The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 158. Baroness Hale: The Supreme Court, Boris Johnson, and the ECHR

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

How did it feel to take on then Prime Minister Boris Johnson when Baroness Hale ruled his suspension of Parliament "unlawful"? Why does the Trump administration present such a threat to the international rule of law? The ‘Spider Woman’ has been at the centre of the legal battle for women’s rights, how have these changed in the past 50 years? Rory and Alastair are joined by Baroness Hale, the first female President of The Supreme Court, to answer all this and more.   Get more from The Rest Is Politics with TRIP+. Enjoy bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, live show ticket priority, our members’ newsletter, and private Discord community – plus exclusive mini-series like The Rise and Fall of Rupert Murdoch. Start your 7-day free trial today at therestispolitics.com For Leading listeners, there’s free access to the Wordsmith Academy - plus their report on the future of legal skills. Visit ⁠https://www.wordsmith.ai/politics⁠ To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via https://get.revolut.com/z4lF/leading, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan. This offer’s available for New Business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and Terms & Conditions apply. For US customers, Revolut is not a bank. Banking services and card issuance are provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. Visa® and Mastercard® cards issued under license. Funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000 through Lead Bank, in the event Lead Bank fails. Fees may apply. See full terms in description. For Irish customers, Revolut Bank UAB is authorised and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania in the Republic of Lithuania and by the European Central Bank and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules. For AU customers, consider PDS & TMD at revolut.com/en-AU. Revolut Payments Australia Pty Ltd (AFSL 517589). Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Producer: Alice Horrell Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Head of Politics: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members' chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. This episode is brought to you by Wordsmith. A.I. And increasingly, of course, in all the organizations we work in, we can get massively slowed up by the paperwork, the processes, the forms, the legal advice. And that's why, in business today, it's all of us, legal teams, companies are facing a choice, lead the AI shift or risk being left behind. And companies like TrustPilot, Deliveroo, SkyScanor are already leading the way,

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Shifts already happening. Wordsmith is helping legal teams around the world with clarity and confidence. There's free access to the Wordsmith Academy, plus their report on the future of legal skills. visit wordsmith.a.ai slash politics. Welcome to the rest of his politics leading with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today we are very lucky to be interviewing Baroness Hale, Brenda Hale, who was the president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. She was therefore our most senior law lord,

but she came to particular prominence, which the public will remember, in an extraordinary case where Boris Johnson had decided to suspend Parliament to try to drive through a hard Brexit deal. And Lady Hale judged that that was unlawful and that Parliament should return, that the suspension should never have happened. And she did it,

people remember famously with this great spider brooch as she delivered that judgment. She is quite a quiet private person, so I'm not sure the public ever had a full sense of her, but she represents something extraordinary in the British system. As we'll find out, we conduct the conversation. She grew up in quite a scholarly background of public service.

Both her parents were head teachers. She went on to do very, very well at university. She became an academic lawyer. And then she became a judge. And then, of course, was the first woman to become president of the Supreme Court. So thank you very much, Lady Hale, for joining us. We like to start with childhood. We see ourselves as putting our...

Psychiatrists? Yeah, putting our guests on the couch. And we say, you know, tell us about your mother and your father. Well, they were both teachers. My father was headmaster of a small boy's independent grammar school in North Yorkshire. My mother qualified as a teacher, but she had to give up work when she married my father because there was a marriage bar in the teaching profession in 1936. They got rid of it in 1944 because they suddenly realized that perhaps married women knew something about children. You're often described, and I know you're a proud feminist. Do you think that's where your feminism was kindled? I think that they were both of them, feminists. One of the stories my mother told me after my father died was that he had always, because she had to give up work, insisted that she had more than enough for the housekeeping so that she had some discretionary spending money of her own. Even though he was a teacher, so he wasn't well paid, nevertheless.

And I thought that is the epitome of equality and respect. Looking at your life, it seems as though you could be portrayed. as quite a sort of good girl. You were a head girl, you got a star double first at Gerton College, Cambridge. Who were you? And of course, when one does that, one sort of remembers Theresa May, who was unable to remember any naughty moments in her childhood, apart from running through a wheatfield. I have some sympathy for her with that. Yes, I was a good girl. I was a specky swat, undoubtedly, yes, yes. I came out a bit when I got to Cambridge because social life in Cambridge was obviously very enticing.

So, come on, then, what was the naughtiest thing? Well, that's a very good question and I'm trying to think. Oh, I'll tell you what, I skipped choir practice. No, you didn't. Without good enough reason, really. And our headmistress was so upset with me that she said, you are on the list of people possibly to be form captain next term. And I'm thinking of taking you off that list.

Whereas, of course, with the rest of the class, they came up to me and said, Brenda, you're one of us after all. Can we inquire what it was that you'd skipped it for? Oh. Was it just run through a weekfield? I think, no, it wasn't run through a weekfield. No, it was because getting home after choir practice was a bit of a problem because the bus left at five past four, whereas choir practice ended at quarter past four. So it wasn't naughty at all.

It was just sensible, really, yes. So, and maybe this is too much psychiatrish's couch, but do you think you mistow? on dimensions of life and adolescence and childhood by being a very well-behaved, thoughtful, hard-working, serious, studious person? Or do you think actually it was a joyful way of being? Well, I enjoyed it. I mean, I really liked my schoolwork. And we were all brought up. I was one of three sisters. And we were all brought up to believe that we ought to go to university if we possibly could, which was a really ambitious idea for our parents to have when only two and a half percent of girls in the relevant age group went to university then. So I was working towards going

to university, preferably Oxford or Cambridge. And so I was enjoying doing that. I loved my schoolwork. And when you got to Cambridge, presumably at that point, well, Cambridge itself would have been incredibly male-dominated. Yes. And I'm guessing the law would have been amongst the most male-dominated of... Well, I'm not sure about that. Because it was all single-sex colleges, as you know then. And there were three colleges for women and 21 colleges for men. And the undergraduate sex ratio was something like nine to one. And it was about that in the law faculty. So it wasn't any different from, it's probably in the middle, because I imagine the sciences and engineering will have been even more male dominated and the arts will be slightly less male dominated. So there were

many things you could have done. You could have become a doctor or many other things. You decided to specialize in law. What was it that decided that rather than because of a historian or a doctor, you want to become a lawyer? Well, historian would have been the better thing because history was my favourite subject at school. But our headmistress at this tiny girls high school in North Yorkshire was an Oxford history graduate. And she thought I was clever enough to go to Oxford or Cambridge. That was her ambition for me. But she said to me, Brenda, I don't think you're a natural historian.

