Baroness Meyer, CBE

Frenzied death chants as the Israeli flag is torn to pieces. Shouts of the Islamic declaration of faith just in case you weren't sure who they are. Thugs led by Shakeel Afsar and Akhmed Yakoob raged in Birmingham last night in a hideous spectacle. Will the big Labour... 1/5

The Lawyer, the Prime Minister and the Long Campaign to Give Chagos Away The most revealing fact about the Chagos deal is not the price tag, the treaty chaos, or the diplomatic humiliation. It is the timeline. Long before Keir Starmer entered Downing Street, the legal case for surrendering the islands was already being built by people he knew, worked with, and publicly called friends. For fourteen years, Professor Philippe Sands KC led the legal campaign for Mauritius in the international courts. From 2010 to 2024, his team was paid around £8 million to challenge British sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. That work helped produce the International Court of Justice advisory opinion that Starmer would later cite as the moral and legal justification for handing the territory away and committing Britain to a £35 billion lease of Diego Garcia. The intellectual scaffolding of the policy existed long before the policy itself. By the time Starmer acted, the argument had already been written. Sands is no distant academic. He is a long-standing friend of the Prime Minister, a fellow founder of Matrix Chambers, and a colleague of Attorney General Lord Hermer. He campaigned for Starmer's leadership, introduced him publicly at the Hay Festival, and later appeared before Parliament arguing that Britain had "illegally occupied" the islands. The same lawyer who helped build Mauritius' case then stepped into Westminster to advocate the political outcome his legal work had prepared. No envelopes, no secret meetings, no hidden transfers. Just a small, influential professional circle whose ideas travelled from courtroom to Cabinet room almost unchanged. This matters because it reframes the entire story. The Chagos deal did not emerge suddenly from a security review or a military assessment. It grew out of a long legal campaign grounded in the language of decolonisation and international law. Sands compared Britain's control of the islands to Russia's annexation of Crimea. He attended ceremonies where the Mauritian flag was raised over the territory. He spoke repeatedly about Britain's need to confront its colonial past. Those arguments were not fringe opinions whispered on the margins. They became the official language of government. Look at the continuity. A legal case is built over a decade. An advisory opinion is secured. A Prime Minister from the same professional milieu arrives in power. The government adopts the same framing, the same language, and the same conclusion. Sovereignty becomes a liability. International courts become moral referees. The handover of territory becomes a gesture of virtue rather than a question of strategy. The transition from advocacy to policy is seamless. This is why the story is so politically explosive. It does not prove corruption. It reveals something more unsettling. A governing class shaped by the same institutions, trained in the same legal philosophy, and convinced of the same moral narrative about Britain's place in the world. A network of lawyers, civil servants, academics and politicians who move through the same circles, cite the same authorities, and eventually govern according to the same assumptions they once argued in court. When critics talk about the "Blob", this is what they mean in real life. Not secret plots. Not shadowy pay-offs. A closed professional culture that regards sovereignty as an outdated problem and international approval as the ultimate prize. The Chagos decision begins to look less like a hard-headed act of statecraft and more like the moment a long-running legal campaign finally acquired political power. The question now is simple: national interest or a professional class that had already decided Britain should lose? When policy mirrors the arguments of a tight legal network, advocacy and governance blur. The Chagos deal came from somewhere familiar and it will not fade quietly. "Sands is no distant academic. He is a long-standing friend of the Prime Minister"