What Shami regards as right isn’t necessarily what is right

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book. She’s wearing a blindfold bearing the legend ‘On Liberty’, which seems to cast her in the role of Justice — blind, and all that. The title is the same as John Stuart Mill’s famous essay on the subject, which is, I’d say, unwise, as inviting comparisons. I did indeed go out to get JSM’s essay to read alongside Shami, and it wasn’t just the prose that left her standing.

This book is an account of her time at Liberty since she started there, the day before 9/11, with a bit of autobiography thrown in. It’s an uneasy combination because the personal stuff is minimal and chiefly to do with her work (she has a son, which gives her empathy for ‘my fellow mothers’ when she visits a crime-ridden estate) and the story of Liberty is an account of one campaign after another, enlivened by her own views.