RICHARD KAY: How Starmer’s closest legal buddy, who netted share of £8million from Chagos surrender, learned his courtroom tricks from spymaster Le Carre in his local pub

It is somehow difficult to imagine the costly and symbolic legal case that led to Britain’s ‘surrender’ of the Chagos Islands without the genuinely reassuring face of human rights lawyer Philippe Sands.

It was a smiling Sands wearing sunglasses as the Mauritian flag was raised provocatively over the Indian Ocean territory in 2022, and it was Sands who, a year later, smacked his lips and spoke of the joy of winning in an international court against his own country, which had, in his words, ‘humiliated them’. [in other words Britain] – completely.’

This humiliation, we now know, thanks to yesterday’s Daily Mail, was particularly lucrative for the 65-year-old lawyer, who can perhaps claim to be among the most famous, if not always the most famous, lawyers of his time. His previous position as Mauritius’ general counsel left him with a share of £8 million.

Even in the money-bag world of international jurisprudence, this is a significant financial reward. As a lawyer friend of mine says, ‘If you can achieve it, good job’.

Sands also obtained Mauritian citizenship; This is not a difficult situation and he was showered with civilian honors.

It was Sands who helped secure the controversial deal that would see Britain cede sovereignty over Chagos and also lease the strategically important Diego Garcia military base for 99 years at an eye-popping cost of £35bn.

The decision caused consternation, especially due to China’s bad influence in Mauritius’ affairs.

Britain will lease the strategically important Diego Garcia military base for 99 years at a staggering cost of £35 billion.

But while he has made it a personal crusade to pay Mauritius billions of pounds, which should come from our already depleted defense budget, to take the Chagos Islands from us, friends say Sands is ‘surprised’ by the uproar over his own payment, as if it were a pointless diversion.

As he haughtily told the House of Lords committee investigating the transfer of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands: ‘I was paid, as in almost all my cases. This was not done without compensation.’ Destroy the thought. Saving Britain from what he calls ‘the last colony’ seems to be an equally motivating factor.

But Professor Sands (who also holds an academic post at University College London) has made a name for himself as an enthusiast of a doctrine in which the notion of Britain’s national interest is subordinated to a vision of a world without borders governed by a panel of international lawyers.

It also enjoys its position among the triumvirate of lawyers at the top of the human rights tree. The others are Attorney General Lord Hermer and of course our Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. When Sir Keir stood to become Labor leader, Sands volunteered to work on Starmer’s campaign, describing him as ‘a great friend…generous, witty and empathetic’.

All three men are cut from the same ideological cloth and often spend time at Matrix Chambers, an influential firm of mostly Left-wing civil liberties lawyers that rarely misses an opportunity to burnish its reputation as a bastion of high-minded political correctness.

Sands was one of the founders of Matrix, which was founded in 2000 with important names including Cherie Booth; She must have complicated matters in the chamber’s tea room in 2005 when she accused her husband and then-prime minister Tony Blair of being war criminals for the invasion of Iraq.

It probably helped smooth things over in those days to be told that working on the Matrix was a noble calling rather than a job.

These days when he’s not teaching or writing – he won the UK’s top prize for non-fiction for East West Street, a book about genocide and crimes against humanity – Sands can be found in another painfully fashionable room, 11 King’s Bench Walk, where he is modestly billed as ‘very important, influential, immensely good and one of the great names of his age’.

But despite his undoubted genius, Sands is a man who divides opinion. When reports emerged that Chagos had been paid, he was branded a ‘mercenary’ by a Labor MP who accused him of ‘pretending to care about rights’.

Graham Stringer may be one of Starmer’s oddball crew of maverick MPs, but his words will have left him hurt. “Philippe Sands makes a fortune representing the interests of a foreign country,” said the senior MP, who has been in office since 1997.

‘Sands, the Prime Minister and the Attorney General believe that international courts dominated by judges from China are more important than our own democracy.

‘The sooner we take back control the better for the people of this country, not for the foreign courts where lawyers make millions.’

Stringer added that the lawyer ‘pretended to care about rights, but in reality he was trying to push back against the Chagossians, who do not want control of Mauritius.’

The MP’s timely intervention was a powerful reminder that one of the judges who ruled on Chagos at the International Court of Justice was a former Chinese government official who supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Dame Priti Patel was no less outspoken. ‘Like Starmer and everyone involved with the Chagos scandal, I believe Sands is happy to sell out our country,’ he said. ‘The Labor Party and their Leftist lawyer friends cannot be trusted.’