What else might we put you in for? And she was rather keen on economics. And I was totally unkeen on economics, partly because of it. it's either sums or theory. I didn't mind sums, but I don't like theory. And I said, what about law? And to her credit, instead of saying nonsense, girls don't do law, or they only do law if their father's solicitor or whatever,

she said, oh, well, that's a good idea. Let's go with that. And it was a good idea. We were both right. You never thought it would be a teacher, not your parents. I deliberately did not want to be a school teacher. The main reason for that was that because I was this girly swat, if girls in my form had not understood something that the teacher had said,

They'd come to me and ask, well, what did she mean by saying that? And I could never explain. So I thought, I'd be lousy as a school teacher. Of course, I did end up for 18 years as a university teacher. Yeah. Also, law, presumed, law is about explanation. It is about sort of taking very complicated issues and subjects and cases and explaining them very, very clearly.

That's right. That's what it should be about. Yeah. Of course, some lawyers do their best to obfuscate. I listened to your Desert Island diss last night as a way of sort of preparing for this. And you've got this extraordinary way of speaking, which every sentence is perfectly formed. I don't know if you ever noticed that. And you may think that sounds normal, but believe me, it's not.

Most people do not speak in perfectly formed sentences. And so you speak even conversationally like you're weighing every word. Is that some you're conscious of? No, I'm not conscious of it. And I don't suppose all my sentences have a third. That one did. Every sentence so far as. Let's keep developing this for a second.

So for international listeners who don't understand so much about the tradition of British law, tell us a little bit about what this profession was that you entered. I mean, American listeners, for example, will think about law in terms of perhaps John Grisham novels and New York law firms and corporate law. But that wasn't quite your style of law or your vision of the law. Tell us a little bit about the subculture of the law that you went into. Well, most people, not just in other countries, Most people in this country think of the law as being the criminal justice system. And they're partly fascinated by trial scenes or by crime fiction or whatever.

But it's other because they hope they'll never be a victim and they know they'll never be a perpetrator. So it's a lovely dramatic box out there. Whereas there are three other justice systems in this country. There's the civil justice system which anybody might encounter if they had a road accident, if they had a consumer dispute, if they had an accident at work, if they wanted to enforce a debt or whatever, it could apply to you, me, anybody at any time. So there's that. There's the family justice system and everybody is in some way or another related to a family and families have their problems and sometimes the justice system needs to sort them out. So everybody can relate to that and it could

hit you at any time. And then there's the tribunal justice system which mainly deals with disputes between individuals and the state, but we all pay tax. So you might want to go to the tax tribunal to say, I've been charged too much tax. You might need benefits of one sort or another. I mean, we all hope to get a retirement pension, do we not? And most of us used to claim child benefit. So you might very well have a dispute about that. Or you might be disabled, of course, and need to have a dispute about your entitlement

to disability benefits. So that's what the law's about. And that's the area of the law that mostly affects other people. And I went into family and welfare law eventually. Okay. And just one more stab at this, because I'm fascinated by this, that there seem to be very, very different types of law and personalities of different types of lawyers. So we might have in our mind rumbole of the Bailey as a kind of classic old criminal barrister turning up at the old Bailey. We might have an image of a woman working for one of the top American corporate law firm.

worrying about how companies deal with each other and how do you do mediation and settlements between huge multinational companies, working 110 hours a week, filling in endless documents and the thing. Can you give us a bit of a sense of what it is that I'm sort of sensing there of these different personalities and these different areas of law? Well, because I've tried to say there are so many different areas of law, there are also different ways of practicing them. And I spent most of my life not in practice, but in academic law. But obviously, most family lawyers are dealing with very fraught family situations. And they have to have this combination of empathy and neutrality. And it could be a divorce, for example. And to come.

Not all divorces. It's mostly about children and finances. Divorces are simple administrative matter these days. So, yes, you're mostly dealing with people at a difficult point in their life who've no doubt got an idea about what they think the dispute is about, whereas the lawyers and the law and the judges will think it's about something different. And so they have to calm them down and say, look, the judge is not going to be interested in this, but they are going to be interested in what's best for your children. Could you give us some examples? What might the judge not be

interested in that someone might think they might be interested in? Well, who was to blame for the breakup of the relationship? On the whole, unless there is abuse, they should be interested in that. but otherwise they're not going to be interested in who was to blame, whereas that's often at the forefront of people's minds. And why wouldn't the judge be interested in that? Because it's only marginally relevant to the two things a judge or judges have to decide, which is what are the arrangements for the children? Where is everybody going to live and what are they going to live on?

Those are the important questions. And was there ever a, I mean, I suppose the reason why the public get confused is intuitively they might feel, wait a second, you know, my partner was cheating on me, they're responsible for the breakup of marriage. Now I'm really grumpy that I have to give them my house and things. Well, you don't normally have to give them your house because it all depends upon who needs the house most. And if the children need the house most,

that's where the house will stay. But just to develop that a little bit, was there ever a time when the law tried to take into account to us to life? Oh, gosh, there was, yes. Before 1971, as a rough dividing line. Before 1971, married women had no claim on property which belonged to the husband. So if he owned the house, which he very frequently did, he could kick her out irrespective of whether he was to blame. He often was to blame. She did have a claim for maintenance, as it was then called. But she only got, well, theoretically, she only got her full claim if she was 100% innocent. And her claim was for roughly a third of his income, but she only got that third if she was 100%. So if they were equally to blame.

And the judge would have to make the judgment about whether she was. Yes. And I guess this is an example of where our world touches your world, because that would have been changed by an act of parliament. It was changed by an act of parliament. It's changed by two acts of parliament, yes. And this is what? Edward Heath's government in the early 70s deciding this is that.

