James Forsyth James Forsyth

Chris Grayling: ‘I want to see our Supreme Court supreme again’

It’s not enough to repeal the Human Rights Act, says Chris Grayling – our Supreme Court, not Strasbourg, must be supreme

When I meet Chris Grayling in his departmental office, I do a double take. The Justice Secretary is not wearing a suit or even his Lord Chancellor’s robes but a pair of pale chinos and a pink Ralph Lauren button-down shirt. Noticing my surprise, Grayling reveals that this is his definition of ‘smart casual’: he’s off to a Tory away day straight after the interview.

Grayling is 6ft 5 and his height makes his mood pretty obvious. Straight after the last election, his shoulders were hunched and his head was down. As he now admits, ‘I didn’t want us to go into coalition.’ Compounding his misery, he had missed out on a cabinet post despite having been shadow home secretary. But Grayling is now in cabinet and standing tall. He beams as he shows me the view from his room, which sweeps round from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall.

When Grayling replaced Ken Clarke as Justice Secretary, it signalled a hardening of the Tory position on a host of issues, most notably the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. Grayling declares that ‘the whole situation now is wholly and utterly unacceptable’. His view is that they were ‘never designed to do the kind of things they are doing today’. He complains that the European Court has ‘an almost unlimited jurisprudence to decide what it thinks are human rights matters and the envelope is being pushed wider and wider and wider’.

But condemning the current situation is the easy part; working out what to do about it the hard part. Grayling promises that he’ll set out his answer in ‘draft legislation which we will publish later in the year, next year’.

He won’t be drawn on the specifics of what will be in this bill.

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