David Lammy, previously a champion of the jury system, declined to come to the Commons to explain the Government’s plans to, ahem, scrap juries for all but ‘the most serious cases’.
Instead, he sent ministerial understrapper Sarah Sackman. An uncongenial specimen. Ms Sackman KC addressed the Commons with airy grandeur, one hand in pocket, her face scrunched into disbelief at Opposition criticisms. What a courtroom finger-wagger she was, using the unpocketed hand to peck at the air and then sweep sideways in denunciation of her opponents. She could have been conducting a Dvorak polka.
You would not want such a martinet to be your trial judge. The Tories’ Robert Jenrick had secured an urgent question (UQ). Such things are irritating for busy Cabinet ministers and it has become a custom for junior ministers to answer UQs. But on an issue as sensitive and, ideally, non-partisan as jury trials it really would have been better for Mr Lammy to have attended.
Except, oops, there were all those past Lammy quotations enthusing about juries. He even wrote a Whitehall report that said how vital they were, particularly for ethnic minorities.
Mr Lammy’s pro-jury remarks were made, claimed Ms Sackman, ‘obviously in a very different context’. Laughter. This derision irked her. The nose twitched and her voice went echoey. Dare one suggest that this graduate of Cambridge and Harvard not been laughed at quite enough in her 40 or so years?
Mr Jenrick had by this point disgorged himself of a longish objection. He delivers quality harrumphs by the yard, does Jenrick. Grievances shoot from his lips as fast as snorkers from a butcher’s sausage machine.
‘There is wisdom in 12 ordinary citizens pooling their experience of the world,’ he cried. ‘The Labour Party just don’t think ordinary people are up to it. All because the lawyers know best.’
Ms Sackman certainly thought she knew better than others in the Commons. Her response to Mr Jenrick began with an exasperated ‘how extraordinary’. Tories: ‘YES!’
She roared that the Conservatives had starved the courts of money. The trouble with that argument, on courts and other matters, is that Wednesday’s Budget allocated billions to welfare handouts. Shortfalls elsewhere can no longer just be attributed to ‘14 years of Tory misrule’. They are Rachel Reeves’ choice.
Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest W) made this point too subtly for Ms Sackman’s legal brain. She sullenly said she did not understand Sir Desmond’s ‘rant’, even though it had been courteous and short.
Kim Johnson (Lab, Liverpool Riverside) thought juries less likely to be racist than judges.
Brian Leishman (Lab, Alloa & Grangemouth) was suspicious of judges because so many of them had been privately schooled.
Formerly a golf-club pro, Mr Leishman has possibly, over the years, had his fill of Old Harrovian cheating on the greens. Ms Sackman, aghast at Mr Leishman’s impertinence, rhapsodised about the ‘integrity and independence’ of our beaks. Good one!
The Greens’ Sian Berry called the anti-jury plan ‘a toolkit for authoritarianism’.
Ms Sackman, with exasperation, argued that ‘the country deserves modernisation’. She was becoming more glottal-stoppy and impatient. And she kept mentioning rape trials. Rape victims (she chose not to say ‘alleged victims’) deserved to have cases heard quickly. To emphasise her concern, she was wearing a ribbon for a rape-awareness campaign.
Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough), who had earlier called juries ‘our greatest defence against totalitarianism’, was incautious enough to laugh about something to a colleague while Ms Sackman was talking, for perhaps the fifth time, about rape victims. Sir Edward was castigated as some sort of Neanderthal brute. There is no defence against manipulatively emotive politics.
Then came a comeuppance. Lincoln Jopp (Con, Spelthorne) noted all that Ms Sackman had said about the injustice of long waits for trials. How, therefore, could she support the Government’s pursuit, after half a century, of soldiers who served in Northern Ireland? ‘Pop!’ went one arrogant little bubble of Blairite lawyerishness.
