Thursday evening saw the extraordinary sight of a government suing a highly respected retired judge from our Court of Appeal, who also now sits in the House of Lords. Perhaps a sheepish admission that this is Trumpian behaviour lay in the government refusing to use her name; instead calling her ‘The Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry’. But make no mistake, the UK government is suing a UK judge.

Why? Well, there was an airborne infectious disease called Covid-19. Most of us lived through the chaos it caused. A previous UK government, wanting to see what mistakes were made and how to improve in future, commissioned an inquiry. They chose Baroness Heather Hallett to chair it.

They have sued her. This is absurd

Her credentials are impeccable; she chaired the inquiry into the 7/7 bombings. She is but one of our many outstanding judges. We have the best judges in the world, she is a product or decades of hard work.

Yet our government is suing her. Why? Well Baroness Hallett says that in order to investigate what happened during Covid-19, she needs to see otherwise private government communications. Which would include those of the then Chancellor, and now Prime Minister.

Her position is not obviously wrong, any inquiry is determined by its terms of reference – you can read Baroness Hallett’s here. And if you do you will see that it is her duty (she has no choice here, duty is duty) to investigate:

‘the COVID-19 response and the impact of the pandemic in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and produce a factual narrative account, including:

…  how decisions were made, communicated, recorded, and implemented’

So, to do her duty she wants to see some evidence. That’s the messages, diaries, communications etc. – what you would expect to see if you want her to do a good job.

But Rishi Sunak says no.

He, and the current cabinet, say that Baroness Hallett cannot see these documents. The law disagrees with the government. The law about inquiries is set down in the Inquiries Act 2005. Section 21 of the Act says:

‘The chairman may by notice require a person, within such period as appears to the inquiry panel to be reasonable—

(a)to provide evidence to the inquiry panel in the form of a written statement;

(b)to provide any documents in his custody or under his control that relate to a matter in question at the inquiry’

So Baroness Hallett can demand the evidence the government refuses to hand over. And she has.

If the government just gave it to her, then she would read it and she (and she is an extremely senior judge) would decide if any of it was so serious for reasons of national defence/privacy/etc that she thought it needed to be redacted. But the current government won’t even do that. They won’t trust her to make a decision.

Instead, they have sued her. This is absurd.

They are going to ask a judge more junior than her to decide (not that she made a slip up or an error) if she made a decision no reasonable judge could ever have made – i.e. that she’s a rogue and not an appropriate person to chair an inquiry after all. Good luck with that.

But the farce becomes even more strange when you look at the detail. We have tick boxes when you fill in a form to sue someone. This form has an ‘is this urgent?’ tick box. The government ticked ‘no’. How is this not urgent?

The government is suing a judge (that should be repeated ten times over) to keep some messages out of the public eye. Rishi Sunak is suing a judge to hide them. What are the public to think?