A good man in government

And how they tried to destroy him.

Attorney General Richard Hermer after his appointment to Cabinet. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street

This is the story of a good man in government. He believes in human rights, the rule of law and the need to fight populism. He is highly experienced, deeply respected and a genuine believer in the values he espouses. So it goes without saying that he has been branded a traitor to his country.

His name is Richard Hermer. He's the attorney general. There was a point a couple months back when he was the biggest story in Westminster. Conservative politicians insisted he had questions to answer over a series of scandals. Keir Starmer was forced to say he had full confidence in him. Longreads were published in the Sunday papers about how events reached this terrible nadir.

What did it all involve? Nothing at all. What scandal had they uncovered? None whatsoever. It was a great festival of vacuity. It proved nothing except for what happens to people who fight for liberal values in an era of populism.

We're seeing this story play out around the world. In France, Marine Le Pen is found guilty of misusing public funds and we're informed by seasoned commentators that we should let her run in elections and do it all over again at scale. In the US, Trump is now breaking the law on a near-hourly basis. His message to buy stocks two days ago would have been criminally investigated in any other era. His entire presence in the White House is an affront to the rule of law.

In Britain, we used to have the same problem.

For years, Conservative ministers demeaned, degraded and destroyed the rule of law. The Brexit process was riddled with moments in which Leave politicians threatened to take actions they knew to be illegal. When no-deal seemed like a possibility, they agitated for the government to effectively turn the legal structure off and on again, as if they were playing with an old computer. After we left the EU, they demanded that we erase thousands of retained EU laws despite having no idea what was in them. They tried to pass legislation which would break international law in a "specific and limited way". They agitated for a UK departure from the European Convention of Human Rights. They passed so many statutory instruments - ministerial legal edicts which have almost no parliamentary scrutiny - that the very concept of primary legislation started to lose all meaning. At one point during covid, they literally passed a law before publishing it, meaning that British citizens were subject to legal punishments for legislation they were unable to read. They attacked "leftie lawyers" and failed to stand up for the judiciary when the right-wing press branded them "enemies of the people".

Now Hermer is fighting to reestablish the rule of law. And he has therefore made himself some powerful enemies.

The attorney general's problems began when he gave a speech at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. It was a very good speech, which demonstrated the moral and political vision of the government in its clearest terms. It was precise in its diagnosis and its remedies.

"We face leaders who appeal to the 'will of the people' - as exclusively interpreted by them - as the only truly legitimate source of constitutional authority," Hermer said. "Their rhetoric conjures images of a conspiracy of 'elites' - an enemy that is hard to define, but invariably including the people and independent institutions who exercise the kind of checks and balances on executive power that are the essence of liberal democracy and the rule of law. Judges. Lawyers. A free press. NGOs. Parliament. The academy. An impartial and objective civil service."

It's unusual for British politicians to have the political and philosophical understanding to be able to give a speech like that. Attorney generals in particular don't normally talk this way. Starmer, who worked with Hermer in the 90s, must have been on board. He had clearly authorised him to do the work they both believed in, in a much more robust and outspoken way than the prime minister himself could afford.

Hermer began with new internal government guidance for assessing legal risk. It was a minor, highly orthodox and largely technical change. The result was a vicious right-wing backlash: from right-wing think tanks, right-wing journalists and right-wing politicians. A full spectrum assault.

Why such a big response to such a small endeavor? Because they knew: a return to the rule of law was a rejection of Brexit. It was a rejection of Rwanda. It was a rejection of the entire populist worldview. They understood, even if many liberals didn't, where the battle against populism was taking place. And they marshalled their forces accordingly.

There's a hidden-away army of lawyers in government. They work in the Government Legal Department, and number around 2,500. It's their job to give advice to ministers. So say someone wants to unlawfully prorogue parliament or set up a third-country asylum system in Rwanda, it's their job to say: 'Yes minister, I understand what you're trying to achieve, but our chances of winning a legal challenge would be minimal.'

In 2015, the then director-general of the Attorney General's Office, Jonathan Jones, wrote the guidelines for these lawyers. He's a principled and practical man who therefore wrote a principled and practical document. Public law barristers often reminisce about its clarity, which is a word they use when they are searching for the highest form of praise.

Then, in 2022, attorney general Suella Braverman rewrote the legal guidance. It was like someone had injected crystal meth into a clown's eyeballs, slapped them repeatedly around the face, thrown them into a children's ball pit and then demanded they write a detailed legal proposition.

