How Keir Starmer saved the summer solstice at Stonehenge
Londoner’s Diary
Last week thousands of revellers gathered at Stonehenge for the summer solstice. Drumbeats thrummed through the night until sunrise, when pagan ceremonies were held to mark the longest day of the year. But what most don’t know is that we have Keir Starmer and a druid king to thank for the annual festivities.
People have flocked to Stonehenge on the solstice for thousands of years, except during the the eighties and nineties when it was cordoned off as part of a crackdown on illegal gatherings. One person who never paid heed was Arthur Pendragon, a modern-day druid who claims he is the reincarnation of King Arthur.
After being arrested for trespassing on the site many times, Pendragon decided to challenge the exclusion zone in court. The civil liberties group Liberty supported his case and lent him a young barrister by the name of Keir Starmer. “I thought, he’s a free barrister, why not?” Pendragon told us when we met him at the solstice last week.
In 1998, Starmer and Pendragon took the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. “They said that the exclusion zone in and around Stonehenge was only legal if [the government] could prove it was in the interests of national security,” he said. “They couldn’t, so they never applied again.” Stonehenge was reopened to the public for the solstice and thousands have visited every June for the last 25 years.
Regrettably, Pendragon’s estimations of Sir Keir have fallen in the intervening decades. “Keir’s nowhere near the civil rights lawyer that I met,” he told us. “And let's look at the Labour party, it’s not a socialist party anymore.” The druid king is running as an independent candidate in Salisbury, as he has done in every election since 2010. “I don’t believe in party politics, I believe it should be us…and if you don’t like what’s on offer, get out there and do it yourself!” One of his main priorities is rallying against proposals for a road tunnel which would run beneath the Stonehenge site.
Pendragon agrees that were it not for him and the Labour leader, we wouldn’t be here by the stones on the longest day of the year. We should all raise a flagon to the unlikely duo, he says, “but me more than Keir Starmer.”
