Nazir Afzal is a hard-bitten former prosecutor who took on the Rochdale child grooming gangs and the 2011 rioters. His work has been so contentious that he was both threatened by the far Right and put on an al-Qaeda hit list.
It comes as a surprise, then, when he admits that he has spent much of the last few weeks singing along to Six, the smash-hit musical about the wives of Henry VIII. His favourite tune is the mournful Heart of Stone, a lament by Jane Seymour’s character (sample lyrics: “You can build me up, you can tear me down / You can try but I’m unbreakable”).
“I’ve been listening on Spotify, driving around, and I’m thinking, ‘Never in my life would I imagine that I’d be singing Six’,” says Afzal, 61, who lives with his third wife and has three sons and one daughter. “I couldn’t get over that. I absolutely adored it.”
Musicals happen to be Afzal’s favourite theatrical genre, having seen Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers during its first West End run in 1983. “I’ve seen the worst that humanity does to people, that might explain why I’ve watched so many musicals,” he says. “Because I can escape into a world that is beyond my normal life.”
Afzal saw Six at the Lowry, the theatre and gallery on Salford Quays, Manchester, during its sold-out run last month. It is a place he will spend much more time at, as he has just been appointed its chairman following a year as a board trustee.
Some might raise eyebrows at a former prosecutor taking the reins at one of the biggest arts complexes in the country, but Afzal insists that his background sets him up to help the Lowry to continue its mission to be “transformational” for the locals who live in one of Britain’s most deprived cities. “My whole career has been about amplifying the voices of people who otherwise wouldn’t be heard,” he says. “And the Lowry does that day in, day out.”
Over coffee in the Lowry’s members’ lounge, Afzal says he considers it the “National Theatre of the North” and that he wants to boost the diversity of the people who buy tickets. “You sit in any theatre up and down the country: how many brown faces do you see? How many black faces do you see? The people who need it most are the people who are least likely to access it,” he says.
“Minority communities love drama. My family, I kid you not, will watch Indian or Pakistani soaps day in, day out, but it would never enter their head to go to the theatre to watch drama,” Afzal adds. “And that’s a missed opportunity for theatre, that it doesn’t reach those communities, and it relies upon a generally middle-class community to come to these places. And then it becomes a bit like voyeurism.”
For the arts to do anything requires cash, but the Arts Council’s pursestrings have been pulled pretty tight. The Lowry gets a little under £900,000 each year in public subsidy, but generates almost £35 million of its own back on top of that – including from philanthropists such as the local hedge fund tycoon Andrew Law, who provided about £8 million so that the centre could buy L S Lowry’s Going to the Match at Christie’s in 2022.
Afzal hopes that the Government revives the previous administration’s review into the Arts Council’s remit, because “there needs to be a conversation about how important it is that we fund the arts. We probably wouldn’t have had the riots as bad as they were, we wouldn’t have the mental health and wellbeing crisis that we have right now, if arts and creativity were everywhere”.
Though new ministers may have dispensed with Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” phrase, it is how Afzal describes the need to redistribute sparse cash around the country. “Hardly anything is spent in the north of England. Yet we live here, you know. And so many people who were in the arts and cultural business started their lives here, but then they have to go south … That shouldn’t be the case.”
One of seven children of Pakistani migrants, Afzal grew up in a two-up, two-down in Small Heath, inner Birmingham. Violent racism was a fact of life growing up for him – he would be frequently spat on or beaten up coming home from school, while an uncle was murdered by the IRA.
“I got beaten up by three young men who used my head as a football,” he says matter-of-factly of the most serious incident. “Thankfully, they were s--- at football, which is why I lived to tell the tale.”
Afzal defied his parents – who wanted him to become a doctor or engineer – and trained as a lawyer. After studying at Birmingham University and the Guildford Law School, Afzal was admitted as a solicitor and soon started working for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
He rose rapidly through the CPS before being appointed Chief Crown Prosecutor for north-west England in 2011. Afzal, a practising Muslim, led the prosecution of the Rochdale child grooming gangs and soon became a figure of national prominence. He was hounded by both the far Right, who objected to a Muslim prosecutor, and some in the local Muslim community. So hairy did things get that Afzal’s family were placed under police protection and his children had to take taxis to school for months.
Afzal’s boss at the CPS was Keir Starmer, then the Director of Public Prosecutions, who ordered his staff not to arrange anything that would take him away from home at evenings or overnight. “He was immensely supportive of me, personally,” he says of Starmer. “I was wondering why I wasn’t being invited to anything, but it was Keir simply looking out for me, because he knew that I wouldn’t look out for myself. I’ll never forget. That kept me going at a time when, quite frankly, I was ready to quit.”
Afzal was the national lead prosecutor on child sexual abuse cases, and the fact he stayed in post had a huge impact. “If I had left, all the Max Cliffords, the Rolf Harrises – that wouldn’t have happened. The fact that he supported me at that time meant that I could then work persistently, relentlessly, to bring other offenders to justice.”
Another of Afzal’s scalps was the disgraced BBC presenter Stuart Hall, who was convicted of sexually abusing women and girls in 2013. Next week, Huw Edwards will be sentenced after pleading guilty to making indecent images of children, which raises the question: does the BBC attract monsters, or create them?
“The answer is that predators and sexual predators spend their whole lives looking for how they can find a victim. If they can’t get a job at the BBC, they’ll get a job in a school, they’ll get a job in a hospital, they’ll get a job where they can get access to children. It’s in their DNA,” he says. “It’s not about the institution attracting them, it’s about the predator who spends their whole life looking for how they can get access to children. What the BBC and other institutions failed to do was to vet and have whistleblowing in place that meant that people could confidently report powerful people.”
Afzal adds of the likes of Edwards and Jimmy Savile: “They were the most powerful people in the organisation at one time and people around them, rather than questioning what they were seeing or hearing, put their heads in the sand because they thought they were getting more out of them in terms of profile. And that is just a terrible indictment of the organisation as it was then.”
The week before we meet, the Match of the Day and One Show presenter Jermaine Jenas was sacked by the BBC for sending inappropriate texts to junior female staff members. Afzal has noticed the BBC’s apparent shift in strategy. “Anybody that does anything that remotely is offensive and predatory needs to be gone. So they’ve gone from one extreme, which was powerful predators were allowed to behave terribly on an industrial level, to one where now any indiscretion will be a reason for ejecting them from the organisation. And perhaps that’s the right approach.”
Afzal also led an independent review into the culture of the Nursing and Midwifery Council. So, what does he make of the growing doubts about Lucy Letby, the Countess of Chester neonatal nurse who was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven more?
For the first time in more than an hour, the loquacious Afzal takes a long pause before answering. “Look, I’m very much aware of people’s concerns around the conviction of Lucy Letby. I have myself kept away from discussing the subject, because there is a process and there is a Criminal Cases Review Commission that can investigate this matter, and I hope that it moves at a pace,” he says. “At the same time, as it currently stands, she’s convicted, and convicted by a jury who did a very lengthy deliberation of a lengthy trial. I personally have not seen anything yet that would enable me to question the verdict. But I use the word ‘yet’.”
Though he stopped working full time in 2017, Afzal says he is busier than ever – though most people of his age would be looking towards retirement. After a stressful career: why? “I’m mindful of the research that once you stop working, your brain dies and you’re dead within a year,” he says. “So I’m hoping that I can push that back by keeping going.”