Braverman decided that, according to her whimsical assessment of reality, ministers were being discouraged from pursuing policy because of legal advice. She therefore demanded that lawyers start their advice "with clarity that there is a sufficient legal basis for a decision or course of action" before "going on to explain clearly that it carried legal risk". In the haunted corridors of her mind, the intention of this mad bit of dribble was presumably to put the good news first - 'It's great minister! Let's go for it!' - and the bad news last - '...although I'm afraid it won't succeed in court'. Honestly it's hard to tell. She was overpromoted beyond the frontiers of reason.

Braverman also insisted that actions were lawful if they were unlikely to be challenged - a really quite imaginative understanding of legality - and removed all references to international law. It was a rather bland attack on the rule of law, but an effective one nonetheless. Its primary purpose was to weaken those who would defend it.

Last November, Hermer replaced that advice. He introduced guidance for policies with a very low chance of success - ones that could conceivably be put in front of a court but which the minister was very unlikely to win. In this scenario, he said, lawyers should advise that pursuing the policy is a last resort. He reintroduced the notion that actions could be unlawful even though they were not likely to be challenged and brought back references to international law.

Crucially, he also brought back the principle of the attorney general as a legal backstop. This is one of those areas of politics which normally escape people's notice but which holds liberal democracy together.

Before Braverman, attorney generals were usually impressive figures. You had people like Geoffrey Cox and Dominic Grieve for the Tories - solid people with solid minds, no matter what else you might think of them, who understood the job. Braverman obviously did not fit that category. She was inept, ignorant, utterly lacking in any identifiable talent, illiterate, and intent on corroding rather than supporting law. She now spends her time telling people that she is not really English because of the colour of her skin, wandering ever more deeply into the unmapped territories of the nativist landscape.

Until Braverman, people felt they could go to the attorney general with legal concerns. Parliamentary Counsel - the people who write the law - could raise concerns with the attorney general if they felt like they were being asked to do something dubious. Government lawyers could escalate to the attorney general if they felt their minister was pushing them towards something untoward. But once she was in place, the backstop ceased to exist. No-one was going to her to warn about unlawful actions. Most of the time, she was the person who first suggested them. This layer of legal safety therefore fell away. It was still technically in the guidance, but in practical reality it became irrelevant.

Hermer reintroduced it. His guidance said that government lawyers should issue their concerns up the chain - to their line manager and if necessary to the attorney general themself. He would listen to them. He would respect them. The changes he introduced were modest, but the spirit of them was not. He was reversing Braverman's changes in basic principle. He wanted to strengthen those who protected the rule of law, not weaken them.

The intellectual home of the anti-Hermer movement is Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank which does not provide details about its funding and is therefore, by any objective measure, a right fucking shady motherfucker. They published a paper on the change in the guidance. It was written in very serious and learned tones but would be considered comically ignorant by anyone with understanding of the subject. It won't surprise you to learn that the authors are big fans of the word "novel", which they use as a substitute for 'bad'. It is effectively a B-movie frightfest, in which they imagine that legislative Bolshevism is about to conquer the UK through the medium of orthodox legal guidance.

The idea that lawyers should advise ministers not to pursue a case that is highly likely to be defeated in court is considered a "highly novel development". The guidance as a whole is branded "constitutionally dubious". This is because "the role of government lawyers does not properly extend to instructing ministers that it would be inappropriate to proceed with a legally high risk policy". But of course no-one is "instructing" anyone. They're advising ministers, who are then free to go off and do whatever they want. This was the case before Hermer's guidance and it is the case after it.

Elsewhere, people have tried to attack Hermer by undermining his reputation. The argument is that Hermer's former clients from his time as a barrister could potentially benefit from government decision-making. This includes Gerry Adams, Sri Lankan asylum seekers and Shamima Begum - a Who's Who of right-wing hate figures.

No-one really believes that Hermer has done anything wrong here. There's no suggestion he has actually behaved in a corrupt way. Instead, they want to know all the times he has recused himself from a policy discussion because of his previous work, despite the fact that this information is typically kept confidential. Policy Exchange duly provided a new paper which made a laboured argument for why the information should be made public. They provide the intellectual ballast to the coming political attack.

It might be the single silliest mock-scandal we've ever seen. They're literally asking for information about all the times the attorney general did the right thing. But of course the real intention is to make lots of noise about all the bad people he has represented.

Lawyers represent bad people all the time, of course. You could just as well say a criminal barristers is an associate of thieves and murderers. But in press terms, it's a useful way to damage someone.

This then played out as it was intended to. The right-wing press launched its standard attack, of precisely the sort they once deployed against Starmer. "Attorney general who represented 'Al-Qaeda terrorist' raked in huge sum in legal aid fees in just four years," the Sun said recently. This is the routine formulation.

