The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his chosen Attorney-General, Baron Hermer, both professional lawyers, seem to take the view that lying is just an aspect of public relations and parliament an irrelevance. As the Roman republic collapsed under the assault led by Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, Cicero reflected, in those perilous times, on the nature of the relationship between civil law (ius civile, the term given to the bulk of statute law in Rome) and government and how it might be enabled to control the situation.
He turned, for example, to the jurists. These freelance experts in law, though they had no professional standing whatsoever, provided opinions on legal matters to anyone who wanted them. What, he wondered, would they have made of the legal situation in 510 bc when Lucretia was raped by the king’s son and the king’s family was thrown out, leading to the emergence of a republic? At that time, Cicero pointed out, there was no written law against rape, but any jurist worth his salt would unquestionably have justified that expulsion for an obvious crime against humanity. ‘Natural law’ demanded it.
That the essence of law should be framed in similar broad terms, whatever the specific details of the law at any time, seemed to Cicero to be an important principle. So he identified examples of what he meant, all of which were abstractions regularly referenced by jurists and judges in giving their opinions, such as fairness (aequitas), custom (mos) and good faith (bona fides). He went on to argue that the overriding principle, for him at any rate, was salus populi, ‘the security of the people’. Summarising his views, he concluded that the arbiter of the partnership that held people and government together should be the will and consent of the people, under the umbrella of a legal consensus that embraced both the written law and those abstract, eternal principles that should need no spelling out. It seems unlikely that lies and contempt for democracy come under any of those headings, but who knows what ‘unwritten laws’ might be applied to government by political lawyers following the dictum ‘To thine own career be true’.
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