By gad, she’s not a man, not a lawyer and NOT one of us!
Is this why judicial snoots are plotting to oust the Justice Secretary Liz Truss who, for all her faults, is democratically elected?
TOP lawyers and judges are indignant. Life has not been going entirely their way. They were already restive about austerity era reductions to legal aid and court budgets.
Then came last June’s Leave vote in the EU referendum, from which they recoiled with all the squawking you would expect of rich, metropolitan eggheads.
To compound their dismay, one of Theresa May’s first acts on becoming Prime Minister was to appoint a non- lawyer as Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor.
Liz Truss was not only the third non-lawyer in a row (after Chris Grayling and Michael Gove) to be placed in political charge of the judiciary, but also the first female Lord Chancellor in the 1,000 or so years since that grand post was established. Judicial snoots, who regard non-lawyers as a lower class of life, were appalled.
All of which may explain some distinctly intemperate things being said about Ms Truss in recent days.
Go down to the Royal Courts of Justice at the top of London’s Strand and it is not long before you will hear mauve-faced, wiggy blowhards moan that ‘the woman just ain’t up to the job’.
They complain about her personal manner, her youthfulness (she is 41), her inexperience, the calibre of her intellect (her ‘flakiness’). In short, they can see nothing good about her in the slightest.
Exception was even taken to the pose she struck when she dressed up in the Lord Chancellor’s traditional ceremonial robes on first taking the job.
Lord Chancellors were once stout figures, former assizes men mottled by age and wearing full-bottomed wigs.
Ms Truss, her blonde hair coquettishly coiffed, gazed at the cameras with a gamine grin, possibly looking more like a sexy pantomime principal boy than a port-nosed grandee of the Courts.
Following a recent row about rape trials, there is talk of a ‘total breakdown’ in relations between the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice.
Now, the rumblings have reached Downing Street, with a report yesterday suggesting that Theresa May is being urged by members of the Cabinet to remove Ms Truss and break up the Ministry of Justice over concerns it is ‘not fit for purpose’.
Rumours are also being spread that several members of her office staff want to leave for other parts of Whitehall. So are the attacks, particularly from those in the legal profession, justified?
Under the rape trials reform, some alleged victims will be spared cross-examination in court and will be able to give testimony in pre-recorded video films — though they can also be crossexamined, but only on video before the trial starts.
YES, there are serious reasons for this and serious drawbacks. Ms Truss wants to make it less traumatic for victims to give evidence, but is an accused rapist not entitled to submit the accuser to tough questioning in court?
In presenting this controversial policy, Lord Chancellor Truss and her officials got themselves into a tangle about how far it would extend and how fast it would be introduced. She did not give a convincing performance in interviews. To be honest, it sounded as if she was busking it.
It reinforced suspicions that she does not spend long enough on her homework and that her private office is inexperienced.
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, who as Lord Chief Justice is the most senior judge in England and Wales, is effectively the judges’ shop steward. He flayed Ms Truss as being ‘wrong’ about the rape trials changes. Posh Lord Thomas (who is not a man known for his sweetness of temper) snapped that the Ministry of Justice had ‘misunderstood the whole thing completely’, when he was asked about it by a House of Lords committee.
‘It was a complete failure to understand the impracticalities of any of this,’ he said. ‘That is the kind of thing that is very troubling.’ This was strong language — a major and damaging harrumph.
A former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, soon weighed in, alleging Ms Truss ‘has no respect either in the political or the legal world’, adding she was entirely dependent on the Prime Minister for her survival.
The chairman of the criminal bar association, Francis FitzGibbon, said Ms Truss had embarrassed herself. And The Times, very much the legal Establishment’s mouthpiece, ran a leader article that said Lord Chancellor Truss should ‘take a good look at herself and ask whether she is up to it’.
Liz Truss was certainly an unlikely choice as Lord Chancellor. Before she became an MP in 2010, she was best known as a Cameroon moderniser who had an extramarital affair with a Tory MP, Mark Field.
That notoriety nearly did for her as the Tories’ parliamentary candidate for true-blue South West Norfolk, but she made it to the Commons despite the unhappiness of the ‘ Turnip Taliban’, as her pro-family local Tory critics were called.
