Keir Starmer and the CPS: Labour's Achilles heel?

Keir Starmer's pre-parliamentary career as head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has come under renewed scrutiny over the prosecution of sub-postmasters during his tenure.

The CPS said on Wednesday that it brought 11 prosecutions against Post Office workers between 2008 and 2018 in connection with the controversial Horizon IT system. The Labour leader, as director of public prosecutions (DPP), headed the CPS from 2008 to 2013, during which time three of those cases were investigated, said The Telegraph.

Starmer's spokesperson had said that "no cases relating to Horizon were brought to his desk" during his time as DPP. Some Conservative MPs have spotted a possible attack line, with Brendan Clarke-Smith insisting that both Starmer and the CPS should "clarify whether any of these happened under his watch".

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The vast majority of the 700-plus prosecutions of sub-postmasters were brought by the Post Office itself, rather than the CPS.

'High-profile debacles'

In recent weeks Starmer has been subjected to several attacks from the right-leaning press over his time as a human rights lawyer, including when he defended the Islamist "rabble-rouser" Abu Qatada in his deportation proceedings in 2008, said Andrew Tettenborn on CapX. 

Another story from The Sun focused on Starmer's work between 2002 and 2014 fighting death penalty convictions in Commonwealth countries that retained it, with the paper accusing the Labour leader of befriending and supporting "sick criminals". 

The Conservative Party would "do well to avoid associating themselves too closely with attacks of this sort", said Tettenborn. Barristers, after all, are "bound by the so-called 'cab rank' rule, which means they cannot refuse to represent those they disapprove of, however strongly". 

The Post Office scandal, however, is one area where the Conservatives can "quietly twist" the knife, continued Tettenborn. Starmer may wish to argue that the debacles "were the fault of underlings – but it is the job of a senior manager to avoid such things as far as possible. Starmer didn't."

The Post Office scandal is not the only controversy Starmer oversaw, said the Daily Mail. Indeed, his stint in charge of the CPS was far from an "unvarnished triumph"; under Starmer, some 63,000 cases collapsed due to incompetence from CPS prosecutors, according to findings by Her Majesty's Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate in 2012. And a critical report from the Policy Exchange think tank found that £25 million a year was being wasted due to the number of cases being abandoned. 

The Labour leader, who has "set himself up as the champion of law and order", said the Mail, has "also presided over a string of high-profile debacles", many of which have "raised serious questions about his competence and judgment". 

'A past consistent with his political career'

The Conservatives are hoping that "the cumulative effect of these stories will recast Starmer in the public imagination as the 21st-century answer to Mr Chaffanbrass", the unscrupulous barrister from the novels of Anthony Trollope, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. 

But Labour strategists have been "planning their rebuttals to criticisms of his legal career since 2019" when they first met to plot Starmer's leadership bid. "Nothing has come out that we didn't already know about," one unnamed source told Maguire. "Voters know lawyers defend people accused of terrible things. And if Sunak wants to have a fight over how people spent the last decade, voters will get to hear about him betting against Britain in the City." 

The Labour leader's old cases "still tell an interesting, nuanced story", said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. And that is "of a strategic thinker, good at seeing a question from all sides, committed to social change but happy working towards it from within the establishment", she said. 

"Like it or not, it's consistent with his political career so far and thus a reasonable indicator of how he might govern."