It was the divorce reform act, 1969. Which was Wilson. That was in the Wilson government. And that was the product of a combination of a more relaxed view in the Church of England, which was very influential in family law in those days, and the Law Commission, which I joined later, which was a body set up to promote the reform of the law. And the first chairman became Lord Scarman,

and he had been a shipping lawyer or commercial lawyer, and then he joined what was then called the probate divorce and admiralty division. And he found himself having to decide these minutiae about who did what to whom, whatever, and he was so shocked by it that he was very much in favour of promotion. voting divorce reform. So that was the

969 Act and then the changes to the financial arrangements came with something called the Matrimandum of Proceedings and Property Act 1970. Yes, so that was probably still at the tail end. And again that was the product of law commission activity. They all came into force in 1971, which

was the watershed. How would you define the relationship between politics and the law? Well, it's complicated, isn't it? Because parliamentarians who are mainly politicians make the laws and the job of the courts

and the justice system is to interpret and apply those laws so we do a completely different job from the job that politicians do we don't decide on what the policy of the law should be that's for the politicians but once they have put it into

a rule that has to be applied a law that has to be applied well then it's for the courts to apply and how do you feel that relationship it was going. So you've written a couple of books. Your first book was a kind of live story, Spider Woman, and that was, I'm sure the publisher had no role and you call it a spider because people remember your brooch when you did the judgment for the prerogation. We hadn't decided on a title, but we started heading our emails, Spider Woman, you know, and eventually it seemed so obvious that we

start with it. Okay, well, we'll come back to the whole Brexit prorogation thing. But your latest book is called With the Law on Our Side. And that's sort of analysis of how the law works and how it should work, But it strikes me that the reason you've written that book is because you worry maybe it isn't working that well for a lot of people. It's not so much that, actually, although I don't duck, you know, the things that are likely to go wrong or do go wrong, what's wrong with the justice system, or indeed what might be wrong with the law, i.e. the rules. But it was, the object of the exercise was to put over how much of the justice system and the law apply to everybody. So everybody should care about it. And that generally it is doing things for them rather than to them or against them. That's why I said about the criminal justice system.

That is generally doing things to you, whereas the rest of the justice system is often doing things for you. So that's part of it. And the other part of it was just to get across what's going on. The first part of the book, I went and visited grassroots courts and tribunals on a random day. And I just wrote up what happened on said random days. And they're all stories and they're all fascinating stories. But they do relate, they're very relatable to everyday life. And the second part was looking about difficult questions about people's rights, different sorts of people's rights.

There's a chapter on school kids having rights. There's a chapter on disabled people having rights. A chapter on LGBQ plus people having rights, etc, etc. And looking at some of the difficult issues has risen. And I give the facts of the case. And then I say to the reader, well, what do you think the answer should be? And then I tell them what the court thought the answer should be. We're interviewing you on a day when Alastair and I have been talking a little bit about the immigration enforcement in the US and a little bit about US attacks on Venezuela.

And they're quite interesting these moments because they suggest maybe that the way we think about the law may be changing. So, for example, ICE in the US, we have agents now turning up in courtrooms in order to arrest asylum seekers who are turning up for their. hearings, the agents are turning up masked, refusing to identify themselves, bundling people away. At the same time, we have US strikes against Venezuelan vessels off the Venezuelan coast. And when J.D. Vance, who's a Yale Law School graduate, is challenged on social media, you know, what are your legal grounds for dropping a bomb on top of this boat off the Venezuelan coast? He replies, I don't give an fuck. Is there an easy way to try to explain why the law matters and why these tendencies are a little bit worrying and that we're drifting into a very strange world here?

Well, I hope we're not drifting into a very strange world. Oh, we'll come on to that. That's up to you. But we shouldn't be just finding them a little bit worrying. We should be finding them outrageous and terrifying, frankly, quite a lot of what is. going on in the States at the moment seems to me from this distance to be a very, very questionable legality. And quite a lot is being challenged in the courts. But it tends to take a long time to challenge things in the courts. And meanwhile, it goes on in the way that they want to go on.

And who knows what will happen in the courts in the United States for various reasons. But we should be terrified. Nobody should be arrested here without knowing. who's arresting you and being told why you're being arrested. That's been the law here. Forget human rights and the like. It's been the law here for a very long time for a very good reason. Can we develop that reason a little bit? Why is it that we don't like the idea that somebody's masked refuses to identify themselves and refuses to say why they're... Because they may not actually have the right to do it. They may be acting unlawfully. And if they're acting unlawfully in the common law, you've got the right to resist. And therefore, you have to know enough

to know whether or not they're acting lawfully. So that's masked agents. And then the second thing is this strike on this Venezuelan vessel. Again, the claim is Rubio says, well, we think they were carrying drugs and they were probably drugs people. They may have been going to US. They may have been going to Venezuela. Anyway, we're not really going to explain and we've killed them. And now we've blown up another three boats. Well, that, of course, would be a breach of international law, rather than national law. And there are interesting debates about whether they're the same or whether there may be circumstances in which it is,

if not justifiable, at least understandable to breach international law when there aren't circumstances where under no circumstances are the governments of this country allowed to breach national law. But I don't necessarily agree that there is a difference between the two, but I understand there is an argument that there might. be in certain really emergency situations. Can I give up one more stage and then hand back to Alastair? So imagine a boat off the coast of Britain was suddenly struck by an American missile and blown up.

And the Americans said these guys were obviously British drug runners who were carrying cocaine on their boat. So we've killed them all. Presumably, we would be outraged and we should be able to explain why. I hope we would not only be outraged, but I hope that the British government would make representatives. in the strongest possible terms. Because obviously it would be a diplomatic matter. And something would depend upon whether it was carrying a British flag, whether it was in British territorial waters,

because different things are being breached according to the exact circumstances of it. But the main reaction should be absolute outrage. And what's troubled me about it is I was talking to somebody recently as an American friend who's a Harvard graduate who said, yeah, but what if they were carrying drugs on board? And I was trying to say to it, well, that's not really the central question. question here. Well, if there is a treaty that says, we accept that you are allowed to bomb our ships if you have reasonable cause for believing that they are carrying drugs, well, then that's fine. But otherwise, you can't launch armed attacks on the shipping of another country.

