Shami Chakrabarti: five things you didn’t know
Shadow attorney general has been called ‘most dangerous woman in Britain’
Labour’s shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti is playing a key role in the Supreme Court hearing on whether the UK Government unlawfully prorogued Parliament.
Baroness Chakrabarti, 50, supported Gina Miller’s High Court challenge to Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament. That proved unsuccessful but a separate case brought in Scotland did rule against the Prime Minister.
“I think the Supreme Court is highly likely, or certainly, let’s put it this way, equally likely to follow in the direction of the highest court in Scotland,” Chakrabarti said in The Guardian today.
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The Labour peer has previously described the move by Johnson as “pretty scary stuff that’s testing our constitution and the British sense of fair play to the limit”, The Independent reports.
The hearing this week in the Supreme Court is the result of two legal challenges – one in England and Wales, and the other in Scotland – that had opposing outcomes. The High Court of England and Wales ruled in the Government’s favour, while the Scottish court ruled against, meaning the Supreme Court must decide which side to take. Chakrabarti is supporting the case against Johnson this week.
Years on from her stint as director of Liberty, the civil liberties advocacy organisation, Chakrabarti has become a prominent figure in British politics, entering the House of Lords in 2016 and chairing a wide-reaching inquiry on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party the same year.
But with the barrister set to play a key role in a potentially era-defining Supreme Court decision, what might the public not know about her?
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A born Londoner
Chakrabarti was born on 16 June 1969 at St Mary’s, “a maternity hospital near Hampstead Pond that no longer exists”, she told the BBC in 2008. She grew up in Harrow in northwest London with her Bengali immigrant parents.
“Perhaps I have a rose tinted view of things but I don’t think there was the fear there is today about letting even relatively young children play outside,” she said. “I walked to school and back by the age of nine or ten.”
She added: “So I do resent the idea that kids just hanging around and not doing anything wrong, is always a menace.”
Fan of To Kill a Mockingbird
The shadow attorney general wrote in The Guardian in 2015 that her favourite novel is Harper Lee’s iconic 1960 work To Kill a Mockingbird.
“The novel had a profound effect on me,” she wrote. “When I first read Mockingbird, as a teenager in 1980s north-west London, I was utterly transported – to small-town 1930s Alabama, a place of spittoons, shingles, scolds and smilax.”
She also compared the plight of the book’s characters - and the moral landscape it portrays - to the modern political world.
“What might Atticus, Scout or Tom say if they could see us now, lucky enough to live in a country where fundamental rights – to a fair trial, to not be tortured or enslaved – are enshrined into law, while others still struggle for them?”
Film debut
Next month, the British political thriller Official Secrets hits our cinemas, telling the true story of Katharine Gun, a former translator at GCHQ, the British intelligence agency. Gun rose to prominence after reportedly leaking top-secret information to the UK press about an American spy operation that was allegedly designed to push the UN Security Council into sanctioning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the film, Game of Thrones actress Indira Varma is set to play Baroness Shami Chakrabarti.
Branded the most dangerous woman in Britain
Chakrabarti made it on to a list of the 100 most powerful women in the UK in 2013, and in 2014 she was included in The Sunday Times’s “100 Makers of the 21st Century”.
But a less prestigious title was bestowed upon her in 2007, when radio presenter Jon Gaunt branded her “the most dangerous woman in Britain” in his column in The Sun.
Gaunt was fired by TalkSport the next year for calling a member of Redbridge Council a “Nazi”. After that, Chakrabarti wrote to his employer to protest his sacking, writing in The Guardian: “The key legal issue in Gaunt’s case is Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of expression... People have bashed this package, but everyone believes in it when they need protection - they are pretty universal, democratic values.”
When facetiously asked in 2016 who the most dangerous person in Britain was, she nominated David Cameron.
Controversial stance on schools
In 2016, Chakrabarti was forced to defend her decision to send her son to a private school despite criticising grammar schools because they enforce “segregation”.
Earlier the same year, she had said that she “absolutely” supported Labour’s opposition to Theresa May’s plans to open new grammar schools, claiming: “I have real concerns about grammar schools. In my lifetime, I have met too many people, including incredibly bright, successful people, who carry that scar of failing the 11-plus, and that segregation in schooling.”
However, when she was accused of “utter hypocrisy”, as the Daily Mail put it, for sending her son to £18,000-a-year Dulwich College, she responded: “I live a charmed and privileged life, much more now than I ever did when I was a child, but people on the left have often had charmed and privileged lives.”