Judge Robert Rinder interview: 'I would love Strictly Come Dancing to go same sex'

As Robert Rinder appears on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, he talks rude celebrities and primetime hoofing with Ben Lawrence

I have never met anyone with such a healthy awareness of their own privilege as Robert Rinder – or indeed anyone who is so truthful about the luxury offered to the famous.

“I have no truck with the obscenely grim whingeing of over-privileged celebrities who complain about people invading their privacy by asking for selfies or whatever,” he tells me over a pot of tea at a Soho restaurant. “I think: ‘Just smile, love,’ because tomorrow you will probably be upgraded to first-class on your flight for no other reason than the fact that you are you.”

This refreshing, pugnacious attitude is likely to have been reinforced by Rinder’s decade-long career plumbing the depths of human tragedy as a criminal law barrister, juxtaposed with his surprise success under the media spotlight, first as the star of his own courtroom reality show and then on Strictly Come Dancing in 2016. It’s also likely to have been strengthened by taking part in the BBC’s hit genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?, which has provided the series with one of the most powerful episodes in its 14-year history.

Much of its focus is on Rinder’s maternal grandfather Morris (or Moishe), who died in 2001 and had a profound effect on his early life as a young Jewish boy growing up in north London. Morris would take Rinder and his brother to Speakers’ Corner where he would hold their hands and make them listen to anti-Semitic bile in the days before hate-crime legislation.

“He’d tell us, ‘This man can say what he wants’. And to be told that by someone who knew what true tyranny felt like was incredibly powerful.”

As a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland, Morris’s story was one of survival. His parents and five siblings were murdered at Treblinka, while he spent the war in the concentration camp of Schlieben in Germany, making missiles, and came to England after 1945 as an asylum seeker.

Rinder always knew that he had suffered, that there was “a jagged suggestion of a past life”, but never pushed it. He also knew that his grandfather sometimes acted strangely. “This was a man who lived his life frugally but had been successful. He was a kosher caterer who lived life with a real humility. He would meet an imam and become best friends and pray with him for the afternoon or go on holiday to Bournemouth and spend a day working in a baker’s like Greggs. But when he died, despite whatever financial comfort he had, secreted around his house were little bits of food dotted in drawers or in the backs of wardrobes. He also had a massive library of books about the Third Reich.”

I wonder whether his family felt the need to protect Morris from his history of suffering.

Says Rinder: “This was a common experience for the second generation of survivors like my mum who felt unable to challenge the behaviour of their parents – whether they were eccentric like my grandfather or not – because they knew they had been through the most horrific experience of the 20th century.”

Rinder doesn’t know whether he will watch the programme (“I worry that it will somehow interfere with the profundity of the memory”). He assumed he wouldn’t be allowed to take part, having already travelled to his grandfather’s home city of Piotrków Trybunalski with the old man in 1998. On that visit, they met a woman in Morris’s old block of flats who was the daughter of the only non-Jewish residents and who remembered him but had no idea he had survived.

“I am always very wary of disclosing a spiritual view of the world to anybody, because those things should be deeply private. But it was the closest I have ever been to the presence of the divine. In a millisecond they shared a lifetime of pain, of memory, of reconnection. It was electric.”

Rinder describes Morris as “culturally defiant but never doctrinaire”. His staunch anglophilia, common of course among many refugees after the war, now seems a happy memory in a country which, in some quarters, is shamefully in thrall to anti-Semitism. The loquacious Rinder falters for a moment.

“I have to be mindful of saying anything political in case anyone who had their case arbitrated in front of me makes assumptions about my politics. I want to take my response away from left and right. It is true that levels of anti-Semitism have risen. 

“I am also concerned about the casual way political discourse has been completely polarised. When people casually use the word ‘Nazi’, I hope this programme will make people think twice about saying it to describe what is going on in any way. You jolly well need to mean eugenics, you really need to mean socially organised hatred. The fact that ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ exists as a casual throwaway remark does a disservice to what happened, to the dead and to survivors, but also to whatever argument you are making.” 

Rinder – sharp, dapper-suited and sweetly self-deprecating – is terrific company and I have no doubt that his natural chutzpah made his transition from barrister to TV personality effortless. He was something of an actor manqué, having been involved in student productions at Manchester with Benedict Cumberbatch, who is still a close friend. Of Strictly, which gained him a wider audience, he says, “I loved every bloody moment of it,” and yet he also says he was indifferent. 

“I thought I would be in it for three weeks [he actually came fifth] and I got a nice Russian partner [Oksana Platero is actually from Ukraine], so I thought: ‘Brilliant, we can discuss Pushkin’.” 

But it was not to be. “One night, we drove past Highgate cemetery on the way to my home in Islington and I said to Oksana: ‘You know who’s buried there? Karl Marx’.” And she turned to me and said, ‘Is he a singer?’ ”

Rinder took this and everything else in the contest with a pinch of salt. 

“I mean, no one f---ing died. It was tedious having all these journalists telling me how hard I must be working. It was a privilege really and I was being given free dance lessons. It wasn’t as if I was up in front of some snaggle-toothed Wykehamist judge explaining to him why someone should be granted asylum.”

Rinder is gay, so I presume that he applauds the rumour that this year’s Strictly may feature same-sex couples for the first time. He rolls his eyes for a split-second.

“I don’t think it’s that controversial. In Blackpool they have loads of same-sex partners, particularly women dancing with women because there aren’t enough men.”

That’s not quite what I meant, and, sensing my frustration, Rinder softens.

“Look, it would be great if that happens because that visibility really does matter. Strictly is a big part of some people’s lives and for a young gay person going through [a difficult time], they could see that it can be fun, joyous and OK.

“People say society is post-gay, but there are places in London where it is still unsafe to hold the hand of your partner, so it could be game-changing.” 

In a way, it feels a shame that someone as outspoken and popular as Rinder won’t be on Strictly this time to make television history if it happens. He’s concentrating on Judge Rinder for now and, I suggest, reflecting on turning 40. He recently separated from his husband, Seth Cumming, also a barrister, which he describes as the end of a journey.

“We were together for 13 years and one needs a grace period, but it’s all been very amicable. I think what did I learn from that, what went wrong?”

At that point, the photographer turns up. Rinder, I suspect, protests too much as he raises his hands in horror. “How on earth are you going to polish the turd? There is not enough sympathetic lighting in the whole world.”

That’s the thing about Rinder, I think. He loves the razzle-dazzle while having enough self-awareness to realise it’s all just a giant game of charades. “I don’t have a complex relationship with fame. It is a joyous, incidental feature of my life and has allowed me and my family a range of experiences which we would otherwise never have had.”

And that, of course, includes this very public excavation of his personal history. It was a privilege, he says. Much like meeting Rinder, in fact.

• Who Do You Think You Are?, featuring Robert Rinder, airs on August 13 at 9pm