From godfather of human rights to ‘gear-stick groper’: He’s received a record suspension from the Lords for sexually harassing a heroine of forced marriage – so what on earth possessed the liberal Lord Lester?
- Jasvinder Sanghera, 53, accused Lord Lester, 82, of campaign of harrassment
- The peer is suspended until June 2022 for breaching the behaviour code
- He harassed a woman and tried to make him sleep with her, the authorities said
- Lester allegedly said he could secure the woman a peerage a decade ago
Perhaps the strangest thing about Lord Lester’s allegedly very strange seduction technique is that this outwardly sane, worldly and highly distinguished man could have possibly envisioned it ending in success
Perhaps the strangest thing about Lord Lester’s allegedly very strange seduction technique is that this outwardly sane, worldly and highly distinguished man could have possibly envisioned it ending in success.
The 82-year-old married Liberal Democrat peer not only seemed to think an elegant women’s rights campaigner three decades his junior could be talked into becoming his mistress, but also decided the best way to pursue this ignoble aim would be to crudely proposition her.
That, at least, is the claim made by Jasvinder Sanghera, whose testimony to the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards has mired the veteran parliamentarian in a sex scandal.
She has accused Lester, to quote the conclusions of a nine-month investigation, of being responsible for multiple incidents of ‘unwanted touching’, including groping her in his car and the kitchen of his £3 million South London house, and of persistently making sometimes revolting ‘sexual comments and offers’ to her, ‘even after she clearly objected’.
After repeatedly rebuffing him, Sanghera says he then decided to offer her a ‘corrupt inducement’ to submit to the creepy advances, saying: ‘If you sleep with me, I will make you a baroness within a year.’
Finally, when all else had failed, Lester stands accused of turning nasty: threatening to ‘see to it that I never had a seat in the House of Lords’, before using his power and influence to ensure she was dropped from the guest-list for important parliamentary meetings.
For any public figure to indulge in such sleazy behaviour would be deeply unedifying.
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For the supposed perpetrator to be a distinguished Left-wing barrister — an architect of the famous 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, and a man regarded (in the words of a newspaper profile) as the ‘Godfather of human rights legislation’, who has spent his life campaigning for minorities, especially women — it is surreal.
Yet just such a conclusion was this week reached by the powerful Lords Committee for Privileges and Conduct, which found that Lord Lester of Herne Hill became so ‘obsessively attracted’ to the younger woman that ‘he completely lost all sense of judgment and propriety’.
It recommended that he be suspended from the Upper House until June 2022, the longest parliamentary suspension of the modern era.
That, at least, is the claim made by Jasvinder Sanghera, whose testimony to the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards has mired the veteran parliamentarian in a sex scandal
Its decision was laid out in a 130-page report concluding the claims made by Sanghera, who has waived anonymity, are ‘more likely than not’ to be true, on what was described as ‘the balance of probabilities’.
Before coming to this ruling, the Committee spoke to ten witnesses. Six of them helped prop up the case against Lord Lester, who continues to dismiss every allegation of impropriety as a ‘pack of lies’. Four spoke in his defence.
The events in dispute date back to 2006 when the peer contacted Sanghera to ask for help to pass a Private Member’s Bill that would make forced marriage a civil offence.
On paper, it represented a terrific opportunity. Jasvinder Sanghera, who grew up in a strict Sikh family in Derby — before running away as a teenager to escape such a marriage herself — has spent 25 years campaigning relentlessly on the issue. In 1993, she set up a charity called Karma Nirvana to champion the rights of women in minority communities, having seen her sister Robina commit suicide in order to escape an abusive spouse.
The award-winning organisation set up refuges in Derby and Stoke, runs a helpline which offers advice to around 600 women a month, and has lobbied against everything from so-called honour killing, to female genital mutilation, to the failure of authorities to deal with Asian grooming gangs for fear of ‘rocking the multicultural boat’. For her tireless work Sanghera, now 53, was awarded the CBE.
