Jenrick Skirts Legal Hot Water
Robert Jenrick is certainly the immigration minister that the government wants and deserves even if nobody else does.
Last month his order to paint over a Mickey Mouse mural at a Children’s Asylum Centre for fear that it was ‘too welcoming’ was emblematic of immigration policy under the Tories: cruel yet ineffective.
Now the minister has been made to look a fool once again on LBC during a carcrash interview with Andrew Castle.
The interview itself concerned an article in The Sun on Sunday that Jenrick had written. In particular the piece discussed “a top lawyer who advised Labour on anti-racism policies [and] is at the forefront of efforts to stop people being deported to Rwanda”.
As Castle points out, any person who is opposed to the plan has every right to explore the legal options available to them but interest naturally turned to the identity of this mysterious lawyer.
In a bizarre move, Jenrick continued to maintain that the identity was there in the article when it was clear to anyone who had actually read it that the name was not included. Meanwhile the immigration minister then refused to provide the name himself.
This vaudeville performance that might have come straight out of and episode The Thick Of It has a couple of interesting things going on in the background.
For a start, Jenrick’s unfamiliarity with his own article is likely a sign that he himself did not actually write it. This should not be too surprising as it is likely something that a special adviser hashed out on the back of a beer mat in the pub after work on a Friday evening. However it also seems to be clear that Jenrick didn’t even bother to read the piece before he went on LBC to discuss it.
We obviously still don’t know the name of the lawyer but on Twitter, Jessica Simor KC speculated that it might well be Jacqueline McKenzie. McKenzie is a highly respected immigration solicitor who was appointed by the Home Office to sit on the Independent Advisory Group to the Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
Attacking someone who played such a significant role in examining one of the greatest scandals perpetrated by a government in recent memory (in the department where Jenrick is a minister) is not a good look.
Furthermore the allegations made against the mysterious lawyer also open Jenrick up to potential legal action for defamation. This is the most likely reasoning behind the minister’s ridiculous performance on LBC. He knows that the claims are made-up or cannot be supported by the evidence. That is why the name was pulled from the newspaper article and why Jenrick refuses to give the name up in an interview despite being asked countless times.
As a general election gets nearer and Conservative MPs fear for their seats you can expect to see a lot more of this. The campaign will sail close to the wind trying to paint Labour as soft and it will be lawyers made out to be the villains.
This week on the podcast we return to the classics as a medical negligence case invites the Supreme Court to take a fresh look at the Bolam test.
Episode link: http://uklawweekly.com/2023-uksc-26/
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