The Cabinet Office is trying to weaponise the law against a former prime minister. They have threatened to withdraw funding for his legal fees during the Covid inquiry. Government lawyers wrote to Johnson:
The funding offer will cease to be available to you if you knowingly seek to frustrate or undermine, either through your own actions or the actions of others, the government’s position in relation to the inquiry unless there is a clear and irreconcilable conflict of interest on a particular point at issue.
To even threaten this is a tyrannical act, the capricious move of a mad monarch. Oddly, it’s the kind of arbitrary behaviour that Boris Johnson’s enemies were accusing him of. The idea the government can stop paying a former PM’s legal fees is wrong. But the idea they might threaten it in order to get him to do as they wish? Oh, that is much worse.
Because if you are the government, you are in charge of the coffers. You are in charge of all the public money that is raised by taxes. To suddenly say you will only give some of that money that is lawfully due unless the person does as you say: well, that is a very serious misuse of power.
An analogy is this. The public pay the legal fees of people charged with criminal offences. Some of those people are guilty. Some of them are innocent. We pay for both and we let the justice system do its job. To turn to any of those people, the guilty and the innocent, and say ‘I will only pay for your lawyers if you admit you are guilty’ would be grotesque. The antithesis of justice. It is wrong, plain and simple.
But that is what the government is purporting to do to Boris. He can only have his lawyers paid for if he supports the government. As a lawyer I find that absurd, not least of all because I have published on the ridiculous case against the Covid inquiry chair.
But by bringing that deranged case in the first place, the government is making Boris Johnson incur legal fees (unsurprisingly, he has reportedly sacked his team of government lawyers and replaced them with a firm’s). If I sue you tomorrow, even if my case is a joke, you will incur costs the minute you go to a solicitor and try to defend yourself.
The government is making Boris incur costs. The government is now saying they will only pay his costs if he supports them. That is simply wrong, and it is a mockery of justice.
You need to imagine this precedent used by future governments. ‘Run the case we want, or we will cut your funding’ starts to look as sinister as it is when you imagine future scenarios in which it could be deployed.
How the government has got itself to this place is a matter for it to explain. But our constitution has the Law Officers – the attorney general, the solicitor general and the advocate general. We also still have a lord chancellor. Why are they silent?
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