“Downing Street's plan is now so desperate that they have decided to attack Keir Starmer, the former lawyer, for working as a lawyer, when he was a lawyer.”
The latest Tory smear campaign against Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has spectacularly backfired.
The Tory supporting Telegraph, has been digging into Starmer’s legal career, blaming him for being a lawyer and trying to pin the blame for what his clients did on him.
In a sign of just how desperate the Tories are, the Telegraph ran a headline of ‘Starmer helped free some of UK’s most dangerous prisoners’, highlighting in their piece the clients the Labour leader represented.
The desperate attempt to smear the Labour leader led to accusations that the Telegraph had descended into the ‘gutter press’.
Reacting to the story, LBC’s James O’Brien said on his show: “Downing Street’s plan is now so desperate that they have decided to attack Keir Starmer, the former lawyer, for working as a lawyer, when he was a lawyer.”
Professor Alan Lester posted on X: “The @Telegraph’s slide into the far right gutter continues. It has raked through decades-old legal cases in which Keir Starmer did his job to try to pin the blame for what his clients did on him.
“It even tries to suggest that acting as a barrister for defendants rather than prosecution means he is against the rule of law. Whatever I might think about Starmer, this kind of attack is dangerous for lawyers. You are not upholding the rule of law when you attack the way our justice system works.”
Another social media user wrote: “It seems to me, all @Telegraph has succeeded in doing is pointing out that Keir Starmer was good at being a criminal lawyer.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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