Just to bring it to the UK. So we're talking at a time when the conservative opposition has just said that if they get back into power, they would. take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights. I'd love to know what you think of that. And also on a day when Robert Jenrick, who's shadowed justice secretary, so one would hope, absolutely committed to the rule of law, etc., has talked about scrapping the sentencing council, and I think more alarmingly, from my perspective, essentially saying that what he calls activist judges, that politicians should be allowed to decide whether they stay on the

bench or not, and that politicians not an independent body should decide who our judges are. I'd be interested in your reaction to that as well. Well, that's about four questions, isn't it? So which is the one you'd like me to prioritize? I'd like you to decide which you want to answer first. Well, I would like to say that the independence of the judiciary from political control has been a cardinal feature of the Constitution of the United Kingdom since before it was the United Kingdom, because it goes back to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which said that judges

would no longer hold office during his or her majesty's pleasure, which meant that the king could move or sack them or whatever at will. Actually, it's surprising how rarely they did, because they knew they needed the judges, but there we go. And judges can only be, high court judges and above, can only be removed by an address from both houses of Parliament to the Crown, so they hold office during good behaviour. That's been the cornerstone of the independence of the judiciary ever since. And we have had an independent judiciary ever since. And if this country loses the independence of the judiciary,

it also probably loses the rule of law, and it loses the constitutional underpinnings of our democracy. That's quite a big statement. And the ECHR... Yes, and I believe it. Yeah. And the ECHR? You also asked about the appointment of judges.

Removal of judges is one thing. The appointment of judges did used to be largely in the hands of the Lord Chancellor. That was in the days when the Lord Chancellor, although a politician, was also a senior and well-respected lawyer. Lord Helton. Lord Hilton being a very good example of somebody who was an active politician, but he also was a good lawyer and he was respected. and he respected the constraints of the office, which they all did. And since at least the Second World War, it has been generally accepted that judicial appointments are not made on party political grounds. Most people who are eligible for judicial appointments aren't party politicians.

Anyway, some are, but very few are. And I could definitely say, and so could my colleagues say, that we did not know the party politics, if any, of our colleagues, on the House of Lords of Supreme Court, or indeed the Court of Appeal and whatever. I mean, some people had been active in party politics in the past, but were so no longer. But most of us didn't know. And that's how it should be, because that means you can make your decisions according to what the law requires you to do and not what your party political sympathies require to do. ECHR.

OK, I'll talk about the ECHR. I don't mind doing that. It's one of the few subjects which have definitely have been turned into a party political thing, basically this week that I am nevertheless prepared to say that I think it would be a disaster if the United Kingdom pulled out of the European Convention on Human Rights. And it is all driven by concern about migration, two aspects to migration, one of which is alleged difficulty in deporting foreign national criminals. and the other is people arriving here irregularly,

without the permission that they need or staying here without the permission, which are two rather separate questions. But looking at the figures, I mean, there's been a report recently from the Bonavaro Human Rights Institute in Oxford that said that successful challenges to deportation of foreign national criminals

are incredibly rare. There's some figures from my great hero and friend, David Gork in an article. He says there have been 29 cases involving deportations from the UK heard by the Strasbourg Court since 1980. And the UK has won 16 of them. And none of the 13 defeats has been in the past five years. I mean, it's astonishing how little.

And then as you say, there's another figure that it's something like 3% of cases are even remotely affected by these kinds of things. Yes. I mean, it's a tiny number. I mean, I think there's more to do with administrative inefficiency in these things. When I was dealing with this sort of issue at an appellate level, the inefficiency in actually recognizing when people had got to the end of their sentence here and therefore should be instantly deported was staggering. So I think that's much more of a problem, administrative structures. clearly with the people arriving here, again, you're not going to find that most of them are going to be able to resist being removed. It's not deported, it's removed, because of family ties here, which is the main thing that people are bothered about. They might be able to resist it on the basis that they risk death or persecution to wherever they might be removed to. But that is a

a general principle of a law that doesn't depend upon the ECHR, although it's there in the ECHR, it's also in the refugee convention. And conventions on torture and child. All sorts of other international instruments. But this speaks to your main point in the law on our side, is that this is about people's understanding or lack of understanding that the law is there for them, for their rights to be protected. The law is being projected at the moment as something that's going to be against you.

Exactly, and it isn't, most of the time it isn't. And if you don't want it to be for foreign national criminals or for people arriving here irregularly, well, then it doesn't have to be for the reasons that we've just been talking about. But there is another thing, I think, that really worries me. If the politicians are seriously concerned about those two issues, The first thing to do is to persuade Parliament to pass legislation, constraining the court's use of the ECHR in those situations, which in fact has already been done with foreign national criminals. They could do that. And then wait and see, I mean, if it's an act of parliament, the courts have to respect it.

I mean, it's nonsense. The courts have to respect what's in an act of parliament. the ECHR is not stopping them doing that. And if the courts declare it to be incompatible with the convention rights, which they probably wouldn't do it, it would depend on how it was done. But anyway, if that was done, there's nothing Parliament has to do about it. It can wait and see. And then if it goes off to the Strasbourg court and they lose in the Strasbourg court,

again, although they're committed by the treaty to putting right that situation, they can sometimes dig their heels in or find a much more limited solution as happened with prisoners voting. Throwing the whole caboosh out to deal with one problem seems to me to be wrong. But this is why I asked you earlier

about the relationship between the two because this feels like a situation where politics is overwhelming the law. So when we read those figures out, there's no rational explanation for what is now becoming the policy of the main opposition party and would be implemented if they were in government.

And I just wonder whether in that context, figures like you, you can do it now because you're retired, but people who are active in the law, should they not get more involved in some of these political debates? Well, judges are difficult. Yeah. I think serving judges have got to maintain their political neutrality and not engage in matters of party political controversy.

