Smash hit

But let us talk of the world as it is. Anyway, who suggested every Asian should be lined up and searched (little brown old ladies included)? Police worry about Asian men aged 20 to 30 carrying massive rucksacks, possibly with steam billowing out of their ears. “Ah,” she counters, “but there you are introducing other rational factors that make people suspects, such as carrying rucksacks.”

That was all anyone ever suggested, surely. She discloses that she is corresponding with the head of British Transport police and says that his letters contain “inconsistencies” over who will be searched. Because intelligence has been so dumb, all police can do is search, so why ban their one means of preventing carnage? “It will be massively counter-productive. Intelligence is likely to come from precisely those you are alienating through racial profiling.”

Perhaps; but she has shifted from a principled to a tactical objection. This is odd. Under cross-examination, this former barrister accepts that searches are acceptable as long as they are not “arbitrary”. So I put a scenario to her: a policeman is told a suicide bomber is on a train. Entering a carriage, he sees two young guys with backpacks. They are similar in all regards except one is Asian and one white. Is it wrong to search the Asian first?

Pause. “No, I wouldn’t say that was wrong.” Bingo! She mutters, “That was a very skilful scenario.” Well, thank you, Shami: you concede that using racial profiling in conjunction with other criteria — which is all police want — is acceptable. Now we have cleared that up, we move to another area where Chakrabarti could be accused of retreating into too soft a liberalism: her desire to prevent the press investigating backgrounds of alleged bombers.

She wrote to Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, urging him to warn those newspaper johnnies that they could prejudice trials. Hasn’t she handed, as it were, ammunition to alleged bombers to argue they should be let go?

“No, it was precisely because of that concern we spoke early. I don’t think there has been contempt of court yet.” In the United States newspapers delve into the past of an accused to the last, yet there is no evidence that this prejudices a jury (even the most lurid reporting could not convict Michael Jackson). Often the media unearth valuable evidence. Surely with alleged home-grown terrorists there is an urgent legitimate thirst for knowledge about what drives them?

“I hear what you are saying but I think the priority has to be law enforcement. I don’t have a fetish for leaving terror suspects on the street. I just don’t think their trial should be prejudiced.” She says it is hypocritical of the “Sophia Loren look-alike” lawyer who is representing the Rome suspect to argue that Hussain Osman cannot gain a fair trial in Britain while herself “giving endless interviews on Newsnight”. She also accepts the media have a valuable role. So when does newspaper probing become prejudicial?

“I don’t know exactly,” she admits. “I am not one for censorship: we don’t support the proposed anti-religious hatred law and I do the bulk of my campaigning through the great British media.” So perhaps she should let them do their job.

Despite her intelligence she can seem happier talking in rhetorical generalities, condemning “the new McCarthyism”. She has been called a Hampstead liberal, although she quickly insists that she was born “in a bedsit in Belsize Park, before it was expensive, after my parents came over from Calcutta”.

Forced out because children were not allowed, the family moved to Harrow: “Not the posh bit on the hill, it’s another example of the Chakrabatis’ downward mobility.” Her father was a bookkeeper, her mother kept a shop. This other grocer’s daughter is a classic second-generation migrant high achiever. If Anthony Powell were writing now, he would capture how successful sorts play up the modesty rather than the magnificence of their upbringings. After the LSE and a brief stint at the bar, she became a civil servant, working for that notoriously soft home secretary Michael Howard.

“I don’t think he had a lot of time for civil servants,” she smiles, “although when we met recently he sweetly pretended to remember me.” Intriguingly the 36- year-old mother with a son of four says she could not decide who to vote for until half an hour before polling in the May election. She seeks cross-party support and attacks the National Council for Civil Liberties, as Liberty then was, for being a Labour front (indeed: in a shameful episode it refused to support three coves who did not wish to join a union).

She is intrigued by the “libertarian” strand in Conservatism and praises David Davis for opposing ID cards. And it is here that we see a little of her hard liberalism: the billions wasted on ID cards should, she avers, be spent on massively increasing police and Asian spooks to infiltrate terror networks. Boy, the secret policeman really will have a ball!