Obiter was at a college reunion the other weekend, and it’s interesting how the years drop away with the help of a prosecco or 13, sitting on a sun-kissed lawn with a judge, a couple of doctors, musicians, a tech entrepreneur and a climate scientist.

Sir Keir Starmer may have to wait for a famously protected Friday evening to glance over his shoulder at the man he’s been.

Helpfully, the website Politics Home has saved him some time. Last October it got in touch with Helen Steel and David Morris, the environment and human rights activists sued for libel by McDonald’s, and assisted in their defence by Starmer, then a young Doughty Street barrister. He did it pro bono until the case reached the European Court of Human Rights.

‘He was great back then,’ Steel told Politics Home. ‘He helped us for free for a very, very long time… he was giving us advice behind the scenes, drafting pleadings for us, stuff like that.’ A good ‘socialist lawyer’, she’s noted elsewhere.

The judgment was not an outright win for either side – some of the claims in the ‘McLibel’ leaflets the pair had distributed were found to be true, but others were defamatory and they were also ordered to pay McDonald’s £40,000, though this was never enforced. The episode had already been a long drawn out PR disaster for the restaurateur.

Any thoughts on the Labour leader now? ‘I think him becoming a politician was a great loss for the legal world in the sense of human rights,’ Morris answered.

Is a reunion in prospect? Steel says: ‘I think his phone number has changed.’ From memory, a security precaution Boris Johnson spent a period shunning.

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