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On Monday we're going to be in London where we're hosting a question time debate between Tory James, cleverly reformed Zeal Youssef and Labour's James Murray who works with Treasury. Rachel Reese's right hand man is how we're describing him. Very good. Okay.
On the Tuesday we're in Cardiff in Welsh Wales, which looks like it's set for a political upset. On the Wednesday we are at Warwick University with Jacob Weismorg taking on students. And then on Thursday we're by the seaside. Get a 99 in your hand because we're going to be lovely worth in discussing royal matters with Lady Colin Campbell.
Amazing. And Phil Gabby of me of the Sun. If you want to come and watch any of the other live events next week, get your tickets now. And the link is in the episode description.
Now, Camilla, do you think it might actually be all over for Keir Starmer next week? I'm starting to wonder. There's a part of me that will be sad. I'll be rocking on the impression.
There's a part of me that will be sad. And also, he's so bad. He has been putting my dog through school for journalists. Yes, he's been paying.
He's got a money printing machine. He's fantastic. But we thought maybe he'd cauterize things on Wednesday with his performance and PMQs because he has his new formula of Lord Mandelson at the Princess was. Follow Ollie.
Rob. Rob Rosson. Give me all the information. Not my faul.
Let's move on. Move on. Let's move on. And I sent backbenches.
Might be coming around to let's move on position. What's interesting is that the toxins seem to have spread to the Cabinet, which of course is what really matters. They want to move on with someone else in charge and that's his problem. So let's have a look at our brilliant political letter.
Tony Divers reporting on this again, first with the scoops. So he's being told by senior government sources the wheels have stopped turning in number 10. The question is no longer whether things can go on, it's a question of when people move. Now you say that we might not be in clover if Star resigns.
Come on. Hang on a minute. Who are the two names Cabinet is saying might replace them? Where's an Ange?
Wow. Okay. And by the way, can I just say on that front that we are going to get on to speaking about Cat Little in a moment. You're not in favour of this shortening people's names, are you?
This Ange? No. Shouldn't I not call him Wesley? Timmy?
Yes. You've got a problem with the fact that the civil servant, the very senior civil servant who appeared today and indeed the other senior civil servant or former civil servant who appeared the other day, have shortened their name to Cat Little. I mean, there's a lot going on there because she's taken Catherine and made it Little so she's Cat Little. But Cat Little sounds like a cartoon character or a primary school teacher.
And it's the same with Sir Ollie Robinson. His name is Oliver. What has happened to this country, the land of Queen Victoria? And I don't know, Rivita can't think of something.
What has happened to this country, the land of Queen Victorian Maratha, that our senior civil servants now have childish playground nicknames? I mean, we called Thatcher Maggie, but she never called us. We did that. She didn't introduce herself.
Hello, my name is Maggie. That would have been ridiculous. If I'm ever. Can you imagine the Cold War being ended by someone called Maggie or Timmy?
Yes. If I'm ever given a dame code, which I think is pretty unlikely. It's probably as likely as the Kirsten are remaining Prime Minister by Christmas. I think I might just say I'm not called Cammie just to annoy you, sir.
Oli Robbins, kpmg, imf, abc, kfc, lgbtq. You don't have letters with Ollie. That's ridiculous. Oli has a 5 year old.
Anyway. Continue, Timothy. Senior government sources have said to Tony that there is a debate about, quote, who would move first streeting poor Angela Arena. Why?
And I thought we were moving a little pack. Ah, yes. And there is a sense that it is over now. A minister who has publicly supported Keir said their colleagues were, quote, furious about the Mandelson saga and the open briefing war between Downing street and the Foreign Office.
And this is a detail from Change Reporting that I love. What is it that Labour Cabinet ministers are most annoyed about? Not the appointment of Peter Mandelson, but that the Prime Minister and his team might be upsetting the Civil Service. Oh, yes, we mustn't do this.
The Rolls Royce standard Cat Little Civil Service. Yes, indeed. The blob must never be impinged. Okay, so we've got a cabinet split.
