Here’s the case against Mrs Justice Hogg

In all the different ways in which our family courts repeatedly betray the interests of children they claim to be protecting, one which has particularly surprised me over the years is how readily certain judges seem to hand over children from a safe and loving home to the care of an evidently abusive, absent father. Making headlines last week was the ghastly case of Ellie Butler, the six-year-old removed from her loving grandparents, to be handed over by Mrs Justice Hogg (daughter of former Tory politician Lord Hailsham) to the psychotic father who proceeded to murder her.

I have followed cases involving Mrs Justice Hogg before – such as the one where she prohibited a devoted mother from having any further contact with the daughter who had lived with her for the first seven years of her life, before being unhappily handed over to her father. In another, Hogg threatened me with summary imprisonment if I again referred to the case of a boy whose mother had smuggled him abroad, away from the predatory clutches of social workers: an order so laughably draconian that months later a more sensible judge struck it out.

Fortunately, not all the cases where children are handed over from loving mothers to dysfunctional fathers end unhappily. In 2014, I reported on two such examples, each involving a female judge: one of whom ordered that two teenage boys should be torn from their beds by police on Christmas morning, to be sent to live with a violent father who had abandoned them years before.

In each case, the resourceful children so often ran away from the man who was ill-treating them back to their mothers that in the end even the social workers conceded that a grievous mistake had been made. In each case the judge guilty of making such an absurd order had no choice but to accept what had happened. Sadly, in the case of little Ellie it was otherwise.