IS THERE such a thing as a parable of the politics of our time? If so, It must surely lie in the story of the way the Government has handled the hunting issue ever since it reached what appeared to be its natural end with the use of the Parliament Act to enforce the will of the Commons.
For three or four weeks nothing happened beyond the intimation from the country’s various hunts that they would carry on with their normal “meets” on the Saturday after the ban supposedly took effect on 18 February. Whether that not unexpected threat struck terror into the heart of the Prime Minister only his eventual official biographer will be able to tell us — but meanwhile we are at least entitled to notice the oddness of his behaviour.
Just two days before Christmas, the word slyly popped out from No 10 that if the Countryside Alliance were minded to ask for an injunction delaying the implementation of the Act, then the Attorney-General would not oppose its application.
This is an extraordinary state of affairs; an Act of Parliament is barely on the statute book before the Government brazenly connives at preventing it from taking effect. If there is any precedent for such action, then no one has yet come forward with it.
Nor is the initiative that the Government took — for, regardless of who first approached whom, it is certainly the case that it was No 10 that leaked this “under-the-counter” deal to the press — made any less disturbing by the failure of the Attorney-General to speak up for himself. If this was a decision that he allegedly took in his official capacity — as part, we are told, of “ the normal conversations between counsel” that often precedes any High Court action — then why was it left to Downing Street to announce it?
It was, of course, within No 10 that most of the anxiety had been felt about the electoral consequences of a hunting ban coming into force within six weeks of the opening of an election campaign. And here, I suppose, it could be said that the Prime Minister, or his advisers, were simply shouldering their own responsibility. Political consequences are not, after all, preoccupations that are supposed to engage the attention of law officers. And it would certainly be reassuring to believe that the Attorney-General bluntly told the press office at No 10 that he was not prepared to do its dirty work for it.
But whether that happened or not, we now know that in a fortnight’s time Lord Goldsmith will rise in the High Court to announce that even if the Countryside Alliance has failed to carry its legal contention about the improper use of the Parliament Act, he is not disposed to oppose any application for an interim injunction, regardless of the time an appeal takes.
There is, of course, a school of thought which maintains that such an intervention by the AttorneyGeneral would be neither here nor there: that the judge in the case would be perfectly entitled to say that whatever the attitude of the Attorney-General he was not prepared to grant any such injunction. But in so doing, he would, in effect, be entering the ring in his own right, something judges never like to do.
So we have to assume that, regardless of the view the court takes of the pretty slender merits of the Countryside Alliance’s case, the injunction goes ahead and that what would have been huge, unlawful demonstrations on the eve of an election become perfectly legitimate manifestations of law-abiding citizens turning out, as usual, in their hunting pink. Sighs of relief all round within No 10.
Are the Government’s troubles then over? Far from it. It will, in fact, have impaled itself on a hook of its own making. It is surely inconceivable that even this Government can justify not opposing an injunction in one of the two legal cases that the Countryside Alliance is bringing and then go straight on to fight an identical injunction in the other.
Much the stronger of the Countryside Alliance’s twin actions is the one being brought under the Human Rights Act — which, though incorporated into English law, still offers a final right of appeal to Strasbourg. In a case of this kind it is not unusual for that process to take up to six or seven years. Which means that the cry of “Tally-ho” (irreverently included by the Prime Minister not so long ago in one of his party conference speeches) could still be heard in the land up to and beyond his own proposed retirement date.
And what do you think Labour backbenchers will make of that when the penny drops? My own prediction is that figures such as my old friend Sir Gerald Kaufman will simply go ape. And quite right, too. For they will have been the victims of one of the most shameless pieces of politicolegal chicanery that this country has ever seen.
Unsung hero
NICHOLAS SCOTT was one of the casualties of our political system. But he bore his disappointments and vicissitudes with great good humour. If Iain Macleod, his original patron from the days when he was national chairman of the Young Conservatives, had lived longer, he could have counted on becoming a Cabinet minister. Margaret Thatcher had him out of hers the moment she became leader and, though she relented by eventually including him in her Government, it was only at a relatively lowly level. He was almost certainly unfairly treated in the episode — being found flat on his face on the pavement during a Tory conference at Bournemouth — that led to him being deselected by the burghers of Kensington and Chelsea. Though no one knew it at the time, he was already suffering from the onset of the Alzheimer’s disease that finally killed him. A melancholy end for someone who was once the most dashing bat in the Lords and Commons cricket XI.
Novel idea
THE great delight of BBC radio over the holiday season was for me the reading of Somerset Maugham’s short stories on Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. Of course, Maugham’s sardonic prose lends itself particularly well to this sort of self-contained treatment. But I still have a more general suggestion to make. Now that nearly all the magazines that used to publish short stories have gone out of business, why should not BBC Radio take this particular art form under its protective wing?
Lord Woolf errs
I YIELD to no one in my admiration for Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice. Which makes it all the sadder that he should be responsible for the latest piece of political correctness to be imposed on judges. Apparently, they have been told that the use of Latin tags in
their judgments smacks of elitism. Shorthand writers have been instructed to render into the vernacular all Latin words. But how is the poor shorthand writer supposed to put into English the phrase obiter dicta, meaning something a judge says that is not legally binding? A shorthand writer tried it, I’m told, the other day and came up with “by the way”. That by no means carries quite the same specific technical meaning — in fact, I would say that it is meaningless.
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