Just to explain. So, several government ministers, including reportedly Rachel Reese, Japan and Mamu, who is treating David Lammy, have accused the Prime Minister of creating a them and us split between ministers and officials in Tuesday's Cabinet meeting. During the disagreement first reported by the Guardian, Rachel Reeves advised Thelma to keep civil servants on. That's because she is a purveyor of treasury orthodoxy, because the only way to keep public servants on site is to pay them double and let them work from home.
I think that's such a strange thing for a minister to be advising someone to do. I know this is the weird thing because we'll get onto Cat Little in just a moment. Cat Little's evidence before the Foreign Affairs select committee, Emily Thornbury 2.0 appears to be that Ollie Robbins was doing the Prime Minister's bidding. If that is what civil servants are for, then you absolutely can't sack them.
And this is doing exactly this what you want them to do. This point was reportedly made in the Cabinet by Shaman and Mahmoud Keir. Starma described Robbins as a fantastic civil servant and Shabanamud reportedly said, if he's such a great public servant, why did he lose his job? I don't understand the split down.
When we used to deal with Tory splits, it would be really simple. It would be wetties and righties policy. Is this philosophy. What's the split here?
Is it Lego hair? Mahmoud is on the side of Reeves. It was on the side of Philipson. Yes.
I can't believe this was talked about by over how pro bureaucracy you are. A Cabinet minister told the I paper that quote, it's bleak. It's a question for the cabinet, I. E.
The future of Kiyosama and colleagues need to come to a view. I know what my view is. I think it's moving, isn't it? I think the wagons are circling and it's just a question of time now.
And also, by the way, I was discussing this with somebody earlier. I hadn't previously thought that the Prime Minister, a proud man, a quite vain man, a man with a little soup song of arrogance at times, which he demonstrated often at Prime Minister's questions. I didn't think he would fall on his sword. I didn't think he would be a quitter because I think he would find that to be in contravention of his self style role as a public servant.
But I'm increasingly starting to think, yes, he might not have the stomach for this. Well, Dan Hodges are most reluctant to give the action of publicity. But Dan. We do actually, Gabriel.
But Dan has been speaking to people in the Cabinet and he says that after Iran there was a pause for thought. Maybe we can't get rid of this Prime Minister right now. Maybe we need him maybe as the man for the moment. But the Mandelson saga has changed that calculation.
We're back to thinking, let's look at what happens in the May local elections and if they really are as bad as we were expecting, that would be a natural time to say to the Prime Minister, maybe you should go. You know how bad it is. Even the London Mayor, Sidi Khan apparently thinks the handling of the Mandelson saga has been a close omni shambles. Right.
Extraordinary. Now, he's usually quite loyal, isn't he? Always going to bat the star. According to polls, he's looking at Leela being not quite wiped out, but losing control of many councils in London and seeing Reform and Green elected in their place.
Why do we never theorise Khan as a potential Prime Minister? I do. Do you? But he's still got his term to run.
Yeah. And the only reason why we can't he's not in play is because he's currently serving as Mayor. But he can't. Very good.
But I think if we weren't in Parliament though, I think he would be forced to be reckoned with. By the way, on Burnham, there's now also reporting that he is in some way trying to convince the National Executive Committee not to block a second chicken run. So obviously he was stopped in the first place from leaving Manchester from the Westminster. There's less justification for that now, Tim.
Well, it's an interesting counterfactual. If Andy had cert in look at me, I'm shortening gains too. If Mr. Andrew Burnham had run in Gordon and Denton and presumably won, then right now he'd be in Parliament.
And one wonders, the dynamic of this would be even worse for Kiyasana. Very true. So while we've got the sort of emotional political battle taking place within Cabinet, the Tories are still trying to exploit the question of whether or not Kiyosan is their Parliament. Yes.
Which I think is a perfectly sensible strategy. That's all they're doing. So they're just trying to grind him down. And this is what Labour did to Boris Johnson, called for him to be subjected to repeated inquiries.
