How CAN a judge (whose closest brush with danger may have been on the croquet lawn) threaten to jail a Minister of the Crown who’s also a war hero?

We DO things oddly in Britain. There has never been an official inquiry into the war in Afghanistan in which 457 British service personnel were killed. A war that cost tens of billions of pounds.

Our soldiers died in vain, and the money was wasted, since the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan. The other day their supreme leader announced that women convicted of adultery would be stoned to death in public.

But whereas the calamitous errors of successive British administrations have escaped investigation, this Government has set up an inquiry into allegations that members of three SAS units were responsible for the summary executions of some 80 Afghans between 2010 and 2013.

If it transpires that special forces did kill Afghans in cold blood, they must be held to account. But isn’t it equally desirable that politicians who embroiled us in a futile war for reasons that seemed confused should also answer for their monumental mistakes?

Not in Britain! As so often, it is servicemen, not ministers, who find themselves in the dock. The politicians who sent those soldiers to a hellhole — often poorly defended in lightly-armoured Land Rovers that offered scant protection from roadside bombs — aren’t under investigation.

except there is one minister who is a hero. And yet this person, Johnny Mercer, is being threatened by the chairman of the Afghan Unlawful Killings inquiry, Lord Justice Haddon- Cave, with imprisonment or a hefty fine.

I doubt that such a threat has been made by a judge to a senior minister (as minister for veterans’ affairs, Mr Mercer sits in the Cabinet) in British history. It is an egregious example of the alarming development of judicial overreach.

MR MERCER wasn’t one of those politicians who sent young men off to die or be wounded. He went three times to Afghanistan as a soldier, finishing as a Captain. We don’t have to share his politics to agree that he was brave.

He’s in trouble with Lord Justice Haddon-Cave because he has so far declined to reveal the names of whistleblowers. There is no suggestion that these people were involved in unlawful killings. It seems they have information about them, though the veterans’ minister suggested to the inquiry last month that ‘ you are already speaking to people who have far greater knowledge of what was going on’.

Mr Mercer was passed confidential information as an MP and he gave his word to his informants that he wouldn’t disclose their identity. One may reasonably speculate that they may have served, or still serve, in the Army. Mr Mercer plainly regards it as a matter of honour that he should stand by his assurances to them. This is entirely admirable.

When the veterans’ minister appeared at the inquiry, Lord Justice Haddon-Cave (whose closest brush with danger may have been on the croquet lawn) didn’t address him with great respect. He declared that Mr Mercer’s refusal to divulge names was ‘unacceptable’. He told him that he ‘needed to decide which side you are really on’.

On the side of honour and decency, I’d say. Having been issued with an ultimatum by the judge that he must disclose the names of the whistleblowers by April 5 or risk a spell in prison or a fine, he is now being urged by No 10 to come clean. His political career is at stake.

I hope he doesn’t buckle. He is behaving like a soldier rather than a politician — which may make him a rotten politician but, in my book, emphatically an honourable man.

Unsurprisingly, the former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, gets the point. He said: ‘It is outrageous that the government minister who has done more than anyone else for veterans should be threatened with jail. He gave his word to the whistleblowers that their identity would be protected.’

I suppose one can see Lord Justice Haddon-Cave’s point of view. He has been charged by the Government with determining whether allegations made about SAS forces are true, and he believes the Inquiries Act 2005 gives him what he has called ‘very significant powers’ to compel Mr Mercer to hand over the names.

But the judge also has discretion. He could choose to respect Mr Mercer’s high and honourable motives. He doesn’t have to pick a fight with the veterans’ minister.

Moreover, there is a longstanding convention, enshrined in the Contempt of Court Act ( 1981), that journalists shouldn’t be forced to reveal their sources, though there are exceptions in matters pertaining to national security and the prevention of disorder or crime. Surely this is a right that should be extended to MPs.

In 2022, Chris Mullin, the journalist and former Labour MP, won the right to protect his sources in a freedom of the press case at the Old Bailey. Judge Lucraft ruled that it wasn’t in the public interest to force him to hand over data that would identify a man who had confessed to his role in the 1974 Birmingham bombings.

THAT ruling may stick in some people’s gullets, but if Mr Mullins was allowed to conceal the identity of a murderer, Mr Mercer should not be compelled to reveal the names of people whom no one is accusing of having committed any crime.

Lord Justice Haddon-Cave may feel that the die is cast because he has put the veterans’ minister on notice. But Mr Mercer nevertheless has powerful arguments of honour and freedom on his side.

There is a further consideration. I don’t revere politicians as a class, but I do think that ministers should command a certain respect, which the judiciary ought not to undermine.

