A few years back, when he was merely a high-profile barrister, Richard Hermer gave a newspaper interview that included a quick-fire question: if given power, which one law would he choose to enact?

‘The European Union (Please Can We Come Back?) Act 2020,’ was his reply.

Such views were, at the time, almost universally shared in the elite London circles in which Hermer then moved. And they remain common currency in the Government of his old chum Sir Keir Starmer, in which he now serves.

The 56-year-old Lord Hermer, as he is now known, was appointed Attorney General days after Labour’s election victory.

As chief legal adviser to a Prime Minister who is himself, in the words of my colleague Richard Littlejohn, ‘a complete and utter lawyer’, the bespectacled Welshman is one of the most powerful men in Britain.

He and Sir Keir go way back. They met as barristers at the fashionable Left-wing chambers Doughty Street, where Hermer was the future PM’s junior on a string of ‘human rights’ cases.

When Hermer became a QC, in 2009, Sir Keir gave the speech at the drinks reception. And in 2019, when he stood for the Labour leadership, Hermer gave £5,000 to his campaign funds.

The 56-year-old Lord Hermer, as he is now known, was appointed Attorney General days after Labour’s election victory

Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) met Hermer when the pair were barristers at the fashionable Left-wing chambers Doughty Street, where Hermer was the future PM’s junior on a string of ‘human rights’ cases

Later, with Sir Keir’s party in opposition, Hermer fronted a weekly podcast released by Matrix Chambers, the equally trendy set founded by Cherie Blair (to which he’d moved in 2012).

Here, he missed few opportunities to lob criticism at the Tory government, and in particular its ‘dehumanising’ efforts to stop illegal immigration, reserving particular scorn for Boris Johnson.

‘No Prime Minister in modern times has come anywhere close to Johnson as a danger to the rule of law and to our constitutional norms,’ was how he once put it.

Lord Hermer is, in other words, an Attorney General who wears his Left-wing principles on his sleeve. And some might say there is nothing so very unusual about that.

Indeed, the vast majority of his modern predecessors were elected MPs. However the baggage he brings to this ancient office has turned out to be professional as well as political.

Take the controversy that erupted this week when it emerged that Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Fein, is in line for a taxpayer-funded compensation after the Starmer administration decided to repeal a law that has blocked him from claiming damages for being interned in the 1970s.

Awkwardly, the same Gerry Adams just happens to have been a recent client of Lord Hermer, who represented him in November 2023, when he was sued by victims of the IRA.

At a High Court hearing, Lord Hermer had argued that parts of the case ought to be struck out on the grounds of ‘procedural breaches and irregularities’, along with the contention that the Provisional IRA was an ‘unincorporated association’ which was ‘incapable in law of being sued’.

Lord Hermer is an Attorney General who wears his Left-wing principles on his sleeve

Gerry Adams (pictured) is a recent client of Lord Hermer, who represented him in November 2023, when he was sued by victims of the IRA

(The argument was partially successful, but the court ruled that the victims – who are seeking symbolic damages of £1 – can nonetheless sue Adams in a personal capacity, and the case is expected to be heard in 2026.)

Lord Hermer earned a reported £30,000 representing Mr Adams. Now, just over a year later, he’s Attorney General in a Government which has taken a highly contentious decision likely to materially benefit the Sinn Fein grandee.

Despite this state of affairs, Downing Street is refusing to say what role, if any, he had in reaching that very decision.

And appearing before MPs this week, Lord Hermer also refused to say whether he’d advised Sir Keir on the matter, saying he ‘can’t remember’.

Citing the convention that holders of his office should never comment on former clients, Lord Hermer also refused to disclose whether he now stands to make more money from the whole thing via a ‘conditional fee’ agreement whereby he might receive a success-payment from Adams.

To critics, that seems a bit rum. Yet this is far from the only political controversy that he is now at the centre of. Consider the ongoing ructions over the future of the Chagos Islands, a British sovereign territory which Sir Keir is seeking to hand over to Mauritius, a country 1,300 miles away which counts itself as one of China’s strategic allies.

The deal is likely to cost UK taxpayers about £9 billion and Lord Hermer’s paw prints are all over it. Not least given his personal view (recently expressed on his Matrix Chambers podcast) that ‘one can’t begin to understand the British colonial project without appreciation for how racism impacted almost every element of it’.

In a speech last October, the Attorney General defended it as ‘honouring our obligations under international law,’ suggesting that Britain somehow has an ‘obligation’ to surrender the island – even though critics point out that an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the matter was not legally binding.