So now they're saying, right, we should get the Privileges Committee to order an appearance by the Prime Minister because we've heard Ollie Robbins being interrogated. We've heard Katie Little being interrogated. Next week we're going to hear Morgan McSweeney being interrogated. Okay.
He has appeared in front of Prime Minister's questions. So that's six questions from the Leader of the Opposition. I think we would all welcome a longer interrogation of these events, wouldn't we? Not.
Not Keir Starville cannot come anymore. It's all confetti material. So they're pushing on that door, by the way, on McSweeney. I'm trying to kind of war game how he's going to appear next Tuesday because obviously he's a Starmer loyalist.
He succeeded in electing this man as anchor Prime Minister. But does he, like, feel he's been thrown under the bus? Does he feel I was the adviser who advised you were the Prime Minister who decided, why am I coming to cop all this flak? I'm now, you know, public enemy number one, struggling to get another job.
He could turn. Yeah, couldn't he? I mean, let's be honest, Starmers next week isn't going to get any easier for the Prime Minister, despite the fact that we called it yesterday. But it could be his last PMQs too.
It could very well be. And that's what we remember. That's how we will remember him. It's interesting you say that all this is good stuff for sketch writing because I was just too busy today.
I wasn't on duty to write about Cat Little. That's the Prime Minister's Civil Service chief. Not much to write about. She was giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Emily Thornbury, who today was channeling Alexis Carrington.
A felt without jacket. It was gold. It was gold and I appreciate it. It was part Alexis Carrington, part Jackie Collins book launch.
Yeah. I feel Emily never wears the same thing to. She's had a massive wardrobe where she's just cycling through ebay or how she does. She always looks great.
But Emily struggled, and I would have struggled to wrap it up too, because after about 30 seconds of categorical speaking, I completely switched off. Yes, it was like a Mandarin speaking Mandarin. It was a foreign language while eating a Mandarin. Pure jargon.
Now, I'm told by people who speak the lingo, she was saying that Ollie Robbins, in fact did see the results of the vetting. It may well have involved those colorful boxes, although she was just as clear as mud about whether it did or not. And therefore the thought lies with Robbins because he didn't pass it on. The fact that it required someone to translate it, I think says everything you need to know.
And watching her speak, I began to actually boil with rage. Yes. Because I feel people like that, people like, we must not have a good civil servant. Right.
She's a career servant, she's not elected. And there are rules and journalism about who you can and can't take a make out of, basically. And normally we don't touch civil servants. So if I can speak of Harris Embodiment, a group of people, it's Maurice Glassman's lanyard.
These are the people who run this country and they're why nothing gets done. They are employed not to facilitate things, but to say why something can't happen. And part of the reason why they speak in that language, which is like the language of the foreign language and the leaf, which they can't understand. It's a lock like Wokery, you know, and triggering all this sort of stuff you develop.
The class develops its own language and those who are outside the class can't understand it, so they're excluded. And they can look down on you because you don't know what I'm talking about. Part of the reason why Catalyst speaks like that is to make you eventually go, I can't bother with this, and you walk away. It's basically the same strategy employed by Starmer, which is to kind of blind you with legal ease and basically try and transmit the message to a process was followed by boring everyone to tears with your explanation.
Yes, exactly. And it's the same process implied by my broadband provider, who I discovered recently for the Last six months I've been paying for two broadbands because when you switch, they're supposed to tell the other company that you've switched and stop the payments. But they didn't do it. So I've been reading them and I've been having like half hour long conversations about process and how to get the money back to the point where you actually think I'm just going to give up Little Timmy.
Like the great British public inside, they're screaming, just get it done. But I think the elect, well, we know the cabinet and MPs are increasingly seeing through it. The electorate sees it, the electorate listens to this nonsense. The electorate feels him sympathy.
I'm always trying to figure out, why does Britain hate Keir Sarma? Because sometimes it's irrational, Right? We've had a lot of bad Prime Ministers, but our dislike of this man is on a whole other level. And I think it's because when he speaks, it is computer says, no.