During the Covid inquiry, we have witnessed a clutch of supercilious barristers crossexamining politicians they don’t like, and scientists they don’t respect, as though dealing with recidivist criminals. They are seldom, if at all, reproved by the chair, Lady Hallett.

More widely, we’ve seen higher courts, and in particular the Supreme Court, circumscribing the scope of elected politicians. The most recent example is its ruling that the Government’s policy of sending illegal immigrants to Rwanda is unlawful because it is not ‘a safe country’. Are judges competent, or entitled, to make such a judgment?

The spectacle of Lord Justice Haddon- Cave sending a Minister of the Crown, whose only ‘crime’ is to protect his sources, to prison for the maximum of 51 weeks would strengthen the impression that it is increasingly judges rather than elected politicians who are running this country.

We should have had an inquiry into the war in Afghanistan, as there was an inquiry into the Iraq War. It is scandalous that there hasn’t been one.

Instead of which, we have an inquiry into the alleged behaviour of the SAS in which families of alleged Afghan victims are represented by the law firm Leigh Day, which specialises in cases against British forces.

How shameful it would be if Johnny Mercer, one of the few figures to emerge with any honour from this sorry business, ended up as its sacrificial victim.

Fifty five years ago, the newly-wed John Lennon and yoko Ono spent a week in bed in the presidential suite of the Amsterdam Hilton. A few days before, they had sent out a card saying, ‘Come to John and yoko’s honeymoon: a bed- in, Amsterdam Hotel’.

Every day they opened their bedroom doors to hundreds of journalists and camera crews, and sat up in bed giving interviews. As honeymoons go, it was peculiarly populous.

‘ We talked to the e Press. We met people e from the Communist t countries, people from m the West — every y country in the world,’ ’

John recalled. ‘ We e gave the Press eight t hours of every day, every waking hour, to ask every question they wanted to about our position.’

this week- long honeymoon ‘bed-in’ was part of their campaign for world peace. ‘it’s the best idea we’ve had yet. We’re doing a commercialmercial for peace on the front pages of newspapers around the world instead of a commercial for war,’ said John. ‘We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks.’

Some of their more rigorous visitors asked them searching questions about their pacifist stance; some of their answers were astoundingly insensitive and egotistical. When one reporter asked her how she would have dealt with the threat of Hitler, yoko replied, ‘i would have gone to bed with him. in ten days, i would have changed his mind.’

Not everyone was convinced. Even some of the Beatles’ keenest fans proved sceptical. ‘Under the ostensibly selfless holy foolery . . . was a core of exhibitionistic self-promotion’ wrote ian MacDonald in his masterly book the Beatles, Revolution in the Head.

Despite John and yoko’s bedbased efforts, the Vietnam War would continue to rage for another six years. Undaunted, yoko Ono remains firmly convinced that the two of them changed the world for the better.

in an interview with tom Hibbert in 1988, she made the surprising boast that she and John had, at that time, been the only two people in the world espousing peace. ‘in the beginning John and i were quite alone in what we were saying, the only ones — but now 98 per cent of the world, i think, is really for peace . . . in the end, you see, it did have an effect. Last year, when Reagan and Gorbachev had their summit and shook hands, i sort of felt, well, John and i did have an effect. i was saying to John in my mind, John, we did it!’

fifty five years on, yoko Ono is 91 years old, and the subject of a celebratory exhibition at tate Modern. the critics have fallen over each other in their headlong rush to celebrate her ‘genius’. this calls to mind Alan Bennett’s observation that ‘if you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize’. Meanwhile, her husband’s killer, Mark Chapman, remains locked up inn prison in New york. He has been incarcerated for the past 44 years. Every two years, he comes up for parole; every two years, yoko Ono instructs her lawyers to oppose it.

If Chapman were to be released, she says, ‘myself and John’s two sons would not feel safe for the rest of our lives — people who are in positions of high visibility and outspokenness such as John would also feel unsafe.’

SHE adds that the murder of John Lennon, ‘managed to change my whole life, devastate his sons, and bring deep sorrow and fear to the world.’

Earlier this month, Chapman was denied parole for the 13th time; it now seems inevitable that he will die in prison.

there will, of course, be those who say that what Chapman did was unforgivable, and it is only right that he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

this is a natural human reaction. Nevertheless, yoko Ono has spent her life publicly preaching forgiveness, and urging the rest of us to follow the path of love and peace.

in Northern ireland and South Africa, ordinary people who have suffered terrible family losses have somehow managed to forgive their enemies, and all in the quest for peace.

As John Lennon sang on Mind Games: ‘Love is the answer.’ isn’t it time yoko Ono practised what she has long been preaching?