Lord Hermer’s paw prints are all over the deal for The Chagos Islands (pictured), a British sovereign territory which Sir Keir is seeking to hand over to Mauritius

Awkwardly, one group which now stands to benefit from the whole thing are his old mates at Matrix Chambers, who just so happen to have been representing the Mauritians.

Their founder Phillipe Sands KC, who is heavily involved in the matter, has dubbed Britain’s decision to cede the islands ‘a special day for Mauritius, for Chagossians, for international law’.

Sands is at the centre of what one might call a ‘Starmerian nexus’. He’s a close personal friend of Sir Keir (they watch Arsenal together) and a longstanding chum of Lord Hermer, whose name has over the years appeared alongside his on a string of public letters making Left-leaning contributions to a string of topical debates.

The most recent, and perhaps most contentious, was a letter to the Financial Times by eminent Jewish lawyers including Lord Hermer which was published in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. It stated: ‘There are some aspects of Israel’s response that already cause significant concern’.

We’ll come back to the thorny topic of Israel later. But first we should stress that Lord Hermer has, during his first six months in office, been a key player in all kinds of high-profile news events.

After July’s Southport riots, which were sparked by the fatal stabbing of three girls at a holiday club, he advised the Government that it would be lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred, resulting in some contentious prison sentences.

Meanwhile in October, it emerged that Lord Hermer had intervened after the Metropolitan police refused to provide the singer Taylor Swift with an escort to Wembley Stadium, where she was playing a series of concerts attended by VIPs.

He told the force that providing the escort would be legal. At least five Cabinet Ministers, including the Prime Minister, had been given free tickets to the gigs.

After July’s Southport riots (pictured), Hermer advised the Government that it would be lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred, resulting in some contentious prison sentences

In October, it emerged that Lord Hermer had intervened after the Metropolitan police refused to provide the singer Taylor Swift (pictured) with an escort to Wembley Stadium

The coming months are likely to throw up yet more tricky situations. The Government will, for one thing, be required at some point to respond to the outcome of a Ministry of Defence inquiry into claims that special forces carried out unlawful killings in Afghanistan.

One might argue that Lord Hermer has a dog in this fight: he previously represented seven Afghan families who claim relatives were victims of such incidents, and in October 2023 told the inquiry that ‘members of the SAS were applying a practice of unlawfully killing Afghan civilians’ and that there was evidence of ‘a campaign of murder’.

Now he may end up finding himself required to offer impartial advice to His Majesty’s Government regarding prosecutions that could stem from the inquiry (should they be brought in civilian courts) along with the issue of how his former clients ought to be compensated.

It’s what lawyers might call a tricky circle to square. Then there is the case of Shamima Begum, the schoolgirl who left the UK in 2015 to join Isis in Syria but has been trying for several years to return to the UK. Lord Hermer acted for her at the Supreme Court in 2020, arguing that she faces ‘unfairness upon unfairness’ in her battle to have her citizenship restored.

‘She is no longer entitled to be protected by the state, and risks exposure to irregular treatment, such as being targeted by drone strikes, the consequences of which may be fatal,’ he said.

Again, he may soon find himself required to impartially advise the Government about this fraught affair, which is of such great importance to his former client.

Should Brexit rear its ugly head, he’ll be in a similarly tricky position. For not only is Lord Hermer a proud Remainiac, but he turns out to have twice acted for clients of a similar persuasion.

In 2019, he was the chosen barrister of pressure group Liberty, which took Boris Johnson to court in an effort to prevent him breaching the Benn Act, a piece of legislation designed by Sir Keir’s Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn, which required the PM to delay Britain’s departure from the EU if he couldn’t reach an exit deal by a certain date.

In October 2023, Hermer told a Ministry of Defence inquiry that ‘members of the SAS were applying a practice of unlawfully killing Afghan civilians’ and that there was evidence of ‘a campaign of murder’ (file image)

Lord Hermer acted for Shamima Begum (pictured) at the Supreme Court in 2020, arguing that she faces ‘unfairness upon unfairness’ in her battle to have her citizenship restored

And in 2021, he represented a group of MPs who went to the High Court seeking to force the Johnson government to order a public inquiry into claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

At this point, it should of course be stressed that barristers do not always agree with their clients. In fact, a longstanding principle of British law, known as the ‘cab rank’ rule, dictates that they cannot cherry pick the people they represent and must usually take on cases that are handed to them.