Yes, it is. It is the petty bureaucracy of everyday life in a country where things are more expensive than they used to be, but the service quality is falling. It's someone explained to you, I'm afraid, having ordered it, that's not on the menu this evening. I have a bucket of cold stick and snap.
But if you know what, it's worse than that. It's not just that, it's those people who tell you everything is fine when it isn't. Yes. So when you go and you have some inconvenience at a doctor's surgery or maybe at an airline desk or on a train, and the person tells you to stay calm when you haven't raised your voice, even though you're getting increasingly, please don't hit the staff.
Yes, please don't punch the staff. And you're saying, no, I'm justifiably put out because you are managing this whole situation really badly and they smile at you and they go, no, I'm handling it really well. Which is why when he says we must do everything in our power to ensure that there's no anti Semitism in this country, as a viral video is currently on X showing a man literally abusing a Jew in his front garden, everyone goes, only he's going to do nothing. But also the bad things in our life are a consequence of his policies.
Yes, he doesn't see it. But like with that please don't thump the staff message that you keep getting, there's this underlying passive aggression, very polite passive aggression in everyday official life. So today is St. George's Day.
Why can't we not just raise a few black flags and go morris dancing? Yes, we have headliners. As to me Yang saying I love St. George.
I'm a big fan of St. George, but let's not be divisive. Yeah, I love St. George, but I do secretly think that anybody who waves the flag is a racist and a bigot.
I don't need your permission to tell me it's okay to feel proud of it about my country so long as I subscribe to this 36 points of principles that I'm at Tolerance and pro diversity. Avoid all of those things. Let's enjoy ourselves. Like starting a party by telling people where the fire exits are.
Right. And going through a little fire drill. Just let us get on with our lives. For the man who told us you won't notice I'm here.
Remember that speech in number 10 when he first got elected? I wanted to touch more lightly upon your lives and sort of thing. I feel like I'm going to wake up and he's next to me in bed. We can't escape him.
What a thought here. He's a patriot. That is his. Attorney General, Lord Hermer.
Coming up next, we speak to the two Telegraph journalists who have revealed the Attorney General's extraordinary role in a witch hunt of British soldiers. While every other channel is fighting for your customers attention, podcasts are worthy already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes. They choose to be here.
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Don't fight for attention. Buy it with Acast. Learn more by visiting acast.com advertise. We're joined now by chief reporter Robert Mendic and investigations editor Claire Newell, fresh from quite the splash.
Which one of you wants to explain it? So we've revealed that Richard Hermer, the Attorney General, was at the centre of this really controversial civil claim against British troops. Essentially, there was a witch hunt against British veterans for a long period of time. And we've got 25,000 documents that for the first time show Hermer's role in all of that.
Just to remind us of that story. This was after the Iraq war. What were they accused of and what happened to that accusation? In 2004, there's the battle of Danuboy.
And this is where members of the Mahdi army, an Iranian back militian in southern Iraq attacked a British checkpoint known as Danuboy. In an ambush British troops and piled in to support them. Firefight that lasted three hours and at the end of which 20 to 28 Iraqis were killed on the battlefield. Now 20 bodies were brought back to the British camp to identify who was involved in this firefight.
But at the heart of it then becomes a series of rolling complaints that actually, no, the British had committed terrible atrocities on the battlefield. Either they'd taken captives off the battlefield and executed them back at the British base or else killed them and executed them on the field of battle after they'd been captured. These were terrible, terrible accusations. Now that just took off as a thing.
It wasn't true, but it was made up by the Iraqis and British human rights lawyers ran with it. That's the extraordinary situation we're in. So that by 2007, 2008, when this was the most heroic battle fought by British, four military crosses were awarded at this battle. Unbelievable heroism, unbelievable bravery of these British soldiers.
They found themselves accused of the most heinous, terrible war crimes really ever sort of leveled the British troops in recent history. So it's the most egregious case of hysteric war crimes being levelled at British troops. We'll get onto Lord Herman's role in a moment, but it's very important for you to explain the role played by the now disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner and that press conference. Claire.