She has accused Lester, to quote the conclusions of a nine-month investigation, of being responsible for multiple incidents of ‘unwanted touching’, including groping her in his car and the kitchen of his £3 million South London house, and of persistently making sometimes revolting ‘sexual comments and offers’ to her, ‘even after she clearly objected’
Lord Lester’s proposed Bill seemed like a victory for her campaigns, so Sanghera travelled to London to help draft it. Yet almost immediately, she sensed a second agenda.
After their first meeting, at Lester’s barristers’ chambers, she was invited to accompany him to Wildy’s, an antiquarian bookshop in Lincoln’s Inn, where, she says, he bought her valuable copies of two classics: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Anna Karenina.
Initially, Sanghera, who has three children from two marriages and lives with a long-term partner, assumed the gesture was eccentric rather than romantic. But according to a statement she gave to the Commissioner, things darkened significantly a few weeks later when she met him in Parliament for a series of meetings, plus a dinner, with supporters of the proposed Bill.
By the time proceedings finished, Sanghera had missed her train home from London. When Lester found out, he invited her to spend the night at his six-bedroom home in Herne Hill, South London, saying that ‘his wife wanted to meet her’.
There followed an extraordinary journey in the elderly peer’s car.
‘He kept repeatedly missing the gearstick with his hand and instead very firmly placed his hand on my right thigh,’ she claimed. ‘The first time it happened, I thought it must have been an accident, but when it continued, I realised it was not. I removed his hand and asked him to stop. He just smiled. He continued to grope my thigh for the length of the journey, despite my protests.’
On arriving home, Lester introduced her to his wife Catherine, who made them a cup of tea, before he escorted Sanghera to a spare room.
‘Once we had reached where I would be sleeping, he said it was not far from his bedroom, which he insisted on pointing out to me,’ she added.
The comment so unsettled Sanghera that she went to bed clothed, and ‘scarcely slept’ all night. Instead, she phoned a friend (described in evidence as ‘T’) who told her to put a chair under the door handle to stop anyone gaining access. The friend was one of six people — including a judge, a senior lawyer and a senior civil servant — with whom she would share details of Lester’s alleged harassment over the coming months. All acted as witnesses during the recent Lords inquiry.
Lady Katya Lester is a retired Asylum and Immigration Judge and has volunteered in the past for the Cambridge House Legal Centre
The next morning, when Sanghera went downstairs, Lady Lester had left. She recalled: ‘At some point, I went over to place the crockery in the sink, it was then that he came up behind me and put his arms around my waist.
‘I pushed him away. Again, he placed his arms around me and further up my body. I had to force myself away. He pursued me around the kitchen and I pleaded with him to stop. Once he stopped, I told him that I wished to leave. I wanted to call a cab, but he insisted he went with me.’
At the railway station, she says, the peer said ‘that he had strong feelings for me’. When Sanghera responded that she did not feel the same way, ‘he persisted and told me that he loved me and said he could not help himself’.
A few weeks afterwards, things took a yet more extraordinary turn during a meeting at the Lords to discuss Lester’s Bill. When she ventured outside for some air, he allegedly followed and propositioned her again, three times.
‘He questioned whether I was concerned that he would not be able to have sex, and told me that there were ‘‘things’’ he could buy for this. I was shocked and did not respond. He went on to make other inappropriate sexual comments,’ she recalled.
On their way back inside he then ‘declared if you sleep with me I will make you a baroness within a year’, added Sanghera. ‘He even spelt it out putting my surname in, and asked me how that sounded.’
Once inside, he started pointing to passers-by ‘and commenting on the reason they have reached the positions they held — including one individual who had slept with someone…’
Finally, she claims, he turned nasty: ‘He said that if I did not [sleep with him] he would see to it that I never had a seat in the House of Lords, and warned me that there would be other repercussions for me, which he did not specify. He said that if I was a “good girl” and did what he was asking, I would be in the House of Lords and could visit his house abroad with him.
‘He made a number of further inappropriate sexual comments to me, such as that he could see me becoming a demanding mistress. I was distressed and shocked.’
Shortly afterwards, she says, she received a text message from Lester saying: ‘You want to think about my proposal.’
Though she shared her version of events with several friends, Sanghera says she did not file a formal complaint since she did not wish to derail his legislation.
