sun pulled the plug on Gordon Brown’s premiership with the headline: “Labour’s Lost It”.

The news, conveyed by Peter Mandelson after Brown’s big speech to a Labour party rally, sparked a volcanic reaction. Brown allegedly phoned Sun proprietor Rupert Murdoch and bellowed: “I will destroy you.” The former prime minister has denied saying this. In any case, over the following years, Murdoch’s media empire was nearly destroyed.

Evidence of phone hacking forced the closure of the News of the World in 2011 after 168 years of publication. The hacking furore led to the Leveson Inquiry and demands for State censorship – still a goal for Starmer’s Labour MPs.

The uproar over the actual crime of hacking eclipsed Starmer’s phantom charges of conspiracy. The inconvenient fact is that Sun journalists did NOT hack phones. Its most senior reporters refused point blank to have anything to do with hackers.

That decision was made in the early days of mobile phones after the news desk received a tip-off about a celebrity at a night club. News editor, Chris Pharo, royal reporter Charles Rae and Fleet Street legend John Kay conferred and decided: “It’s not a story. It’s not journalism. We could go to jail.”

This became newsroom lore. No Sun reporter has ever been arrested, still less convicted of phone interception.

So how had the Sun unearthed so many stories casting Gordon Brown in an unfavourable light – on immigration, the NHS or the miserly treatment of fighting soldiers? Kay’s biggest scoop revealed that troops in canvas-covered Land Rovers were being blown to pieces by al-Qaeda roadside bombs while American troops were safe in armoured personnel carriers.

He also detailed how hard-up squaddies had to buy their own boots because Ministry of Defence footwear fell to pieces. In time-honoured tradition, sources were paid for tip-offs. News UK helped police link these payments with their public sector sources. The CPS considered charging journalists with corruption or aiding and abetting a criminal act. But there was no evidence. Finally, they opted for “conspiracy”, the last catch-all resort of a prosecutor without a leg to stand on.

The appointment of Starmer, a competent but uninspiring silk, as DPP in 2008 came as a shock to colleagues at the Bar. But he had powerful sponsors, including Labour PM Tony Blair’s wife Cherie, also a human rights lawyer.

Certainly, it was no surprise that Starmer was rewarded after the end of his five-year term with a knighthood, a safe Labour seat – and a shot at the leadership. Nor is it surprising that Gordon Brown has since played an important behind-the-scenes role on policy in the Starmer regime.

The CPS declined my Freedom of Information query about Gordon Brown’s visits to its offices during Starmer’s stint at the helm, so we cannot say how deep the connection ran. I’ll let you make your own mind up.