While Starmer was in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, the Times played a key role in stopping his attempt to become PM, and was one of the favoured publications used by serving intelligence/military officials to leak info presenting Corbyn as a threat to national security.

Six weeks before lunch with Leppard, on 14 April 2011 Starmer had lunch with another Times journalist, Sean O’Neill, at Biagio.

O’Neill would come to write about the Labour Party when Starmer was in Corbyn's shadow cabinet.

One Times scoop on which Starmer's lunch partner Sean O’Neill was lead reporter came in February 2016 and was titled “How leadership is taking its toll on ‘paranoid’ Corbyn”.

O’Neill used anon briefings from shadow cabinet members to paint picture of Corbyn as out of his depth.

“Shadow cabinet members complain meetings lack structure, discipline and direction,” O'Neill wrote. One shadow cabinet source said: "[Corbyn] just lets people talk, but it often meanders pointlessly. If there's a row it ends up in media but more often discussion just wanders off”

Four months after O'Neill's article appeared in the Times, Starmer resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet citing the “need for a much louder voice on the critical issues” and airing “reservations” about Corbyn’s leadership and the need for a change of leader.

To many people’s surprise Starmer wrote his first national media article after being elected Labour leader in the Sunday Times, which is behind a paywall.

(As an aside, the former head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett, joined board of the Times in 2010, the year after he left the SIS.)

Starmer also seems to have a close relationship with the “Society of Editors”—an organisation with a stated goal of advancing press freedom boasting 400 members—lunching there with unspecified individuals in May 2011 and April 2012.

Starmer also attended their conference in November 2011, and had another formal meeting with them in April 2012. The available records show his successor as head of the CPS, Alison Saunders, never received hospitality from them, or met them formally.

The Society of Editors appears to have unusual access to the British intelligence establishment. Then head of MI5 and Starmer's drinking partner, Sir Jonathan Evans, gave a rare public speech at its 2007 conference, an occurrence even he called “fairly unusual”.

Further to that in 2010, Sir John Sawers gave the first ever public speech by a serving head of MI6 at a meeting of the Society of Editors in London.