Retired judges, we still have to be, I think. Careful. Careful and respect. of principle, which is what I have been trying to be. But the legal profession generally, I mean, I was at an event which happened to be just before this announcement, the Human Rights Lawyers Association, which was being addressed by Robert Sparno, who was president of the European Court of Human Rights for a few years, now retired, and he was revealing all of these inaccuracies in the way in which the whole thing is portrayed. Of course, everybody there in

the room was in favour. And so organisations like that should definitely be standing up. And they should be taking on whatever legal advice the Conservative Party has got. I mean, obviously, I haven't yet read that legal advice. So I do not know quite what the foundation is. I mean, I know the headlines, but I don't know what the foundation. The foundations don't speak to the headline. Okay, Lady Hale, Alistair, quick break, and then back for more. This episode is brought to you by Revoluted Business, the all-in-one account to manage finances. Now, politics has its share of bad deals, trade summits, late-night negotiations, often somebody walks away with the short straw. And we've seen enough botched negotiations

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Exchange like an expert. Open a Revoluted business account today by scanning the QR code on screen or via the link in description. And add money by the 31st of December 2025 to get a 200,000. welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan. This office available for new business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and terms and conditions apply. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science.

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cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away, and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about

Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain,

and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alastair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good

to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for the rest is history wherever you get your podcasts. You made a point which is that actually leaving the ECHR wouldn't be enough. You'd have to leave the refugee convention and conventions on torture and child rights. And of course, there is a movement, particularly in the United States, to say any form of international agreement of any sort is an intrusion on our sovereignty. In fact, they've just rejected the sustainable development goals, the United Nations, which

and non-binding aspirations to try to develop good water supply for all, good education for all on the grounds that it's an assault on American sovereignty. Is there a good way of explaining why you can't end up defaulting to the position that I fear reform and increasingly conservatives are going towards, which is saying any form of international treaty, any form of international law is limiting our sovereignty. and we're not going to have international law. Well, it's ridiculous. The longest standing, probably, international treaties, are treaties dealing with things like carriage of goods by sea, which is dealt with by an international treaty

to which almost everybody who carries goods by sea observes. And it's the way, the whole of traffic by sea. There are similar carriage of goods and people by air depend upon international treaties about this. There are so many things that are governed by international treaties. And the reason that you sign up to them is that you realise that while you give something up, you gain something in return. In fact, carriage of goods by sea is something from which the United Kingdom has gained enormously because most contracts for the carriage of goods by sea are governed by English law. And therefore, if there's a dispute adjudicated on according to English law, either in English courts or in courts of arbitrage.

which apply English law. So there are huge benefits from international treaties. There's a quid pro quo. The idea that it's giving up sovereignty is just ridiculous. Can I just sort of develop that from it? Presumably the point is that if we say we're not going to have anything to do with the European Court and Human Rights and we can maltreat any foreign national in our country, then a British national and somebody else's country could be horribly mistreated and we would have nothing to appeal to. Well, that would be, I suppose, the case, although that British national might be able to appeal to the courts of the country in question. but the English authorities, government, would not have the same opportunity to say to the foreign country, you shouldn't be doing that because it's contrary to a treaty to which we are both parties. And that's a powerful argument. I mean, diplomacy works in a lot of cases.

People tend to forget that international relations do actually depend upon countries talking to one another. And we set up the CHR, partly driven by Britain and by conservative politicians. politicians as well as Labour politicians, because we believe that protecting people's rights in Europe was morally correct and also contributed to peace in Europe. It's part of the post-war settlement. And we seem to be losing that as well. That's definitely the case that it was part of the post-war settlement. There is a view that, yes, Winston Churchill was in favour of the Council of Europe. And David Maxwell Fife, of course, was partly responsible for drafting the European Convention. But it was actually adhered to in the last days, of the Labour government, slightly less enthusiastic about international treaties, I think, than the other. Yes. I think they were slightly less enthusiastic.

But they signed up to it. And I think part of that was there's a huge tradition of civil liberties in this country. Huge tradition. Now, people are very proud of. They're proud of Magna Carta for all the wrong reasons, but they're proud of all sorts of other things as well. And they thought that we had all of these liberties already, a very well-known legal historian has called it the export theory of human rights.

We were okay signing up to it because it already represented our law. And it's a good idea for Europe to be signing up to it because they need it. And then we don't like it when it comes back and bites us. Well, because it turned out that our law wasn't as perfect as all that. And one of the reasons is, of course, that Parliament can interfere with it. So Parliament can take away our liberties. Can we move on to the case that made you a kind of famous? Can I use that word? You became famous on the back of Brexit and the Boris Johnson's

prorogation of Parliament. And I completely hear what you say and I've 100% accept that you were sitting there as a judge. But whether you liked it or not, you were sitting in an unbelievably political environment. Did that have any impact on you at all? And I'm going to come in very quickly on this because this was absolutely the end of my political group blew up in the middle of what you were doing. He doesn't blame you, don't? So I was running against Boris Johnson against the idea of the prerogation of Parliament. I was saying when he was running for the leadership, the only way he's going to be able to get his mad Brexit deal through is by locking the doors on Parliament.

This is like something out of the 17th century. And the maths is obvious. The only way of passing law needs to be to work with Parliament. You need to negotiate with Parliament, get it through. And he was denying when I was running for leadership against him that he did. do it. He and Dominic Raab would say, you know, I have a scaremongering, this absolute nonsense they were going to provoke Parliament. Sure enough, they can't get their bills through, and they try to shut the doors on Parliament. So people like me and Ken Clark and David Gork,

who'd voted against this bill, suddenly face the possibility that we're not going to be able to vote. And there was this extraordinary moment where I remember Boris standing up in the House of Commons shouting about us and them and who was on the side of the people, you know, going full, full populist. Because you had ruled that Parliament needed to meet again and that he couldn't do it. Can you explain to us your ruling and the thoughts around it, the logic of it? Well, I can do my best. Obviously, there's a 70-paragraph judgment, you know, which explains in detail why. And there's a summary, which is the thing I read out, which also explains slightly less detailed way.