Okay, so Phil Shiner was involved at a really early stage in these accusations. And in 2008 he did what became a really infamous press conference. British soldiers may well have been responsible for the executions of up to 20 Iraqi civilians, the torture of many of these 24 deaths, the torture of nine other survivors, and horrific bodily mutilations prior to some of the executions. He and Martin Day from Le Day Day solicitors stood up and told the world about these allegations.
And they were pressing for a public inquiry to get to the bottom of it. And they were lucky. You know, the Labour government then agreed they got what they wanted. And then the years that followed, there was this big inquiry into these really serious accusations.
We should just probably explain the context in which that inquiry is allowed. Tony Blair as commander increased scrutiny and indeed criticism for taking us into a so called illegal war. We have got Piers Morgan losing his job as editor of the Daily Mirror because of photographs depicting soldiers urinating on Iraqis that proved to be false. So we've got a very febrile environment where you have Abu Grave which is America's responsible for.
Which gives the impression that this might have happened. Exactly. It's a massively important context, isn't it? Because they're operating in a world where these kind of claims are believed, people think they're likely to be TR the lawyers bringing those claims.
Do they make any money out of it? So potentially. So if you bring a civil claim against anybody, whether it's a company or the British government, often you do something called a conditional fee arrangement, which is essentially known to us as a kind of no win, no fee. So that means there's a massive risk in doing it.
You don't normally get paid for the work you're doing as you go along, but if you win at the end, you get a massive payout. How does Lord Hermer, now the Attorney General, fit into this story? Robert? So Lord Hermer, back in those days, plain old Richard Hermer, he later becomes Richard Hermer qc, and he's a relatively junior barrister, but not that junior.
He's a senior junior, probably the best replica. He's a human rights barrister, he deals in these kind of cases and he's very close to our current Prime Minister. They work at the same chambers together in those days, 2007, before skier Selma becomes chief prosecutor for the country. So Richard Hermer is a barrister.
He's approached by Leigh Day and he's approached or certainly is in conversation with Phil Shiner about they're seeking his advice as lead counsel on these Al Sweedi claims. Now, Al Sweedi is named after one of the dead Iraqis on the battlefield who, it's alleged was executed back at the British base. Now, Claire, one of the smoking guns in your expose is the fact that when Lord Herma is brought in to advise you found paperwork in which he seems to question the credibility of the claims, but yet lean into the idea of prosecuting the British soldiers for them. Can you just explain that a bit more?
Yeah, it's really interesting to see. So when we went through these emails, we can see that at a really early stage, Richard Hermer is concerned about these claims. He's wary. He seems to have lots of questions about whether they're true or not.
But the interesting thing is he joins in anyway. We can see that in 2008, these claims start Lee Dare working on them and so is Richard Hermer. So it doesn't put them off, which, as an outsider, as a layperson, seems a bit strange. When barristers take these kind of cases, they just take the one that immediately comes along or is There some element of choice in this that he's choosing to be involved in this.
So if you're doing criminal work, there's this thing called the cab rank rule. And that means, say if someone's accused of murder, they just get whatever barrister is kind of coming up next. So barristers would say, well, I couldn't refuse that case. And I think Lord Turner said that before, hasn't he, that because of the cab rank rule, he had to take work from specific people.
There wasn't any choice. But what's different about this case is he did have a choice. The cab rank rule doesn't apply for conditional fee arrangements, so he didn't have to get involved, he chose to. And when Hammer was involved, what kind of things was he saying to the lawyers?
What was he saying to them in terms of strategy? So he gives them advice on the press conference. Behind the scenes. He doesn't attend, but they kind of say to him, this is what we're planning on saying.
This is what our press release is going to say. What do you think? And at one point he encourages Martin Day to go further. And then from the emails we've got hold of, you can see that between them, Martin Day and Phil Scheiner, the other lawyer, they agree, okay, let's up the ante.
