Days like this, as I have observed before, it’s difficult to know where to start. How the hell did we end up with a Prime Minister and Attorney General who thought a proper way to further their careers would be by hounding British troops for alleged ‘war crimes’?

But that’s where we are with ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer and that other self-righteous north London yuman rites hack, Danger Mouse sidekick ‘Lord’ Hermer.

Both are up to their necks in the disgraceful witch-hunt against servicemen and women falsely accused of variously torturing, murdering or otherwise abusing ‘innocent’ civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

Starmer was instrumental in paving the way for bogus cases against soldiers and supporting the spiv law firms which pursued them, pocketing millions in legal aid along the way.

Hermer even praised the Left-wing lawyers involved, telling them they had done more good for society than the brave, decorated soldiers they had falsely accused. He encouraged them to press ahead with lawfare against the Ministry of Defence even though he admitted some of the claims may be ‘implausible’.

Whatever happened to the principle of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’?

Hermer also trashed the respected judge who concluded that after a public inquiry many of the claims were ‘deliberate lies’ motivated by ‘ingrained hostility’ towards the British Army.

Starmer, a complete and utter lawyer without a scintilla of shame or self-awareness, defended the solicitor who brought compensation claims on behalf of Iraqi ‘civilians’ who were in reality Iranian-sponsored combatants belonging to something called the ‘Mahdi army’. Of course he did.

Our now embattled PM declared that Martyn Day was a ‘man of utmost integrity and honesty’. (My own learned friends advise that Day was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing by a tribunal.)

But this worthless testimonial came from the politician whom we now know sent serial crook, liar and best friend of paedo Jeffrey Epstein Peter Mandelson to Washington, and Nonce Finder General Tom Watson, who falsely accused distinguished Tory politicians and war hero Lord Bramall of everything from murder to child abuse, to the House of Lords.

There’s 25,000 pages of emails and other assorted paper trails to damn both Starmer and Hermer for their manipulation of Tony Blair’s egregious human rights law and subsequent betrayal of the British military.

I haven’t got room for it all here, nor can I be bothered to go through every cough and spit. They’ve got plenty of previous and they’re still at it. Despite the latest amendments being nodded through the Commons, British soldiers who served loyally in Northern Ireland aren’t out of the woods yet.

One of Surkeir’s first acts on becoming PM was to remove the legal protections granted to Army veterans of the Troubles, even though the terrorists kept their ‘get out of jail free’ cards.

(The ‘new’ IRA demonstrated their gratitude this week by setting off a car bomb outside a police station.) 

No doubt a canny lawyer like Hermer can still find a way of prosecuting a retired squaddie for an alleged ‘war crime’ committed in Belfast 50 years ago.

I’ll leave the forensic details to others. What concerns this column is not the process but the mindset and motivation.

OK, so I’m a few years older than the Stermer Twins. But I’ve been around Labour for much of my career and can remember when it was a patriotic party which revered the military.

Seventies Chancellor Denis Healey was a beachmaster at Anzio. My dear old friend the late Terry Duffy, leader of the engineering union, was a fearless commando. Even that legendary Leftie Tony Benn was an RAF pilot, whose brother was killed in combat. I can’t imagine them ever conducting a witch-hunt against their comrades in arms on the basis of bogus ‘evidence’.

No, the rot set in with Blair’s pernicious ‘yuman rites’ Act, which replaced the rule of law with the rule of lawyers and gave licence to former student revolutionaries to vent their pathetic political bigotry against our Armed Forces.

The persecution of servicemen and women dates back over two decades to another celebrated associate of Starmer and Hermer, the thoroughly evil solicitor Phil Shiner.

For more than ten years, Shyster made a handsome living suing the British taxpayer at the British taxpayers’ expense as head of the Birmingham-based Public Interest Lawyers (PIL). I first crossed swords with him on TV during the Iraq war, when his representatives were harvesting claims in the back streets of Baghdad and Basra.

Back then I compared him to the post-punk band Public Image Limited (PiL), put together by Johnny Rotten after the self-immolation of the Sex Pistols, showcased in a movie called The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.

Shyster was a punk lawyer. Maybe some day they should make The Great Human Rights Swindle, featuring Starmer as Johnny Rotten, Hermer as Sid Vicious and Shiner as manager/svengali Malcolm McLaren.

He specialised in bringing actions against the British Army, trawling Iraq and Afghanistan for ‘clients’. His cowboy outfit was like one of those Blame Direct law firms who advertise for ‘slip and fall’ clients on daytime TV.

Have you been tortured by a British soldier? You could be entitled to com-pen-say-shun.

Yet even though some of us knew from the off that Shyster was a wrong ’un, his work won him the prestigious accolade ‘Human Rights Lawyer of the Year’ in 2004.

You couldn’t etc.

Three years later, the Stermer Twins worked alongside Shyster to reshape the law to make it easier to bring legal actions against British troops in foreign war zones.

As Hermer stated in 2016, when alleged – and mostly made up – evidence of unlawful killings by British troops ‘began to emerge’, he, along with ‘other more senior human rights practitioners such as Keir Starmer QC... was starting to think through the issue of the availability of relief in the domestic courts’.

Trebles all round!

Shyster has since been struck off after being found guilty of legal aid fraud. But the Stermer Twins have gone from strength to strength.

What also disgusts me to the pit of my stomach is the way in which these so-called radical socialists love to embrace the trappings, titles and privileges of the old Establishment they profess to despise.

I give you ‘Sir’ Keir, ‘Lord’ Hermer, not to mention ‘Lord’ Mandelson and ‘Lord’ Nonce Finder General Watson.

How Surkeir has the gall to pose in front of Union flags and dress up in combat fatigues while betraying our troops at every turn is beyond my comprehension.

As Dick the Butcher said in my favourite Shakespeare quotation: ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’

Bit late for that, probably. But as I said when we came in: How the hell did we end up with a Prime Minister and Attorney General who thought a proper way to further their careers would be by hounding British troops for alleged ‘war crimes’?

Still, at least, there’s one small consolation. In a parallel universe, we could have ended up with Phil Shyster as Prime Minister. Come to think of it, he couldn’t have been much worse.