Judge Tanweer Ikram is not your usual judge. Ikram, who has a CBE to his name for services to diversity, has tirelessly insisted that minorities need to see people looking like them in senior positions (he has Pakistani Muslim heritage). Whether you see him as an innovative radical or a dreary progressive, Ikram is now mired in less savoury controversy.

Last month, he notoriously gave a 12-month conditional discharge to three women guilty of publicly displaying paraglider images supporting Hamas, a banned terrorist group. It was quickly pointed out afterwards that he had previously ‘liked’ a post on LinkedIn accusing Israel of terrorism in Gaza (something he says he did mistakenly). Understandably it was suggested that having done this he ought to have recused himself from the trial for apparent bias.

Is tolerance for such matters a price worth paying for the preservation of judicial independence?

Comparisons were also made to a case last year when Ikram sentenced six retired policemen to suspended prison sentences for sharing racist messages on a private Whatsapp group; and to his jailing, in 2022, of a policeman who did the same (something he later recalled with pride to a US audience, adding that he had thereby ‘horrified’ the police). The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office is now reportedly looking into him over allegations of bias in relation to the latest controversy.

Quite right, you might say. At the very least he has been both imprudent and injudicious. Whatever the strict legalities, his failure to withdraw from the paraglider trial left an unfortunate impression of partiality: there is something curious in sentencing a private sharer of unacceptable jokes much more severely than a public supporter of terrorism. His later publicising of the cases involving police goes against the expectation that judges should not talk publicly about controversial cases they hear.

All this is true. But authorities still need to think very carefully before making this a formal disciplinary matter: in the long run the cure could well be worse than the disease.

First, no attack is being made on Judge Ikram’s integrity. No one is alleging actual bias or ill will: the complaint is more than anything about foolishness and insensitivity to the impressions he creates.

Secondly, for all its misguidedness there is a strong argument that his conduct was not entirely beyond the pale. The failure to recuse himself in the paragliders trial was ill-considered but arguably not illegal. Furthermore, it is telling that the Crown Prosecution Service seems to have accepted that any attempt at a judicial review of the sentence he imposed there would probably fail. And while the Guide to Judicial Conduct does warn judges against careless talk, they do on occasion refer publicly, at least in passing, to cases they have tried. His Honour may have been thoughtless in the vehement terms he used to his American audience, but whether he should be publicly rapped over the knuckles for a faux pas of this sort is more doubtful.

This all strongly suggests that a softer approach of the kind prevalent before we had formal investigations by a Judicial Conduct Investigations Office would be more appropriate: a quiet word behind the scenes suggesting he would do well to look before he leaps. If we want our judiciary to behave in a seemly way and not diminish our respect for them or the law they administer, trust and suasion are a far better way to do that than dry questions of whether rules have or have not been broken. While formal sanctions may have to be available, they are best kept for serious and clear breaches.

We must take care not to suppress judicial viewpoint diversity – arguably, indeed, something much more important than racial diversity. As every barrister knows, for every Judge Ikram there will also be other judges whose private views lean in a different direction. This is no bad thing. If we want to attract the brightest and best to the Bench – something becoming more difficult with increasing government penny-pinching – we cannot afford to discourage even those known to have strong views from applying.

And before you wholeheartedly back the idea that something needs to be done to bring Judge Ikram into line, consider one thing: next time the boot may be on the other foot. Imagine that in future a different judge, perhaps someone with known libertarian sympathies, deals lightly with some fool expressing unfortunate views in private online but comes down hard on someone guilty of openly glorifying terrorism, and then defends in public an expansive view of free speech.

Would you really want to see disciplinary proceedings against them? Or is tolerance for such matters a price worth paying for the preservation of judicial independence? It’s always worth remembering that measures taken against those you disagree with might somewhere, sometime, equally apply to your friends.