And so that's how they interpret his advice. And then they put something extra in the press release which does go further than before. And what was that? Well, they basically insert into the press release a line that says, the survivors allege that civilians were executed.
Right. And that it was effectively a massacre. And so at the press conference, this causes an unbelievable stir, as you can imagine, and it does sort of help contribute to push the government into a public inquiry. I know we've already discussed what money Lloyd's made from this, but what kind of deal did Herma have in relation to this case?
He was on a conditional fee arrangement, which means he stood to not be paid during the case, but if it was successful, he would have got a lot of money at the end. And potentially we've looked at some of the emails going back and forth. It certainly would have been hundreds of thousands that the claimant would have received, if not maybe multi millions. And of course, Herma would have got a percentage of that.
He bills his hours at the standard of whatever it is, £275 an hour, I think it is. But this conditional free arrangement allows us, in the event of success, he gets an uplift of 50% so he can double his fee, basically, of successful so, to recap, British soldiers accused of something, lawyers step in to pick up the case. Herma is involved and gives advice. And the advice he gives leads to them actually raising the rhetorical tone of the accusation.
And in theory, if they had succeeded, Herma could have made hundreds of thousands of pounds out of the case. It's worth splitting those things up a little bit. So there's a press conference at the beginning in 2008. That's where he gives them advice on what they're going to say.
They decide to up the ante, and then around the same time, the civil claim starts. So it's a separate thing to the press conference. Herma is involved with both, so he's also advising them on the civil claims. And what we can see in the emails is that there's a point in time where the mod makes an offer to these claimants and the claimants want more money.
And Herma is involved in that process. He's advising, well, how much money can you get? What should you accept? Right.
So he is helping them potentially get more money. So in the event the mod withdraws his office. Well, now, to repeat the context that you establish, Kamala, you might have come across this case and thought, well, maybe they're telling the truth. Yeah.
In which case it is worth pursuing and we should say that this is what lawyers do. But what did the 2014 government inquiry, which cost 31 million pounds, find? Well, that the Iraqi claimants who made these claims were just lying. Right.
It was, quote, deliberate lies and it was a pack of lies. They were terrorists. Yeah, they were terrorists. They were past members of the Mardi Army.
They were insurgents. They were the ones trying to kill the British. And the British fought back. That's it.
Yes, the British. British soldiers, in defending themselves against terrorist shocks, we might conclude, okay, they tried, but they failed. But what do we know about Phil Shiner now? Well, it all kind of went quite badly wrong for Phil Shiner.
He was referred to the solicitor's regulator and he was found to have breach the rules. And it's a little bit complicated regarding the press conference, but also his behaviour in terms of his professional standards as a solicitor. But from there, there was also a complaint to the police, and a couple of years ago, he pleaded guilty to fraud charges. Bill Shiner was the driving force behind almost all complaints against British troops in Iraq.
And he lodged, in the end, something like 3,000 complaints of criminal behavior against British troops in Iraq over the years, of which these were the most egregious. The ones we're dealing with now that Lord Herman got himself involved in. So China's imprint all over the sort of the shadow they put on British troops is just shocking. Right.
And the tide of public opinion because of some of those historic cases, there were clearly some issues, to say the least. In very few cases, it became this enormous tidal wave of British troops just behaved terrible in Iraq. Just wasn't the case. They just weren't true.
Now, the things he did were things like touting for business in Iraq. He actually went sort of door knocking. Not him personally, but he had agents on the ground looking for cases and terrific encouragement on Iraq to say, yeah, I was detained, mistreated and all restaurants. Have you been tortured?
Who's like Better call Saul, except it's better call Phil. It's Better call Phil. Waste of money. This destroys the lives of the British soldiers who were falsely killed.
I've done many, many stories over the years of how awful the repercussions of soldiers suffering PTSD and all the rest of it, having bravely fought out there in this terrible war that they never really probably won, having won Gantry medals from the Queen in many cases. But to suddenly find yourself at the end of a police investigation, at this end, or a military police investigation or whatever it might be in your name, Drax with them. In the case of our Swede, it went to public inquiry, this thing that went on for years, a huge, huge cost. The toll was enormous.