Their role is merely to act as an advocate, advancing a particular line of argument in court.

We should not, therefore, infer that the Attorney General’s previous work for the likes of Ms Begum and Gerry Adams necessarily makes him a supporter of them, or their cause.

His views can only be gauged by looking at opinions he’s expressed outside court, for example on Brexit, or the legacy of the British Empire – on which front he once declared that in order to buy into the notion of… ‘British exceptionalism, you can only do that if you wilfully ignore history.’

Perhaps the most topical, and certainly the most fraught area in which Lord Hermer now plays a key role involves the Government’s policy towards Israel.

This is a particularly tough subject for him given his heritage: he hails from a family of Jewish businessmen which includes cousin Matt Hermer, an impresario who founded the Kensington nightclub Boujis, which became famous in the Noughties as a hangout of Princes William and Harry.

Born and raised in Cardiff, where he attended the local high school before studying politics and modern history at Manchester, he has always been a prominent member of the community and first ventured into public life as a representative of the Union of Jewish students, who sought election to the NUS executive in the early 1990s.

Hermer hails from a family of Jewish businessmen which includes cousin Matt Hermer (pictured with his wife Marissa in 2018), an impresario who founded the Kensington nightclub Boujis

After eschewing radical politics for the law – to the relief, he once said, of his parents Ian and Judith – he was called to the bar in 1993 and moved to London to work at Doughty Street, the human rights chambers Sir Keir had helped set up in the early 1990s, which then prospered under the Blair government.

He and his wife Caren Gestetner, a former solicitor at Mishcon de Reya who left to study ‘gender, policy and inequalities’ at LSE (and now runs a charity which carries out ‘gender audits’ of primary schools designed to combat sexism), attend a synagogue in north-west London.

It’s a stone’s throw from the £3 million detached home in the area, where they have raised two daughters.

In the Jewish community, Lord Hermer’s sometimes quite punchy criticism of Israel has caused significant tension.

In 2023, he advised Labour to oppose a bill by Michael Gove designed to prevent public bodies from boycotting Israel, saying it would have ‘a profoundly detrimental impact on the UK’s ability to protect and promote human rights overseas’.

The Jewish Chronicle newspaper accused him of taking a ‘political’ position on the Middle East, to which he responded, writing: ‘Your questions infer that my analysis was somehow influenced by some form of malign intent towards Israel. It was not.’

He added: ‘I have dear family members currently serving in the IDF. I also happen to believe (again completely unconnected to my professional analysis on the Bill) that the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank is unlawful, deeply damaging to the interests of Israel and wholly contrary to the values of tikkun olam [repairing the world] that I grew up with and continue to guide me.’

Then came that public letter following the October 7 attacks, in which he and other signatories stated: ‘The Israeli government is led by a coalition of far-Right parties whose common goal is the formal annexation of the West Bank and the extension of a one-state reality of unequal rights over more than five million Palestinians under occupation.’

In the Jewish community, Lord Hermer’s sometimes quite punchy criticism of Israel has caused significant tension

Speaking to LBC shortly afterwards, Lord Hermer said it was ‘almost impossible to conceive of how a siege that deprives a civilian population of the basic necessities of life… is in compliance with international law.’

His subsequent appointment by Sir Keir – which was, by the way, a huge snub to his former shadow Attorney General Dame Emily Thornberry – was therefore subject to significant criticism from some Jewish groups.

‘Richard Hermer KC provided a seriously inaccurate opinion to the Labour Party on the last government’s Bill to ban Boycott Divestment and Sanctions by public authorities and refused to correct it, even after I pointed out the inaccuracies,’ commented the chief executive of Jewish lawyers for Israel, Jonathan Turner KC.

‘I view his appointment with great misgiving.’

The fire was fuelled via one of his first official acts, after taking office, when he was intimately involved in Britain’s decision to drop objections to the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli officials, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by the International Criminal Court.

In September, meanwhile, he played a key role in a decision by the UK to suspend export permits for some weapons to Israel.

That sparked criticism from, among others, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which said the Labour Government’s decisions had ‘all been hostile toward the Jewish state’, describing Lord Hermer as a figure ‘whose views on Israel were well-known before he was appointed’.

The putative ceasefire in Gaza will, perhaps, take some heat off this particular aspect of his day job. But other controversies will soon follow.

For few people seem to hold more cards, in Sir Keir Starmer’s Government of complete and utter lawyers, than Left-wing human rights barristers who hail from North London.