When a supreme court judge is a household name, it’s either because they’re very outspoken on a hot topic, or because you’re living in choppy times, and there are so few grownups left among the legislators that the law has to put its hoof down. Brenda Hale, the right honourable Baroness Hale of Richmond (she doesn’t stand on ceremony, but she’d be annoyed if you got it wrong, preferring things to be right) emphatically doesn’t fall into the first camp, but was thrown into the spotlight in 2019. This was when she found Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament – which meant his government could evade scrutiny in the run-up to Britain’s exit from the EU – unlawful.
Now retired, she was then head of the supreme court and boy could she accessorise. She handed down that ruling wearing a spider brooch with a body as big as a plum, and one headline that week ran: “Spider woman takes down Hulk: viewers transfixed by judge’s brooch as ruling crushes PM.” Johnson, of course, was not crushed, but got his miserable deal through and survived to make a complete, self-serving hash of the next crisis. “I’m not going to make any comment about Brexit,” she says, slightly incredulous that I would ask. I can’t help it, unfortunately. It’s like a tic.