What the good thing about the public inquiry was it did get to the truth. It got to the heart of matter. And in a way, one should be grateful that we got to where we got to. But, you know the idea we should have had a public inquiry.
No other country does it like this. It's just jaw dropping. We know what happened to China. Post inquiry.
What did Lord Hermer then do? Well, Richard Herman just carries on building his practice. No one knew about his involvement in this. And tell the story we have just done.
Yes, well, we knew he'd written a forward to a Phil Shiner book, but these documents lay bare. He was very closely involved and they expose his involvement in these civil cases, which we didn't know before. Right. So we knew that he had worked with Phil Shiner, we knew that he had worked with Martin Day.
That was in the public name. But this is the first time that his role in these civil claims has ever been revealed. And of course, the emails show his substantial movement. That's his own word.
So we read his witness statement that was submitted and he talks about how he was substantially involved in these civil claims. So what does it then say? I mean, can you tell us anything more about the close relationship between Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer? Because obviously, many years on, we now are in a situation where, to put it very bluntly, somebody who's been complicit in the attempted persecution of British troops against allegations by Iraqis that proved to be demonstrably false has now become the top sort of legal politician in the land.
That's why this matters. You know, this is historic and it was shocking at the time and it's shocking now. But the reason this really matters is that Richard Hermer, very close friends, close colleague of Keir Starmer, on whom he's worked on many human rights cases back in the 2000s before Keir Starmer's made DPP. Okay, so professionally close, but also personally close while they're at Doughty Street Chambers together.
I don't think there's much of a paper to put between. Fair enough. When Keir Summer wins his land side lecture, victory in 2024. Boy, has time passed.
Yes. And what happened to 72? It's been terrific. You can't fault this living room.
In that period, on day one, he says, I need an Attorney General. I know Richard well. He's not an mp. I'll make him Lord Hermer.
So I'm now taking this human rights lawyer who's been very much involved in what's called the witch hunt against British troops back in the 2000s, is now made Attorney General. He's now Lord Hamer. Terrific. One of the roles of Attorney General is to say to the Prime Minister and to the Government, what are the grounds for going to war?
What are the legal grounds for going to war? And we know that Lord Hermer believes that British troops on the Ministry of Defence all those years ago were being sued on a regular basis for groundbreaking legal work that he was doing and often with Keir Starmer in the early days, before he was DPP in making the Human Rights act apply in Iraq. Now, it's quite complicated, but what it means is that laws governing how you can behave in the UK do things like detention of prisoners suddenly apply in a war zone, in a conflict zone in southern Iraq that the British are in charge of. And that's jaw dropping.
That is also just mad how you cannot fight and win a war applying the same standards in Britain as you would in the war zone. Everyone in Iraq in those days had a gun. That's at its simplest in this case, there are a load of members of the Mardi army in a field back at the Danube, going back to the Battle of Danyboy in 2004, who ambushed British troops. We took captives and we detained them.
They sued. Lord Herma was advising them to sue the Ministry of Defence for their captivity. After the Battle of Danube, they made the most egregious claims of torture, executions and so on and so forth. And that case rumbled for years and Herma was the lead counsel on it.
You can't get away from that. He can't get away from that. And he's jumping up and down, very angry with. What is he saying?
Out of interest, let's have some balance here. What's his rebuttal to your story, Claire? So he's saying quite a lot of things. He's condemning Phil Shiner.
Fine. He's saying. Saying that when we've raised questions about credibility, saying, look, surely you knew these detainees were lying. There were all this stuff about how someone was supposed to be in the field carrying yogurt, how they were farmers or laborers.
Come on. It's kind of getting a bit silly. He's saying at no point did it kind of reach the threshold where he should have dropped the case. It wasn't proven they were liars until the inquiry found that in 2014.
