January 19, 2025 - 8:00am

There are few more vivid illustrations of the ongoing “vibe shift” away from the post-Cold War norms of Western governance and towards the Right-wing restoration of national sovereignty than the 2001 romcom Bridget Jones’s Diary. In the film, the main love interest — the idealised image of the perfect man, summoned up from the depths of the New Labour unconscious — is a human rights lawyer, who may or may not be based on Keir Starmer. Indeed, in a crucial plot point, said love interest secures the affection of the heroine and the adulation of the tabloid press for halting the Government’s removal of an asylum seeker. As these narratives go, Starmer must ruefully observe, it’s a relic of a vanished world.

The global human rights industry was largely a product of America’s unipolar moment, holding out the prospect of an international enforcer of liberal values, the closest to a global hegemon that history has yet witnessed. Having convinced themselves that history had ended, with themselves the victors, buoyant liberals, as the political theorist Patrick Hayden observed, saw the creation of an international human rights regime as a means of “replacing the realist national interest-based security paradigm with a cosmopolitan, person-based paradigm”. Within Britain, there was no more zealous enforcer of either American power or human rights legislation than New Labour, and the legal supergroup Matrix Chambers it spawned — of which Starmer, Cherie Blair, Philippe Sands and Attorney General Lord Hermer are all alumni.

Yet Britain’s continued rule by the Matrix Chambers coterie does not serve it well in this actually-existing era of international competition. In October, the Attorney General condemned politicians “who appeal to the ‘will of the people’” rather than adhere to the perfect and unchangeable abstractions of international law. But the latest revelations of Hermer’s pursuit of war crimes charges against the SAS, following his long history of acting against the interests of the British state and people, pose a problem for Starmer. A country increasingly sick of activist lawyers will not long consent to be ruled by them, nor to pay heavily to advance their pet projects, as with the self-defeating Chagos Islands surrender, a personal Sands crusade. Starmer is learning, admittedly late in life, that in a democracy the popular will counts for more than the approval of fellow human rights lawyers.

For Sands and Hermer, both self-avowed devotees of the mythical “1945 order”, the world is divided between righteous advocates of the rule of law and “populists” who seek to overturn it. It is a version of cosmopolitanism honed into an uncompromising, even fundamentalist vision. Above mere nation-states shines down the perfect and immutable Law, towards which frail, misguided, even wicked human societies, swayed by the currents of mere democracy and the temptations of national self-interest, must be shepherded, whether they will it or not. If it weakens individual statehood — “that most artificial and fake of constructs”, as Sands once put it — so much the better: only thus can utopia be reached. Unlike America itself, which along with Russia and China has always placed its sovereign interests above treaties and tribunals, we remain ruled by zealots, highly-educated naïfs who affirm that international law exists as an objective reality in itself, rather than a political construct derived from state power and the will to wield it.

Starmer’s self-inflicted woes are the result of this intensely religious vision meeting political reality. Fortunately for the British taxpayer, Donald Trump is likely to override the Chagos Islands deal and the “relentless legal maximalism of the UK Government”, giving Starmer a valuable if painful lesson on what international law is, and what it is not.

At the very least, the Prime Minister has learned that Britain’s actual sovereignty over the Chagos Islands is a legal fiction, subject to Washington’s veto. Just as the Matrix Chambers worldview is an unwitting product of American global hegemony, so is its negation the product of its retreat: in preparing to defend itself from challengers, America must wield power over its empire all the more firmly, including disabusing our provincial governors of their cosmopolitan illusions. One can make a lucrative career, as Starmer’s friends have, of sawing away the props of a nation’s sovereign power. The result, however, is not enlightened global arbitration but instead domination by stronger, fully sovereign nations.

In just the same way, the end of the Gaza war has come not from the Biden administration’s lawyerly hand-wringing but as an order from the incoming emperor to restore peace in an outlying corner of the empire. Appeals to international law had no impact on Benjamin Netanyahu’s behaviour, but reasserting the raw facts of relative power appears to have ended the war in an instant. States have always been governed and interacted with each other according to their national interests; those who impede these interests are swept aside. In a world of renewed global competition, it is only Starmer and his circle who still inhabit a world as benignly make-believe as Richard Curtis’s vanished Nineties London.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

arisroussinos