We were, of course, aware of the atmosphere, the very people call it feebrile. But that had been even more so with our first case about Brexit, the first case brought by Mrs. Miller, about whether Theresa May could give notice to leave the European Union without parliamentary approval. This was the one that led to the Daily Mail enemies of the people. Exactly. Headline. Yes.

And so the atmosphere there had been almost worse, partly because of that incident, than it was when it came to the prerogation case. The thing about the prerogation case from a judicial point of view was that there were two cases. There was one brought in England, which was decided by the High Court of England and Wales, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, which said, oh, this is too political, it's not justiciable, we can't go there. There was another case brought in Scotland in front of the Scottish equivalent where the inner house of the Court of Session, presided over by the Lord

President, who is the Scottish equivalent of the Lord Chief Justice, said, not only is it justicable, because this is a matter of constitutional law. I can decide. Yes, exactly. And we're going to hold that it was unlawful and not only that it was unlawful, that it was of no effect. So Parliament had not been prorode.

So you've got an English court saying it had been perraud and a Scottish court saying it hadn't been proroged. They couldn't both be right. There's only one parliament. And so obviously we had to decide between those two. And we decided that the Scots were right to hold it justifiable, right basically in their approach to the principles, we did not agree with them that it was necessary, well, they held that the object of the exercise, they used

the lovely word stymie to stymie Parliament doing its job at an inconvenient time. Which is where it felt to me. Yes. Well that may or may not have been the actual motivation, but we decided that we didn't have to decide that because if the effect of what was being done by the government, was to prevent Parliament from doing its constitutional job, well, then that was just as unlawful, irrespective of what the motive was. What did the government claim its motive was?

It never did. So it tried to suggest our motive wasn't to stop Parliament voting, but we're not going to tell you what our motive was. No, it didn't suggest anything about motive at all, except that the Queen's speech had been arranged for October the 14th. So why not prorogue Parliament five weeks before that? At exactly the time when the clock was running down and if Parliament was correct.

running down on whatever. So that Brexit would have happened automatically. And we had, yeah, it would have happened automatically without a deal, which is obviously what Parliament was trying to prevent. We didn't think it was, well, we didn't have any evidence one way or there. We could make guesses about what the object was. But no, there was absolutely no evidence. It was just this memo saying, why don't we preroged Parliament five weeks four?

Of course, we had evidence that the normal length of prerogation before a Queen's speech is a maximum of five days. You know, we really don't need more than that. So it was obviously inexplicable. When you're sitting there as a judge, do you ever look, so there's a eminent lawyer putting the case for the government? Okay. Do you ever look there and just think, you don't believe this? You know there's no case here.

And how do you kind of handle that? Well, of course, that happens whether it's for the government or whether it's for the other side. You know, your job as a judge is to decide between two or three or four competing sets of arguments. And you sometimes think, for any lawyer, do they really, really, in the heart of hearts, believe that this is right? And of course, we had some very good lawyers appearing in both of the Brexit cases and a lot of argument. And we're trying to focus on the arguments rather than. And you mentioned the Gina Miller case and the Daily Mail headline, the enemies of the people. With photographs of you, is that right on the front cover of it?

Oh, no, no, the photographs. What happened with that is that the High Court, headed by the then-Lord Chief Justice, plus his second in command, the Mars of the Rolls, plus a senior appeal court judge, the three of them. There were photographs of the three of them, quite large photographs, under the banner headline, enemies of the people. Well, that was pretty shocking, really. I'm afraid. In fact, it was very shocking.

But what was more shocking was that there is a member of the government who swears an oath, and I watched it being sworn, to uphold the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. And that's the Lord Chancellor. That's right. Those list trust. That's right. And what she should have done straight away is to say, we have a free press in this country.

Within the limits of the law, you can publish what you like. But it's my job as the member of the government who's sworn to uphold the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law, to tell you that you're wrong. These are not enemies of the people. These are people who've sworn a judicial oath and they are acting in accordance with their judicial oath. And if they happen to have got the answer wrong, the Supreme Court will put them right.

Such an easy script, but she didn't. There was something, I mean, this was the moment at which I really began to break with the Conservative Party direction it was going, because I remember that. I also remember Boris Johnson after your ruling, Fetley standing up in Parliament saying, this is completely illegitimate. The people want this. We don't have to pay attention to the

parliament. This is what the people want. No definition. And this is classic populism. Because the people is a very generic term. What is it? 100% of people, 70% of people, 52% of people, 60% of those who voted for the people. The second thing I think it was this sense, the Supreme Court's wrong. I'm just going to stand up as the prime minister and say, I disagree with them. Rather than what I would have expected, for every previous Prime Minister from any party, which is to say, well, look, you know, obviously we disagreed, but in the end, we have the rule of law. In the end, I follow what the Supreme Court says, and I'm going to apologize. What do you want me to say? Well, I want you to sort of, I mean, I suppose just to just to develop what begins to happen in politics when prime ministers don't say,

I'm sorry, I got it wrong, the Supreme Court's ruled against me, but instead the Supreme Court is wrong, I'm doubling down, I'm on the side of the people. Well, except that he had to accept our decision because the consequence of our decision was that Parliament had not been proroged. So it met again the next day. Yeah, I was there. The Prime Minister did not have to do anything. And the last day of the hearing in front of us was concentrating on what the consequences would be if we held it to be unlawful. That was the most interesting part of the whole case, actually, what the consequences were. And of course, if it's unlawful, it's of no effect.

and so it has a knock-on effect through the whole process. So there was no way he could actually ignore our decision. But he and Liz Trust, I suppose what I'm getting to, is that instead of even paying lip service to the Supreme Court or the rule of law, they are beginning to play this game of saying this isn't legitimate, we're legitimate. And also I would add that the things that we've been talking about, appointment of judges, removal of judges, they play into the same thing. And this is what's happening in America.

it shows how quickly, if you decide we don't really fundamentally care about the rule of law, how quickly you can slide into something very, very dark and dangerous. This is true. Do you worry that's already happened in America and do you worry that it could happen here? I don't think that what goes on in America is necessary a model for what goes on here. In fact, it's not easy to think of examples where we have copied America. Well, I would argue that some of what the Conservatives are doing now is part of doing that. I'm on the politics now.