And I think our position is, Come on, Lord Hammer, you've just got some questions to answer here. Is it possible for you to be Attorney General when you've been doing all this work previously? And I think that's a key point. It goes a bit further than that, actually, because at the heart of his case, actually, it doesn't matter who's in the field, whether they are farmers, labourers or Mardi army people shooting at the British, because once they're in detention, human rights laws apply.
Right. And so what he actually says at one point in the various emails we have is he actually says to regulators investigating the behaviour, various lawyers in this. I don't care if my client is a saint or a member of Al Qaeda or a member of the Mahdi army. It makes no difference to me.
They still have a claim under human rights laws. That's extraordinary. This is so important and interesting because it gives an insight into the philosophy of some of the people working in this government. Right.
And it's not just a question of how a war is fought, but should a war be fought? Because we've just been through a conflict, Iran, where the Prime Minister kept saying, I have made the judgment that I was uncertain legally that we could join in the conflict. He kept Referring back to that kind of legal advice, is there a case for saying this is a government which might take the view that if any kind of war leads to a situation in which people's human rights are violated or any kind of war has to have absolutely every country in the world kicking off on it as okay to do, this is a government which is almost handicapped in its defence policy by lawyers. I think it raises real questions about their judgment and Lord Hammer's judgment.
You know, we can read some of his comments that he thought this case was still viable even though they were proven to be fighters. And we might agree, we might disagree with what he's saying, but surely it speaks to whether his judgment can be relied upon, whether he's the right person to do that job. At one point he sent the witness statements of the Iraqis making these, as we now know, false accusations and some of the documents in the case. And his reply in an email is, this is great.
This is why I wanted to become a lawyer. Yes, there you go. And so, yes, you're absolutely right. His philosophy, you would think, is of that sort of left wing, liberal, let's not fight wars, Ben.
Yeah. And it may well be he will argue I will apply the law as I see it and that's right to do. And he may well say, in case of Iran, that's absolutely right. But Britain's enemies will think, I suspect, we've got a soft touch.
Yes. I think that's going to be an interesting question if you're Russia or whatever sort of rubbing your hand, what are you saying? But also, I think the electorate may justifiably ask themselves if the Attorney General is a man who has prosecuted or attempted to prosecute British soldiers. They may rightly ask, whose side are you on?
But this is St George's Day and Labour MPs are making a big show of showing their flags and how patriotic they are. And Kiyi Sama's rebranded Labour began by, as he said, I'm always standing in front of the Union Jack. Yes. I'd argue the least patriotic thing you can do is legally hound British soldiers.
Yes. Especially if they're accused by liars. Yeah. So Lance called Brian.
What do I expect to amazing man who won the Military Cross at the Battle of Dandy Boy. And then we'll see all those troops found themselves under allegations of before crimes all made up, said to me, you know, the one thing I expect was the British government put a ring of steel around us. It's a protect us. And now I discover that the current Attorney General is one of the people who was bringing these allegations against me.
And he sticks to the summit and says Lord Hermer should not be Attorney General. It's really straightforward because it's one thing to look at this kind of lawfare being waged by fruit injectors, but quite another to observe what's gone on and then see one of them promoted to the highest office in the land. Look, I think when Richard Herman was doing all these cases, he can't have imagined he'd one day be Attorney General. No one could have done so.
That's fine. He's a human rights lawyer bringing cases they got out of control, all those cases run out of control. He never ran for election. He's not where he is because he put his record, his character to the British people and say, who?
Like that kind of person. This is. John is about democracy again, isn't it? Yes.
In the same way that Lord Mandelson. He's not elected, he's just normally a good career to put out doing that job, but instead Kiyosama sends the friend of someone to do it. Likewise, he has promoted a friend to this very important job by giving him a seat in the laws, which is perhaps the most unsocialist means of promoting someone you've imagined. Similarly to Mandelson, people with the knowledge that has now been exposed by this great Telegraph exclusive are saying, is he really the right person for this job?
Robert, Claire, great work. You've got more to come later, I believe. So we should rise daily tears to keep a close eye on the Telegraph website, but thank you very much indeed. Thank you for having us.
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