Go easy on Gauke. The chap’s a lawyer... just like us
CRICKETERS will tell you there is a ‘fast bowlers’ union’ which discourages any bowler from hurling bumpers and beamers at a fellow paceman. Parliament’s lawyers operate a similar protection racket. If one of their number is in the mire, other lawyerMPs refrain from making his or her life any more difficult.
Come, come. You never know when you might have to sit next to that person at a black-tie dinner at Middle Temple.
When Justice Secretary David Gauke came to the Commons to explain his Department’s Worboys failings, he was potentially in trouble. It had fallen to Department of Justice officials to prepare a dossier on rapist Worboys for the Parole Board panel before it considered his early release. That dossier left out some clunkingly obvious things – eg the judge’s remarks from Worboys’s trial and information about the ‘rape kit’ he kept in the back of his taxi (an indicator of cold intent). Doh!
Furthermore, there was Mr Gauke’s dithering a few weeks ago: his original headline-chasing, saying how tough he was going to be on Worboys, and then a volte-face when he said there was no chance of him winning a judicial review of the Parole Board’s controversial decision to free Worboys. He’s been veering over the place like a Reliant Robin with a puncture.
A potentially sticky half-hour therefore awaited Lord Chancellor Gauke when he entered the Commons to discuss the Worboys foul-up and the High Court’s decision to overturn the Parole Board’s decision. THE court became involved after victims of Worboys secured a judicial review – something Gauke said would not possibly succeed if he had tried it.
Had this minister been a non-lawyer – a Grayling, Gove or Truss – there would probably have been a right ding-dong. But Mr Gauke is a lawyer. I say, chaps, one of our finest is in a spot of bother. Go easy on the lad.
Labour frontbencher Richard Burgon (lawyer), normally abrasive, tiptoed round his criticisms like a chorus member at the Royal Ballet.
Kenneth Clarke (Con, Rushcliffe), another lawyer, said it would have been ‘ scandalous’ if Mr Gauke had ignored legal advice from his Department and proceeded with his own judicial review. Not content with making this point, Father of the House Clarke made a wider, more dubious claim that it would be ‘a very bad day’ if ministers took legallyrelated decisions ‘in response to campaigning’. Criminal sentencing, averred Mr Clarke in his most snooty tones, ‘must never be a question of responding to popular pressure’.
You could have cut the pomposity with a steak knife. In his Thatcherite days, Ken Clarke was a tremendous cultivator of popular (‘vulgar’, he might now call it) opinion. Brexit seems to have pushed the old Europhile over the edge. What a pity he did not retire at the last election when still near the top of the game.
Lawyer of lawyers Dominic Grieve (Con, Beaconsfield) entered the fray. One almost expected an attendant the cry ‘all rise’, such are Mr Grieve’s judicial airs. I had watched him cleaning his spectacles and his mobile telephone. What a palaver. It was like seeing a postilion polish the Lord High Everything Else’s carriage. ‘Criticisms of the Secretary of State are entirely misplaced,’ said creaky-voiced Mr Grieve.
Broxtowe Tory lawyer Anna Soubry, agreed. So did his wheezing Muttley Bob Neill (Con, Bromley & Chislehurst – lawyer). Like them, Mr Gauke is a Europhile.
Zac Goldsmith (Con, Richmond Park) had raised the Worboys case earlier at Prime Ministers’ Questions. When he had done so he was shrieked at by Yasmin Qureshi (Lab, Bolton SE). This Qureshi, a creature of sparse charm, is a lawyer. Perhaps she was angry with Mr Goldsmith for having been impressively persistent on the Worboys matter and for uncovering a legal cesspit.
In his question to Mr Gauke, Mr Goldsmith said that the judicial review had ‘blown open the system and given us a rare glimpse’ of terrifying failings in the legal probation system. Too right.