Society
Goldsmith: let them eat cake
Published 20 March 2006
Observations on rights
That the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, should mount his high horse in defence of human rights is a development as surprising as it is welcome. He is, after all, the principal legal adviser to a government whose laws, in the blunt words of Amnesty International, have led directly to "serious abuses of human rights".
He is, too, the legal brain of a government which took all the way to the House of Lords its argument that evidence obtained under torture should be admissible in British courts. And of course it was he (and he insists on the point) who ruled that it was perfectly legal to invade Iraq at a time when everybody knew the UN Security Council would vote against it.
What a relief, then, to discover that there is a line it is not permissible to cross, that there is something in the field of human behaviour that makes His Lordship, in the words of his anonymous friends, "incredibly cross and very disappointed". So cross and so disappointed, in fact, that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was forced to make a humbling apology.
Who was the victim of this outrage? Jean Charles de Menezes? The Tipton Three? The Belmarsh dozens? Not quite. It was Lord Goldsmith himself. And no, he wasn't beaten about the testicles, kept for days with a bag on his head or dropped down a legal black hole in Cuba for four years. Here's what happened: a telephone conversation he had with Sir Ian Blair was recorded without his permission.
Even now the prisoners in Guantanamo must be passing around their British newspapers and sharing their horror at the headline: "Met chief taped phone call with top law officer." What is Britain coming to, they must be asking each other through the wire mesh, when the police can do such a thing to a cabinet minister?
OK, you're right, they are doing nothing of the kind and it's not funny at all.
It is wrong to tape phone calls without permission, but for an attorney general to make a fuss of such a thing at a time when he is helping to withhold the human rights of hundreds of people against whom the police can produce no evidence of wrongdoing shows an astonishing failure to connect his own world with the real one. He might just as well have leant out of his window and shouted: "Let them eat cake."
We shouldn't laugh; we should be incredibly cross and very disappointed.
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