Before becoming a Conservative, she had been a republican-leaning Lib Dem and was reared in a socialist, Northern England household, being educated at a comprehensive school.
Were her new Tory convictions genuine or were they worn simply with political advancement in mind? David Cameron quickly promoted her and in 2014, just four years after entering the Commons, she reached Cabinet as Environment Secretary.
She became something of a joke for a party conference speech at which she spoke, with a daft grin, about the wonders of British cheese and how she was going to China to sell them some pork. But there was at least substance behind these claims — pork exports to China indeed rose fast.
Having followed her on the stump at election time, I can report that she is pretty good with the public, engaging them seriously in debate without sounding arrogant.
Despite an occasionally wooden, distant manner on a stage, she comes across in person as a modern woman with a quick wit and cheerfully thick skin.
SHE needed that recently after a ceremony when, soon after her appointment as Lord Chancellor, she made a speech to newly-minted QCs.
Displeased by the fact she was talking about Brexit more than justice policy, some of them took to Twitter to insult her even while she was speaking.
Lawyers, by and large, are controlled, cautious people of careerist bent and would not normally attack the minister who is in charge of the appointment process for top judicial vacancies. So, what is going on?
It does not help that Ms Truss does not ‘speak legal’ — she has not mastered the ornate jargon of the law. But grotty, opportunistic politics by scheming Left-wing lawyers also has something to do with it.
Lord Falconer’s remark about Ms Truss being dependent on the PM is laughably hypocritical, coming as it does from a New Labour insider whose Westminster career is based on the fact he once shared a house with Tony Blair.
The rape trial row is not the only one of her troubles. She has been in hot water over changes to the way compensation awards are calculated for car crash injuries, which could add up to £75 on car insurance premiums.
And now a parliamentary committee has concluded that Government plans to raise £300 million by increasing probate fees — up to a ceiling of £20,000 per estate — may not be legally enforceable. That was a change authorised by Ms Truss, too.
In the eyes of judges, perhaps greater damage was done when she failed to come to their defence after last autumn’s High Court verdict, which found against the Government on Brexit.
The judges — one of whom was Lord Thomas — ruled that the
Government should consult Parliament before proceeding with Article 50, which would take us out of the EU.
Leavers were angry at what they saw as activist judges and the Mail ran its ‘Enemies Of The People’ headline. (The Daily Telegraph’s front page headline, meanwhile, was ‘The Judges Versus The People’.)
The judiciary was furious and looked to Ms Truss to defend them. Instead she said that it was not her job to tell the Press what to publish.
The level of grievance over this in legal circles is high, but is probably linked inextricably to a wider, tribal anger at Brexit (and the Mail’s passionate Euroscepticism).
But then the EU has long been very lucrative for lawyers.
There is also a distinct defensiveness in the legal profession over the evisceration of one of their own — ambulance-chasing lawyer Phil Shiner, who amorally pursued spurious cases against British troops in Iraq.
To that extent, Ms Truss is collateral damage.
Then there is the matter of the new Lord Chief Justiceship. Lord Thomas is soon to retire. His replacement will be selected by an expert panel, but Ms Truss was able to set the job specification and she effectively ruled out anyone over the age of 65.
THIS knocked out two favoured candidates of the legal Establishment, Lady Justice Hallett and Sir Brian Leveson.
The latter is a particular pinup for Leftists, having chaired the inquiry into newspapers after the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal, and recommended statutory regulation of the Press.
How they would have loved the great basher of newspapers to become Lord Chief Justice. What a stick in the eye for Fleet Street that would have been! Judicial big shots are incandescent at this treatment of Hallett and Leveson and the chairman of the Commons Justice select committee, a former minister called Bob Neill (who no doubt fancies he would make a much better Lord Chancellor than Ms Truss), has helped spread dissent.
Indeed, the head of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, told the House of Lords constitution committee last week that the judiciary should be allowed to sit on the bench beyond the age of 70.
Presumably that went down well among the creaking backs that inhabit the Upper Chamber.
The question of age aside, there is a worrying mulishness in the judiciary at present, perhaps best described as pique, which defies easy explanation.
They just do not think Liz Truss is ‘one of them’. And so they are attacking her. Grievous bodily harm from the legal elite. Edifying, it is not.