Sands volunteered to work on Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign when the now Prime Minister was running to become Labor leader, describing him as ‘a great friend…generous, witty and empathetic’.

While these interventions are important, they also show how controversial the decision to transfer sovereignty is. A name close to the negotiations describes Sands as ‘Starmer’s legal friend’ and says, ‘Decolonization was used as a justification for this move.’

He adds: ‘Of course not all Chagossians want their homeland to remain in British hands, but it seems the majority do. They are all eligible for British citizenship and recent months have seen an increase in Chagossians arriving in the UK. The Chagossian people are not Mauritians. They have a different history, beliefs and culture.

‘For them, Mauritius is as much a colonial power as the United Kingdom.’

Donald Trump’s seesaw view didn’t help much. Last month he described the decision as ‘a great deal of stupidity’ and later said the deal was ‘the best thing’ the prime minister could have done; perhaps he damned Starmer with faint praise.

But last night, just hours after the US State Department officially backed the deal, the President said Starmer had made an ‘extraordinary mistake’ by handing over the base.

All this seems a deeply indifferent matter for Sands, who has been described, unoriginally but languorously by the lawyers’ in-house Counsel magazine, as ‘a man for all seasons’ and who has been ‘pushed from obscurity into public intellectuality’.

This enthusiastic profile listed his numerous accomplishments as an author, podcaster, documentary producer, and expert on the global conference scene, as well as praising his legal acumen.

It may therefore be illuminating when Sands makes an interesting omission in his Who’s Who introduction.

While he describes himself as educated at Cambridge (Corpus Christi College), he makes no mention of his years at the fee-paying University College School in Hampstead, North London.

Leftists see such excellent schools as temples to Tory elitism, and it’s not hard to see why going to one might be a bit embarrassing for Sands.

Yet he was born into a middle-class family (he lost 80 relatives in the Holocaust), where his father was a dentist and his mother ran an antiquarian bookstore. And today he lives in the Hampstead area, where he grew up, with his New York-born wife, Natalia, also an attorney, and their three children.

In interviews, he cites a politics teacher who took the then 15-year-old student and his class to visit a coal mine in Yorkshire as the inspiration behind his fight for justice. And although he made his name by demolishing Blair’s claim that he had clear and undisputed legal support for the war against Saddam Hussein in 2003, he missed few opportunities to criticize the Conservative Party, particularly belittling its support for Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

Following Trump’s first election victory, Sands said: ‘I deeply disagree with Boris Johnson’s characterization of Trump as an honest, liberal man from New York.’ He added scandalously: ‘Boris Johnson would basically welcome the election of Adolf Hitler to that standard and you can imagine the words ‘We can work with him’, ‘It’ll be good for Britain’. For a liberal religious man, there is one issue that interests him more than any other: the consequences of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As he wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘I have been following the development of this terrible story since it began in the hours after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001.

‘I was in New York that day, less than a mile from the World Trade Center. I saw what was happening, smelled the acrid smoke that hung over the city for weeks, and witnessed the photos of missing family members plastered on hundreds of city walls.

‘To this day I can still feel the shock, the horror and the fear. Such a horrific act of killing cannot be allowed to go unrequited. However, it is now painfully obvious that the USA – with the support of England – will go down the wrong path in the coming years. First decisions taken after 9/11: Using Guantanamo to launch a ‘war on terror’ [the US base in Cuba] By establishing a permanent place of detention, resorting to torture, and invading Iraq, they left legacies that we will remember for years.’

The lawyer, who was called to the bar in 1985 and received silk in 2003, is naturally happiest with those who agree with his worldview.

One of them was the spy writer John le Carre, whom he befriended at his local bar. They shared suspicions about the Iraq war, and he befriended the lawyer, who asked him to review his drafts. ‘In every Le Carre novel there was always a terrible lawyer, and my job was to control this terrible situation,’ he said.

In turn, the author taught Sands how helpful clever editing can be in court. ‘There’s all kinds of tricks I stole from him,’ Sands said. ‘He understood that his readers were intelligent and liked to guess where he would take them.

‘It was the same for the judges. You want them to get to the outcome you want, but you make them feel like they’ve achieved that outcome.’

It will be interesting to see whether the same closure can be achieved in the Chagos sales.

Or whether this will remain an act of political and strategic vandalism that will live on in the memory long after this Government’s term expires.