It’s time to bring our puffed up lawyers down a peg or two!
Fluttering flunkeys, more horsehair than at the Derby. After watching the Lord Chancellor’s OTT swearing in, QUENTIN LETTS says...
JUST after breakfast yesterday, bystanders in a central London side street witnessed a vignette which said much about modern Britain.
A motorcade of top-spec Range Rovers screeched to a halt, blue lights flashing.
To the fluttering of flunkeys, and while traffic behind was left to stew, an ornately costumed, middle- aged white gent alighted. he wore shapely black tights, buckled shoes, a gold-woven cloak, frilly ruff and the sort of white gloves favoured by snooker referees.
Accompanied by similarly attired aides, this elizabethan figure processed 20 yards down the pavement before ducking into a side entrance of the Royal Courts of Justice, to be greeted clubbily by two ageing jurists in full-bottomed wigs.
Little-known Cabinet minister David Gauke had arrived for his swearing-in as Lord Chancellor.
The curlicued Courts of Justice are often compared to a cathedral. And it was in booklined, twinkly- lit Court Four, a veritable chapel of the Law, that the swearing-in was to occur.
Magnificoes had gathered. eighteen high Court judges wore high wigs and red gowns. The district judges were marked out by dinky blue collar tags. A green sash identified the president of the Law Society.
Look, there was the chairman of the english and Welsh Bar and a smattering of Supreme Court judges (mufti for them — they’re too continental to wear wigs). Leaders of the legal regulatory bodies were on parade, as was the retired Lord Chief Justice, one John Thomas, a ruby-faced fellow of peppery temper, now a peer.
Soon entered the Judges of Appeal in their black and gold finery and yet more wigs — we had more horsehair than the paddock before the epsom Derby. The atmosphere in the room was one of comradely ease, for they all seemed to know one another, a burble of patrician gossip rising slowly to the clerestory window.
Finally, Mr Gauke’s procession arrived, led by a chap in the sort of kepi favoured by ticket collectors on the Orient express and accompanied by yet more judges including beady-eyed Lady hale, head of the Supreme Court. Brenda the Battleaxe tossed her grey hair from side to side, a char flicking her mop.
The Queen’s Remembrancer, Barbara Fontaine, wore a black tricorn hat worthy of hMS Pinafore. Attorney General Jeremy Wright and Solicitor General Robert Buckland — bar Mr Gauke, the only publicly elected figures on the floor — wore wigs so long and pendulous, they resembled floppy-eared basset hounds. Sir Brian Leveson (of newspaper-regulation infamy and now in charge of criminal justice), glanced furtively at the Press seats.
‘All rise!’ came an orderly’s clipped command. Rise we did for the concept once revered as the Majesty of the Law.
When a Foreign or home or Trade Secretary takes office, there is sparse todo. When a Secretary of State for the environment arrives on the job, rabbits from Watership Down do not file from their burrows to raise furry paws of acclamation. nor is there even a formal swearing-in of our Prime Ministers. A brief, private chat with the monarch (and perhaps a glass of gin, depending on the hour) is all a new PM receives.
Yet the lawyers consider themselves a class apart. I almost said they consider themselves above the Law.
The current Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, admitted that yesterday’s ceremony was created comparatively recently.
As for the current Lord Chancellor’s oath, it was, for all yesterday’s veneer of tradition, minted only in 2005, back when Blairite lawyers ran the Government.
The office of Lord Chancellor dates to at least the norman Conquest and its incumbent was once regarded as a mighty power in the kingdom. Occupants have included Thomas a Becket, Thomas Wolsey and Sir Thomas More. even in the 20th century, Lord Chancellors were parliamentarians of the first rank, men such as the mercurial F. e. Smith, nuremberg prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe and eccentric Tory Quintin hogg. They brought to the arid Law the grapeshot of popular oratory and an awareness of the democratic imperative.
But then Tony Blair decided that the Lord Chancellorship did not sit with european human rights rules, which held that one person could not be a minister and a legislator and a judge.
