Dominic Grieve QC, newly-appointed pro bono Visiting Professor in Law at Goldsmiths, and former Attorney General of the United Kingdom, was interviewed in the Times Higher Education about his life and career, commenting he was looking forward to discussions with students and staff at Goldsmiths: “As I know from giving talks and lectures, it’s the questions and the conversations afterwards that are the most important”, he said.
Asked about what he was hoping to bring to Goldsmiths, he referred to his “experience of having to apply legal principles and sustain human rights on a daily basis, taking account of the needs of government decision-making in a political context”. He also pinpointed the gap between the detachment of academic study from the realities of politics and government, on the one hand, and politics being practised without sufficient intellectual rigour, on the other; “I hope I may contribute to bridging that gap”, he added.
The former British politician and barrister, who served as the Conservative MP for Beaconsfield from 1997 to 2019, also expressed his enthusiasm about contributing to our new LLB programme that brings together Law and Politics – our LLB Law with Politics and Human Rights – explaining that “there is great opportunity to help it be innovative”.
Dominic’s Visiting Professorship at Goldsmiths Law means our students will have unrivalled access to one of the brightest legal minds in the country, whose experience in government and the realities of the political world spans a period of over twenty years, when he played a central role in major debates, including, most recently, Brexit.
Among other key official roles he held, Dominic was the chair of the intelligence and security committee from 2015 to 2019, and was in the news this week following the release of the committee’s report into Russia’s threat to UK national security. Writing in The Guardian, he lambasted the Government for delaying the release of the report, explaining that “nine months of that delay [had been] the direct result of the prime minister deliberately preventing the report’s publication”.
Speaking to France 24 about the key findings of the report, Dominic explained it was making clear that “Russia is prepared to murder people in the UK if it considers it is in its state interest to do so”, that the evidence of “cyber activity is very worrying” and that it also clearly reveals “the extent to which Russia seeks to subvert Western democracy”.