Why schools should stay shut

Has the stock of any politician fallen more sharply, these past three or four years, than that of Shami Chakrabarti? As the leader of Liberty, and an almost weekly performer on the BBC’s Question Time, she was a respected purveyor of leftish sanctimony to the masses, a humourless voice of conscience and, I think, self-regard. The battles she fought then were at least, in the main, on the side of decency — and while we might have found her a little trying and even bumptious, there seemed no doubt that here was a young woman motivated by principle.

That notion was swiftly expunged when she accepted a brief from Jeremy Corbyn to whitewash anti-Semitism in the Labour party via an ‘independent inquiry’ headed by herself. She renounced any semblance of impartiality immediately by joining the Labour party, and produced a report which an awful lot of Jewish people felt lacked a little, you know, rigour.