She was also concerned that she would not be believed, and was unsure as to whether the Lords had a disciplinary process for members accused of sexual harassment.
However in November 2017, the ‘MeToo’ campaign persuaded her to speak out. A formal inquiry was launched in February, and its conclusions were published this week. In finding that Jasvinder Sanghera’s claims are likely to be true, the report’s authors, who include several eminent lawyers, point out that she has no obvious motive for making the claims up and is not seeking compensation.
Her case is also strengthened by the evidence of the six reliable witnesses to whom she reported the incidents at the time.
Lord Lester, for his part, has denied everything.
Among the evidence he cited in his defence are emails and messages Jasvinder Sanghera sent to him after the supposed events, in which she addresses him affectionately in her sign off. Sanghera argues that this is simply her usual way of ending emails.
The peer has also complained that the Lords disciplinary process did not afford him the opportunity to cross-examine his accuser, arguing that he has therefore been denied natural justice.
Interestingly, only a few years ago, he poured scorn on the idea that four peers accused of sleaze offences should be allowed to cross-examine their accusers, saying: ‘This isn’t a court of law.’
Now, the boot is on the other foot, and the hard-won legacy of this supposed ‘Godfather of human rights’ hangs in the balance.
‘He put his arms around me … I felt violated’
In her statement to the Commissioner for Standards, Jasvinder Sanghera (pictured right) said:
I attended a meeting followed by a meal in the House of Lords with a number of others including NGOs and Lord Lester. By the end of the meeting I had missed my intended train. I could have caught a later train but this would have meant arriving home sometime in the early hours of the following morning. Lord Lester suggested that I stay at his home in London. I initially said no as I did not wish to impose on his hospitality, but he insisted and said he would call his wife. Shortly after this he said he had telephoned his wife who is looking forward to meeting me, that his wife was at home and that she worked in an area that related to my work, and would love to meet me. I had no reason to be concerned about staying overnight, especially with his wife present and had by that time been working with him for a few months, and so I accepted his invitation.
In the car on the way to his house, he kept repeatedly missing the gearstick with his hand and instead very firmly placed his hand on my right thigh. The first time it happened I thought it must’ve been an accident, but when it continued I realised it was not. I removed his hand and asked him to stop. He just smiled. I felt incredibly uncomfortable knowing that I was on the way to staying at his house. He continued to grope my thigh for the length of the journey, despite my protests.
When we arrived at his house, we were greeted by his wife who had made tea for us. We chatted, and his wife told me she would bring me a cup of tea to my room in the morning. Lord Lester then said he would show me to my bedroom for the night. Once we had reached where I would be sleeping, he said it was not far from his bedroom, which he insisted on pointing out to me, saying he would not be far from me. This made me feel very uncomfortable, as his remarks and his earlier behaviour made me feel that he had other intentions notwithstanding my unequivocal rejection of his advances.
I went into my bedroom and immediately placed the chair under the door; I felt afraid, recalling what had happened in the car. I immediately called T, who had been a friend for many years. I was in the bedroom at this time and I told her what had happened and I felt trapped in his house. She advised me that I put the chair under the handle of the door, which I had placed as I feared Lord Lester might come into my room in the night and she suggested I leave first thing in the morning. I scarcely slept all night, sleeping fully clothed.
I removed the chair in the early hours of the morning as I knew his wife will be coming to bring me a cup of tea. This she did, and I then got ready and came down to leave for home.
By this time, his wife had left, it was only Lord Lester in the house and I went into the kitchen. I went over to place the crockery in the sink. It was then that he came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. I pushed him away. Again, he placed his arms around me and further up my body. I had to force myself away. He pursued me around the kitchen and I pleaded with him to stop. Once he stopped, I told him that I wished to leave. I wanted to call a cab, but he insisted that he went with me. I allowed him to, as I just wanted to get out of the house.
Once we got to the train station, he told me that he had strong feelings for me. I responded by saying I did not feel the same way. I said that he should know better as he had a wife. I made it very clear that I did not feel the same way and did not want to be involved with him in any way other than professionally. He persisted and told me that he loved me and said he could not help himself. I was relieved to get my train home, feeling uncomfortable and violated by this behaviour.
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