Putting MPs in their place

The president of the UK Supreme Court had no doubt that parliament would resume sitting after he and his fellow justices decided five years ago that Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue it prematurely was “unlawful, null and of no effect”, he told me yesterday.

Lord Reed of Allermuir, who was the court’s deputy president in 2019, said he was confident that an order of the court would be respected by other institutions of the state. But he thought that members of the court might have been accused of being “judges in their own cause” if they had still been sitting in the House of Lords — as they did until the Supreme Court took over in 2009.

In a wide-ranging interview to mark its 15th anniversary, Reed revealed that his counterparts in the European Union still invited him to their annual meetings so that he could advise them on how a common law system could resolve challenges that their own legal systems were facing.

I asked Reed whether he thought the justices were more activist than the law lords they had replaced. That was what some MPs had told him when they had met, he recalled. He will be visiting them again in parliament in November.

And we discussed a couple of the cases that his court would be deciding over the next couple of months. I wanted to know how a father whose children had been put into the care of Worcestershire County Council could ask the Supreme Court to release them by ordering habeas corpus, as I reported here last month. Reed’s answer was not what I had been expecting.

I also asked him about a case that interested The Times on Saturday:

That was not quite how Reed would have summed up the issue his court had to decide, he explained.

The full interview, complete with a judgement on carpets, is now available to all my paid subscribers.