Blair’s attempt to scrap the historic office ended in farcical failure but he did dilute the position and some of the recent holders have been sub-par. I was interested to hear yesterday’s oath because I recalled the parliamentary debates in 2005 when the Blairites were at their tinkering.
A certain John Bercow, then a mere backbench MP, complained that the new wording was ‘pompous windbaggery’. For such a pompous windbag as Bercow, now Commons Speaker, to say that, it must be a humdinger. Sure enough, the oath is quite a mouthful, so much so that Mr Gauke slightly fluffed it and had to be prompted by an official. he was required three times to say his full name and ‘solemnly and sincerely and truly declare’ certain things.
The first two times, in flowery terms, he declared allegiance to the Queen. The third time he said he would look after lawyers. ‘I will,’ he intoned, ‘respect the rule of law, defend the independence of the judiciary and discharge my duty to ensure the provision of resources for the efficient and effective support of the courts.’
In former centuries, the Lord Chancellor’s oath was less specific in its duty to protect lawyers and their incomes. It used to say ‘I will do right to all Manner of People after the Laws and Usages of this Realm without Fear or Favour, Affection or ill will. So help me God.’ As we can see, ‘all Manner of People’ has been dropped. So too, yesterday, was ‘God’.
Mr Gauke chose atheistically to affirm his oath. Is the Law its own Church? It is noteworthy that the 2005 oath singles out the judiciary for special protection.
Forget ‘without fear of favour’. This is in-built, oath-insulated privilege for the people who make a living out of the Law. Time and again at yesterday’s ceremony, amid all the ersatz ceremonial, as various dignitaries held forth in almost sepulchral speeches, we heard it said that the judiciary and the legal sector must, must, must be protected by the Lord Chancellor. nothing less would ensure the rule of Law.
Back when murderous medieval barons roamed the land, one can understand why judges needed a muscular protector at the top of the country’s counsels. nowadays, is it so vital? Are our judges frail flowers, likely to be crushed by any criticism from outside?
Is it not the case that the Law is now the most powerful estate in the land, quite out-boxing former rivals the Monarchy, the Church, landowners and the Press?
Far from the judiciary needing protection from other people, might it not be the people who need protection from an increasingly over-zealous, over-intrusive legal sector? Are some lawyers, with their farming of human rights law (and the current controversy over parole) not undermining public faith in our courts? There should be nothing innately worshipful about lawyers.
The Law belongs to us all and there is nothing to prevent any citizen from representing him or herself in court ( inadvisable though it might be, so complex have the lawyers made the laws).
Why, then, are lawyers singled out for special protection in the Lord Chancellor’s oath?
Mr Gauke is the first solicitor to become Lord Chancellor. his four immediate predecessors (Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Liz Truss and David Lidington) were not lawyers and this occasioned much clucking and tutting in legal circles, for scriveners often look down their beaks at non-legal minds.
There is a little-disguised sense of triumph that, for the first time since 2012 ( when that most agreeably europhile of lawyers, Ken Clarke, stepped down), they have one of their own back in ‘their’ ministry.
And yet again one must demur. It is not ‘their’ ministry. A ministry belongs to the Crown and, thereby, to the People — you could almost say ‘all Manner of People’. But I had better watch my step, for the Mail got into terrible trouble with the establishment when it called three senior judges ‘enemies of the people’ after they ruled that Theresa May had to get parliamentary approval for Brexit.
That decision, which even some Supreme Court judges felt was wrong, gravely weakened the Government’s hand as we negotiate our departure from the eU.
It certainly sparked widespread fury among the democratic majority who voted Leave.
The then Lord Chancellor, Miss Truss, was castigated by lawyers for not leaping more assiduously to the judges’ defence — as she was bound to do by that oath they had written for her.
But was she perhaps not holding to an older concept of duty towards the wider populace? The judges seemed to want to ignore the democratic reality of the referendum.
The sketch writer in me loved yesterday’s swearing-in ceremony. I am a sucker for ceremonial.
But if the Lord Chancellor must make an oath, should it not pledge its primary duty to the citizens of the land rather than to our rarefied, richly rewarded judges?
Would that not be a surer way of ensuring lasting respect for the Law which is so vital to our country’s stability?