Keir's ECHR showdown is last chance to see off Reform

David Lammy going to Strasbourg reminds me of David Cameron going to Brussels to try to get a deal that would allow Britain to stay in the EU.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Angela Merkel should have given him something he could sell to his voters as a genuine change, but she stuck to her purist EU principles – and, as a result, weakened the EU by losing the UK.

The justice secretary ought to have been saying privately to his fellow leaders at yesterday’s Council of Europe summit that if they don’t make real changes to the way the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) works, other people will. By “other people”, he will mean Nigel Farage and Jordan Bardella, the French presidential candidate of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. And by “changes”, he will mean countries such as Britain and France withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights altogether.

So far, Lammy and Keir Starmer have hinted at this argument rather than being explicit about it. The prime minister, in a joint newspaper article yesterday with Mette Frederiksen, the social democratic prime minister of Denmark, said: “Europe has faced big tests before and we have overcome them by acting together. Now we must do so again. Otherwise, the forces that seek to divide us will grow stronger.”