It's all then duly seized on by Conservatives in parliament, where the language about Hermer has become completely unhinged. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick asked where Hermer's "loyalties lie". Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel said he appeared to prioritise the "rights of illegal migrants, terrorists and criminals above the security and safety of our peoples". Deputy Reform leader Richard Tice called him a "clear and present danger" to the country. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch used a PMQs session to claim that it was "not clear" Hermer believed in his country.

These are all unforgivable slurs. If honour and decency still meant a damn thing these people would be held in disgrace for questioning someone's patriotism in order to score a cheap political point. But they don't, so they're not.

Then the Labour noises started. Lord Glasman, leader of the conservative Blue Labour faction, lashed out vindictively, saying Hermer "is the absolute archetype of an arrogant, progressive fool who thinks that law is a replacement for politics". This halfwit is the man held up as some kind of intellectual figurehead for the Labour right. He understands very little and what he does understand he misrepresents.

Once the red-on-red attacks started, journalists smelt blood. Pretty soon there were anonymous briefings against Hermer from within the government. "He is acting as a blocker on half the legislation emanating from departments across Whitehall," one official told the Sunday Times, "with the objections spanning everything from human rights concerns to a lack of parliamentary oversight."

This is obviously nonsense. Hermer is not a blocker. He simply wants ministers to respect the rule of law. That means writing legislation tightly rather than broadly, reducing the use of statutory instruments, making sure that policies comply with international law, and limiting the risk of court proceedings. In the long run, those policies will be in place quicker and last longer. But they will take a bit more time to write, which upsets the drama-addicts in Westminster.

The sudden noises from Labour introduced a pincer movement on government and opposition benches for Hermer to go, a dangerous sense of massed forces across the spectrum closing in on the attorney general. A week ago, for instance, Hermer spoke at the joint human rights committee. It's not the kind of thing journalists usually pay much attention to, but Politico's Westminster newsletter covered it like this: "Expect hacks to carefully watch every word said by Hermer, a constant lightning rod for criticism, for any lefty lawyer sentiment that could make news." The knives are out for him. And even if they do not cut him, they will necessarily limit his room to manoeuvre.

This is the same battle that we're seeing in France with Le Pen, or in the US with Trump. It's the one we saw in Poland under Law and Justice, or in Hungary under Fidesz. Wherever the populists go, they try to destroy the rule of law, because it is a restraint on their power.

Over and over again, the mainstream right sides with the populists in the assault. They defend those who try to destroy the rule of law and attack those who attempt to uphold it. This is what we're seeing today, in that ecosystem of right-wing think tanks, newspapers and politicians amassed against Hermer.

He's a good man in the government. And therefore they mean to destroy him.

Odds and Sods

I had a couple of pieces in the i paper this week - one looking at Musk’s collapsing relationship with Trump and another looking at the dwindling opportunities for Lords reform, as the Conservatives in the Chamber get up to all sorts of silly nonsense over hereditary peers. If we don’t secure broader reform in report stage of the current bill, the chances are probably lost for another 30 years. I was also on Times Radio last Friday talking about Trump’s tariffs, which basically just involves me holding my head in my hands and crying. Video below.

I’m playing the wonderfully titled Still Wakes the Deep at the moment: a game set on a Scottish oil platform during some kind of alien invasion. It’s a combination of The Thing, Annihilation and My Name is Joe. So, in other words, it is very unusual. Sci-fi is so often American-produced that it feels terribly strange, and honestly quite thrilling, to be running from an extraterrestrial while a bloke shouts: “Get away from it quickly ya wee cunt”. But that is absolutely the way they speak in this game. As someone who lives with two foul-mouthed Scottish women, I can confirm that we’ve never heard such absolutely 100% on point Scottish dialogue in a video game.

The game play - basically just desperately running and trying to escape - is unremarkable but competently delivered. That’s not what it’s about. It’s the atmosphere, the creeping dread, the sense of throbbing madness taking over the location. Honestly, it’s very striking how good it feels to see authentically represented British culture in a video game. It’s not alone either. A couple weeks back we had the release of the English-set Atomfall and on Wednesday the wonderful Thank Goodness You’re Here won the Bafta award for best British game.

We talk sometimes about representation - a dreary media-studies word which signals something profound and important in the human condition, our need to be reflected in the world around us. But the conversation about video games is far less sophisticated than it is for film. Where it does take place it is typically about race and gender. This is a different form, about your national social and cultural life. It feels like something quite meaningful is taking place, as Britain’s thriving video games industry is finally making itself felt in front of the digital camera as well as behind it. As the creators of Thank Goodness You’re Here said when they picked up their award:

“The central thesis of Thank Goodness is that the lives of the people in communities like ours are important and their stories are worth telling. And to the kids growing up in Barnsley and towns like it, he hope that in some small way this inspires you to tell your story, with your own voice and without compromise. If us two knobheads can do it, then you definitely can as well.”

See you next week.