Was it really illegal to intern Gerry Adams?

While most people were thinking about other things, the Supreme Court decided last month that Gerry Adams, the Sinn FEIN/IRA veteran, was not legally interned in the early 1970s. It had also been unlawful to punish him for attempting to escape, the court found: his internment order should have been signed by the secretary of state (Willie Whitelaw) in person, but was not. The consequences of the decision are clear enough – a compensation case for Mr Adams and a slew of other lawsuits. Already more Irish Republicans and Loyalists from the other extreme – about 50 in total – are suing the British Government for everything they can think of. Yet again, “legacy” issues in Northern Ireland are being used to re-fight the political questions the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to settle.

Well, if that’s the law, that’s the law. But is it? A learned paper just published by the Judicial Power Project at the think tank Policy Exchange casts doubt. It suggests that the Supreme Court does not understand this aspect of public law. It is a long-standing principle that the legal duty of a secretary of state to sign off on an administrative decision can lawfully be delegated to a junior minister. This is known (after a specific case) as the Carltona principle, but it was also provided for in the internment legislation. Parliament was told so at the time. If there were no such principle, secretaries of state would spend every waking hour personally signing orders for this and that, instead of governing the country.

The court decision is a mini-repeat of the attitudes displayed in the famous prorogation judgment in September 2019. The leading judge in this case, Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, is considered one of the most interventionist of the Supreme Court judges and was cheerleader for Lady Hale in the judgment she gave last year. In that case, too, there was a curious judicial insensitivity to the law as it touches politics. The court held that the prorogation of Parliament was not “a proceeding” of Parliament. This view allowed it to ignore Article 9 of the 1689 Bill of Rights – crucial to our constitution – that the proceedings of Parliament are not a matter for courts.

The former cabinet secretary Lord Butler knows what it is like to try to make government work. He argues the only quick and sure way out of the trap created by Lord Kerr and friends is legislation now. Otherwise, yet again, Northern Ireland – and the whole kingdom – will be caught in the crossfire of “lawfare”.

The Easter weekend this year was 

disturbed for the residents of Netherfield, a village near us in Sussex, by the sudden occupation of a field. It is part of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Although the occupiers had bought the site, they did not have planning permission. Nevertheless, they installed hardstanding, placed two mobile homes on it, parked a couple of caravans, sunk a drainage site and chopped down the trees, swearing at protesting residents as they did so. They erected menacingly high gates at the entrance, and brought in a number of large cock-birds. Despite the occupiers’ lack of legal permission, UK Power Networks is proposing to connect their electricity soon, closing the public road for five days. The new arrivals are from what is often called “the travelling community”. Nowadays, they seem to go in for less travelling and more settling.

I shall not weary readers with the details, which matter only for those directly concerned. But there is a wider point. Residents have, of course, complained to the planning authority, Rother District Council. The official reply is that while the travellers’ behaviour could “be subject to formal enforcement action”, it “would not be proportionate” to serve an enforcement notice because of the circumstances, “including human rights, Covid-19 pandemic guidance and the submitted planning application” (which, it should be noted, was sent only after the occupation had begun).

The council might as well stick up a large public notice which says: “Dear travellers, if you want to put up

How many 94-year-olds do you 

know who still ride? Yesterday’s press photographs of the Queen on her fell pony Balmoral Fern in Windsor Home Park revealed one who does.

I have not been able to establish exactly when Princess Elizabeth first sat on a pony, but since she was always mad keen on horses and was born in 1926, it could well have been in the 1920s – which is longer ago for us today than Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne was then. By the early 1930s, the mounted princess rode out, also at Windsor, accompanied – then as now – by a bowler-hatted groom.

Ninety or so years ago, the population of the world was a quarter of its present size, there was no television in Britain and Hitler had not yet reached the front pages. If the coronavirus lockdown follows its expected course, it will have taken up just over 0.3 per cent of the life of the woman still in the saddle. Somehow that is a comforting thought.

Newspaper headline: “Singing 

hymns could spread virus, says minister.” That’s right: it can spread the virus of Christianity, a greater threat to the mighty than any discovered or invented by science.