Kennedy's Call to Arms; Attack the Government Once Too Often About Its Retreat From Civil Liberties and You Could Find Yourself the Victim of a Mugabe-Style Slapdown. Yes, Helena Kennedy Qc Is in Trouble Again with the New Labour Whip's Office. Only This Time She's Ready to Hit Back

Summary

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FOR a woman who is about to be whipped, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC seems remarkably unfazed. The cap she is wearing today is that of chairman of the British Council which she is soon to give up after six exhilarating years hymning the joys of cultural diversity. The former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, will be her successor. The whipping, I hasten to make clear, will not involve any physical pain. She has been summoned by a government whip because of remarks she made about David Blunkett, the home secretary, whom, if one can believe the headline writers, she recently likened to Robert Mugabe.

"I didn't compare him to Mugabe," Kennedy pleads, as if winding up for the defence in a show trial. "What I was saying was that he seemed to have learned his jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe. The reason I say that is because principle doesn't matter. That's the thing about Mugabe. If he doesn't like what the judges say, he sacks the judges. He changes the law to suit himself - it's a bit like [former Lord Chancellor] Derry Irvine getting the boot. And so there's a sense in which it's about pragmatism rather than about principles. That was the allegory."

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Kennedy's Call to Arms; Attack the Government Once Too Often About Its Retreat From Civil Liberties and You Could Find Yourself the Victim of a Mugabe-Style Slapdown. Yes, Helena Kennedy Qc Is in Trouble Again with the New Labour Whip's Office. Only This Time She's Ready to Hit Back

Whether such a nuanced argument could convince a stony-faced whip is a moot point. Nor is Kennedy so naive as to believe she has a cat in hell's chance of making her case. This is not a government, as she has never ceased to point out, which encourages debate or dissent, let alone listens to a contrary point of view. Moreover, as she has discovered in the past, government whips deal in broad, crude brushstrokes. Not for them the subtle cut and thrust of the Inns of Court, where Kennedy usually struts her stuff.

Fiv...

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