What this country has actually done. Right. And so I'm trying to be optimistic. You understand here? I do. I do. Because the rest of our conversation would lead you to believe that I believe that what's going on in America is very, very. Well, I said it was frightening, terrifying.

But is it not frightening to have the main party which has been effectively governed this country more than any other, now in a position where it is already taking these. positions that most of your career would have been unthinkable. Well, I've already said what I think about the positions, and I think that's all I should say. Okay. And just develop this one thing. Forget about the politics. I don't know if you drags into party politics.

But one of things that is striking is that none of the parties are really passionately and dramatically defending international human rights or the CHR. And I'm sort of surprised by that, that it's not more central. Why do you think in this environment we're not seeing more leading public figures coming out in defence of these things? I think there might be two political parties that have come out fairly strongly, one of which has quite a few members of Parliament. Again, it's not for me to put words into politicians' mouths, really. But have you got a sense of the culture? Well, let's move it off Britain.

I mean, it's true in Europe too. I mean, we've got now the AFD in Germany talking openly about expelling hundreds of thousands of German citizens. It appears, in practice, predominantly Muslims. We've got similar statements coming out of Kekyll and Austria. I mean, there is an entire tendency now of a development of a politics which just doesn't accept the idea. It seems to me some basic questions about human rights, rights, international human rights. And you can see the same, I'm afraid, with a lot of these wars going on around the world, of leaders essentially saying, I don't care.

You know, I'm getting the job done. You can tell me that I'm breaking the law and I'm killing people. I don't care. Well, it's not only politicians who ought to be standing up to this. Civil society should be standing up to it too. I mean, I've just been in Sri Lanka.

A very good example of constitutional resilience where the constitution of Sri Lanka actually got something bad, stopped, was a combination of the lawyers the legal community, who are always a part of this, and they should be standing up, some political actors, constitutional acts, and civil society, and the combination of those was able to stand up to something that was a big threat to the Constitution in Sri Lanka. Well, we should be thinking in those terms.

We should be thinking in terms of the community as a whole, not just lawyers, like me, I'm afraid, but other actors in the constitutional space. It's quite something that you even feel that we have to make that case. But I think you're right, by the way. I think we do have to make that case. Well, you're putting to me the horror stories. Yeah. And I'm saying what I think I would hope would happen

that the basic decency and common sense of the great British public would say, nonsense, we are proud of ourselves for doing these things properly. We're proud of ourselves for true. treating people properly and humanely. And let's stand up for that. And let us remember all the good things that human rights have done for us, because they have done lots of good things.

And let's remember our history. How would you assess the relative performance, if I want to a better word, of the Supreme Court here and in the state? So are there comparisons you can make as one more or less effective than the other? Well, they're very different animals because we don't have a written constitution. So the basic principle of our constitution is that Parliament can make or unmake any law. There is no court in the country which has got the power to invalidate a provision in an act of parliament. There's no court outside the country that's got the power to.

So Parliament can do what it likes, basically. That means that the role of the Supreme Court here, the Supreme Court here has much less power than the Supreme Court in almost every other country, almost every other civilised country in the world has a written constitution with a court, either a Supreme Court or a constitutional court, which can strike down provisions in acts of the legislature, parliament. We can't do that. So why anybody thinks we've got too much power, I simply do not understand at all. But it also means that until recently it's been taken for granted that we're not party political at all because we don't have that power. And so all we're doing is ensuring that administration keeps within the powers that Parliament has given it.

Whereas the politics in America is kind of inbuilt into the system. Everybody knows the party politics of the members of the Supreme Court of United States. Now, there have been plenty of examples in the past where people appointed by or nominated by Republican presidents have actually turned out to be the most liberal members of the court. We can all think of at least two, three, four examples of that. So you never know what's going to happen. When you swear a judicial oath and you start being a judge, you know, things get a little bit more complicated than they might have seemed at the outset. But nevertheless, we are going to be watching with huge interest when cases challenging some of the actions of the Trump administration come before the Supreme Court what it's going to do. And some of us might be hoping that it will, I don't want to use the word restore.

for obvious reasons, but it will emphasize that it really is the final check and balance and the constitutionality of what goes on over there. Is hope the same as optimism? You're hopeful. Are you optimistic? Oh, I have to be optimistic. I'm optimistic all the time. How's that mean obvious? Well, let me finish on that. It's my final question.

Looking forward, thinking about the shape of the world where things are going over the next, let's say, 10, 15 years. What are your hopes and fears? Well, I have the same fears that you've been putting to me. Obviously, it will be foolish to say, you know, this is unrealistic, especially in the current state of politics here. But I have great faith and hope in the great British public, really, and in civil society more organised,

and indeed rather a lot of politicians, I'm afraid, who really do know better and who ought to be standing up, I hope. And I have faith in the legal community as well. So I think all of those three elements that I think can show constitutional resilience do give me hope. Otherwise, what do you do at the age of 80 if you can't have hope? My final question is I want to ask you about feminism. Rather late in the day. I'm sorry, but there we are.

I want to ask you whether you think feminism and feminist campaigns have achieved their objectives or whether you actually think that there's still an awful long way to go before we have genuine equality between the sexes? In a way, both of those things, in that certain objectives have been achieved. You know, when I was, we talked about when I was at Cambridge, you know, the sex ratio was nine young men to one young woman. There were hardly any women judges. We've now got over 40% of judges are women.

And so they're also, and the law, family law is much more understanding to the different roles that people play within the family, whether it's men or women, much more understanding and dealing with that. So we've got equal pay laws, again, we've got sex discrimination laws, so we've got all sorts of laws which are much better than they used to be. But of course, the implementation isn't necessarily perfect. I mean, there's still a lot of concern about violence against women and girls and how well that is policed.

