Human rights are not an academic’s plaything or a means of chicanery or obstruction by shifty lawyers; if you want to see how the state behaves when human rights are ignored just observe the scenes in Belarus this week where thuggish police, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, fire stun grenades at peaceful protestors and drive around the streets bundling people into the back of vans with blacked out windows. You don’t have to be a “lefty” to find that chilling.

The Prime Minister’s comments are ignorant and irresponsible. His complaints about “lefty human rights lawyers and other do-gooders” would no doubt be heartily endorsed by President Lukashenko, whose secret police is still known as the KGB. No doubt his sentiments would also find favour with the rulers of another part of the world whose history is probably more familiar to Boris Johnson; the British government can hardly criticise the People’s Republic of China over its encroachments on human rights in the former colony of Hong Kong when the very profession best placed to uphold those rights is the same one whom the Prime Minister denigrates. In Communist China numerous human rights lawyers have been arrested and jailed for “subverting state power”.

The Home Secretary’s categorising “lefie lawyers” alongside traffickers and do-gooders is both daft and insulting. Given the high office she holds she ought to take time to remind herself of the importance of the rule of law and the role of the legal profession in protecting it. Parliament makes the law and gives people legal rights. Lawyers don’t act off their own bat, they act for clients, and those citizens and others are entitled to advice about their legal rights and to rely on those rights; the lawyer who fails to provide that advice fully and independently shouldn’t be doing the job.

Priti Patel’s hostile and patronising remark about lawyers who “lecture us on their grand theories about human rights” could easily emanate from the embittered Mr Lukashenko, and it is something that should be of great concern to all of us.