Chief Justice blasts Hain for naming Green in Parliament

THE Lord Chief Justice has blasted the peer who used parliamentary privilege to break an injunction and expose Sir Philip Green, saying he had made himself ‘a one-person court of final appeal’.

Lord Hain’s decision to expose the Topshop mogul as being at the heart of a sexual harassment row was ‘not compatible with the rule of law’, Lord Burnett said yesterday.

Lord Burnett, the head of the judiciary in England and Wales, said that ‘for approaching 300 years it did not appear to occur to any member of either House that it was appropriate to use the freedom of speech in Parliament to undermine an order of a court’. But, he added, ‘in the last ten years, however, there have been five breaches’.

Former Northern Ireland secretary Lord Hain named Sir Philip after he had blocked The Daily Telegraph from exposing alleged harassment towards his employees, which he has denied.

Sir Philip’s lawyers said Lord Hain had failed to declare his role as an adviser to the Telegraph’s law firm. On Monday, though, he was cleared of wrongdoing by the House of Lords’ standards commissioner.