In the 14 years since Shami Chakrabarti has been working at Liberty – she started the day before the 9/11 attacks – a little Italian restaurant on the corner of Westminster Bridge Road has been something of her home from home. Cotto – the name means both “well cooked” and, colloquially, “madly in love” – presided over by the avuncular Lino Boccia and his family, is one of those semi-mythical trattorias that offer not much on the outside, but immediately take you off to the back streets of Rome within. It’s about halfway between where Chakrabarti lives in south London and her office across the river. Her son, now 13, grew up on Lino’s margarita pizzas, and won’t eat anyone else’s. She enjoys a regular diet of rigatoni puttanesca and a glass or two of pinot grigio.
“You used to get some MPs in here when they were still flipping and flopping flats,” she suggests, “because it’s just across the bridge from parliament, but there is a bit less of that now.”
Does she have time to cook much?
She shows me a large burn mark on her wrist. “That was from the last time I did any serious cooking,” she says. “Hot fat in a wok and wet fish. Most of my cooking is omelettes and so on. My long-suffering friends get the same couple of dishes.” She laughs. “But when we have saved the Human Rights Act, I might have time to branch out a little.”
It’s Friday and it’s been quite a historic week in that particular ongoing struggle. I wonder if she had been at the celebration of 800 years of Magna Carta at Runnymede, which had happened the previous Monday?
“Here’s the thing. You couldn’t make it up,” she says. “David Cameron went to Runnymede to celebrate Magna Carta in order to trash human rights. I didn’t go. I decided there were other places to be rather than sipping champagne while the prime minister explains why European human rights are a bad idea in front of the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
Liberty is, she hopes, winning some of the arguments against what was a key policy in the Tory election campaign and a dog-whistle issue for Ukip sympathisers. She points to the fact that Harriet Harman – former lawyer at the National Council of Civil Liberties, but not always a friend to Liberty while a minister – has made opposition to repealing the Act the central issue of her interim leadership of the Labour party. And there are plenty of likely Tory rebels too, including Ken Clarke and Boris Johnson.
“The other good news is that the devolved governments will not support it,” Chakrabarti says. “I went to see Nicola Sturgeon last week for the first time, who was fantastic. I have only two problems with her. One is she is younger than me. The other is that she has taken over my title. Years ago the Sun called me the ‘most dangerous woman in Britain’. The closer you get to the great city of Liverpool the bigger the standing ovation you get for pointing that out. Unfortunately, according to the Daily Mail, it’s now her.”
You don’t have to spend very long at lunch with Chakrabarti, former barrister, to realise she is a formidable persuader. She talks fast, knows the debates back to front, and is cheerfully up for an argument. While draining a bottle of wine, we move quickly across a variety of subjects: surveillance society, the rise and fall of Nick Clegg, the end of the right to trial by jury, the tragedy of Charles Kennedy, the pretty dismal civil liberties record of New Labour, why women are better than men at meetings, the problems of radicalisation and the challenges to multiculturalism, with hardly a pause for breath.
“When do we start thinking about what happens socially and culturally to make kids who are as British as I am feel so disassociated that they want to go to Syria?” she says at one point. “I am not apologising for it. This is not a palatable thing to talk about at lunch, but those hideous, hideous films of hostages about to face their death in the most awful way: what colour jumpsuits were they wearing? And why? Talk about handing people propaganda coups. Guantánamo still stands. It is a terrible thing for all of us – this huge icon of hypocrisy: how can you say that when you do that?” She pauses, smiles. “There you go, that’s lunch with Chakrabarti. We haven’t had the main course yet…”
Lino brings it on cue: rigatoni for her; today’s special lobster and crab ravioli for me. She greets her food with the excitement of the familiar.
“I always think there are two traditions in restaurants,” she says. “That service tradition that dates back to class and servants. I have never liked that. And the other tradition of hospitality: this is Lino’s home and you are a guest here. Coming from an Asian family, it’s always the latter.”
Both of Chakrabarti’s parents cooked well, she says. But her mother was the kind of cook who could go to a bare cupboard and make a feast out of hardly anything. She died in 2011, “on the same day as Amy Winehouse”; Chakrabarti wore her pearl necklace when she carried the Olympic flag at the opening ceremony of London 2012. “I spoke at my mother’s funeral,” she says now, “and I did the classic of saying lots of things that I wished I’d said while she was alive. I have tried to learn from that.”
Chakrabarti clearly gets a good deal of her spirit and determination from her formative years. Her parents came to London in the late 1950s, just married, on a boat passage that doubled as their honeymoon. Her dad was trained as an accountant, with an adventurous streak. It was, she says, “just the two of them. But they quickly made friends with people from all over the world who were also a bit displaced. They were always into hospitality, they never skimped on that. There were always guests at the table and debate.”
It is to one of those family debates – about whether the Yorkshire Ripper should face the death penalty – that Chakrabarti dates her commitment to human rights. Her father argued, surprisingly she thought at the time the ethical case against capital punishment. “He doesn’t remember, of course, but that was his Atticus Finch moment. That is what started me off.”
We talk a bit about the randomness of parenting, of what kids might remember. Chakrabarti was divorced from her husband last year and lives with her son. “With boys it’s sometimes difficult to talk,” she says. “You have to pick your moments. I did this thing called Women of the World, a feminist festival in Sydney a couple of years ago, and I flew there with him for 24 hours. He had his video games and whatnot but inevitably there was going to be a bit of chat.”
So she turned to him at one point and explained she was doing this speech about women’s freedom struggles around the world, and how, a bit ironically, she’d been helped in the research by a young intern in the office called Tom. Her son said, “Mum. Don’t be so sexist, a man can be a feminist.”
Chakrabarti was slightly taken aback by her 10-year-old’s grasp of that idea. “I said, I rather agree with you, darling,” she recalls. “This has been a debate for years and I think you are right.” And then she turned and asked him: “Are you a feminist?”
He paused for a moment, and, then, boy after her own heart, replied: “Well, yes, of course, but not diehard.”
Chakrabarti laughs at the memory. “The thing is,” she says, “everybody wants human rights for their own children, but they need to want them for everybody else’s children too … Anyway, that is my bleeding liberal heart on my sleeve.”
How was the pasta?
“It was as great as ever, and now I am completely stuffed.”
Shami Chakrabarti is appearing at the Port Eliot festival, 30 July-2 Aug, St Germans, Cornwall. porteliotfestival.com