That's nothing to do with the law. I mean, obviously new horrible things, get invented all the time because of digital world we live in. But the laws are on the whole not too bad. But the implementation can be bad. Obviously, we have evidence of misogyny and sexism in parts of the Metropolitan Police. There are obviously stories where young women have good reason not to trust the police. So that's got to be sorted. Prosecution decisions have got to be looked at carefully. We did have a director of public prosecutions who, when a complaint of rape was made, said,

well, let's look to strengthen the prosecution case, not to undermine it. And that improved the situation for the prosecution of rape. Because when you take the opposite view that the job is to undermine the case rather than to strengthen it, Well, then that reduces the number of prosecutions. So there are prosecution decisions. There are obviously what goes on in courts. And I cannot say that the courts are perfect. I'm sure I wasn't perfect when I was a judge.

So implementation of women's rights, women's dignity, the understanding that women are people, you know, with the same claims to dignity and equality of treatment as men. That's pretty important. So lots done but lots to do. Well, thank you for your time. It's been great. Well, thank you very much. Lovely to see you.

Lovely questions. Well, Rory, I found her very impressive and I think she's the second oldest person that we've interviewed. I'm giving Michael Heseltine a few years on her. And that's not being rude about a lady's age because she was very, very open about her age. I'm actually very proud of how she just kept going. I actually revealed my strongest impression of her, apart from the fact that she's very nice and very clever. And that was this incredible way she has of speaking. You ask you a question, whatever it's about, and then she sort of formulates her thoughts,

and then speaks in these perfectly formed sentences. And as you know, one of my mottoes is think in ink. And I think that is a consequence of her having to write so many judgments over the years, where you really have to use the written word to crystallize your thoughts and then verbalize them. And that's what I thought she did throughout the interview in a very, very succinct and interesting way. I've always had a real soft spot for very senior judges because they always seem to me to be very good at listening. And as you say, they're not great talkers. And I guess it's because they're trained to listen.

It can be true for senior journalists, actually. As people age, I tend to find politicians pretty unbearable once they're over about 50. But senior judges and journalists can actually remain quite engaged later in life. And I think it's because they're professions wire their brains to have to listen very, very careful. to stuff. I also thought that she's a reminder of something that is completely unique to Britain when we talk about our national strengths, which is our judges. Famously, people from all over the world bring cases in Britain. You know, Russian mobsters will literally sue each other in British courts because they trust that our judges are completely uncorruptible and that they will accept,

literally, these incredible cases. I remember, do you remember Roman Abramovich? Yeah. going after Berzovsky. I mean, these were cases where Russian members of basically on the edge of organized crime were making very explicit in British courts, mafia codes and whether or not the other person had complied with the regulations for mafia code, all heard in sort of solemn silence by these British judges. And I think Lady Hale is a sort of credible example of that, because she's the side of Britain that we don't talk about very much. and maybe it gets a bit lost in a Britain which is much more sort of celebrity social media ideological. I mean, her story, child of two head teachers, head girl at her school, both her sisters, head girl at her school, one of only, I think, seven out of 170 students at law at Cambridge, starred double firsts from Gerton.

And when you ask her about what she's done naughty in her life, she says, I don't know anything naughty. I was a very good girl. I worked very hard. Yeah. She's also, what you've just said, though, is really important because if you tie together some of the things that we talked about, they are all actually related to trends that either exist within the United States system where the politicians are in charge of who sits in the courts, and particularly in their case in the Supreme Court, which, you know, is now almost rules according to political.

political bias in some cases, or are being exacerbated by the current United States system, including, for example, by the fact that you have so much sort of, you know, Judge Judy as a sort of, you know, never-ending TV perennial, where literally law becomes part of a kind of entertainment complex. And that's why I thought it was very interesting. We did the interview in the build-up to the Conservative Party conference when Robert generic was gearing up to talk about you know taking politicians should be appointing the judges rather than an independent system etc she was clearly very alarmed by that and equally alarmed by what i think by what even though she was very diplomatic equally alarmed by what she saw during

the prorogation issue where she felt that again was the law being taken for granted the rule of law being taken for granted so if you always if you imagine that in politics and cultural issues we are sometimes just a few years behind the United States, then I think it's right that she raises the alarm about that. I'd love it if she actually, she's got a book out, as she reminded us, I'd love it if she went on a book promoting speaking tour in the United States. I think she'd become a bit of a sensation. She's wonderful, isn't she? And I think the final thing I thought is that as our constitution comes more and more under strain, and I think you're right to suspect that certainly with Farage and the direction the Tory party's going, when they're beginning to

talk about suspending international human rights treaties and doing these very fundamental changes to our constitution, we will need guardians of our constitution. We'll need people who are prepared to stand up and say, actually, that isn't constitutional. And our system is dependent on, very dependent on judges. It's also actually interestingly dependent on our king to try to keep this whole constitutional show on the road as it comes under strain. And we really need, judges of that quality. What I loved about her is there wasn't any side to her. She wasn't really showing off. There wasn't much vanity. It was a pretty straight. And I, I, you desperately need that to be reassuring. Although I must say my final thought, given the fact that my sense is this is

a woman of incredible, really impressive intellect, integrity, very, very straightforward. It's true that when she did that ruling about the prerogation of parliament, she was attacked by Johnson and the Attorney General and others trying to make her out as though she was politically motivated. So even with the very best, purest of the judges, they're going to find it very difficult defending the Constitution. Yeah. And also the kind of decades of sort of fuddy-duddy, out-of-touch judges, you know, on all the sort of headlines that go on that. The truth is if we don't have a system in which we can trust. whatever their views. And as she said, she didn't necessarily know their views, all the judges, the other judges, but she could kind of, you know, she could sometimes guess. But unless you can have judges that literally do their job, which is to ensure that the law is being properly applied,

then the rule of law does break down. And if you've got political pressures for it so to do, then that becomes a real and present danger. I think people will really enjoy that interview. I hope they do. And we should maybe think about somebody else who's even older. And we could maybe do another judge. Maybe we could do your friend John Sumption at some point at someone. My friend. You mean my lawyer? You were making the mistake here or you're politicizing the legal system.

He was my lawyer. He was my lawyer. He was representing me. Anyway, good luck and we'll see you. See you soon. Thank you, Alison.