For a man who once sang the praises of the jury system, David Lammy was mysteriously absent when MPs gathered to quiz the Government about plans to, well, thin out jury trials across most cases.
Rather than showing up to defend this legal shake-up, he dispatched Sarah Sackman — his junior minister and, as it turned out, an unexpectedly theatrical stand-in.
Enter the Deputy, Brimming With Starch
Ms Sackman KC drifted into the Commons with the sort of lofty poise one normally reserves for an opera conductor or a barrister halfway through a devastating summation. One hand stayed firmly tucked in her pocket, the other fluttering and stabbing at the air as though she were orchestrating an invisible orchestra.
At moments, it felt as if she might break into a jaunty Dvořák routine.
Her manner left little doubt: this was not someone you would wish presiding over your own fate in a courtroom.
But she had a job to do — and she meant to do it with maximum hauteur.
A Tory Challenge and an Uncomfortable Memory
The discussion had been forced by Robert Jenrick, who secured an urgent question on the issue — the sort Cabinet ministers traditionally groan about and spin toward a junior instead.
On most subjects, the Commons tolerates the substitution.
But on jury trials, a topic ideally handled without partisanship, Lammy’s absence rang louder than usual.
And perhaps it was inevitable. After all, he had loudly celebrated the virtues of juries in the past.
He’d even authored a Whitehall review stressing their importance to ethnic minority defendants. The Commons had not forgotten.
So when Sackman insisted Lammy’s earlier praise came from “a very different context,” the benches erupted.
She didn’t much care for the mockery — her expression pinched, and her voice hollowed out in indignation.
Jenrick’s Harrumphing Machine Gets Going
By then, Jenrick had already unleashed a stream of complaints with the speed and force of sausages flying out of an over-worked butcher’s press.
He declared that trusting twelve everyday people was fundamental to the justice system.
Labour, he thundered, simply didn’t believe ordinary citizens were capable.
The lawyers, in his telling, wanted to run everything.
Sackman, unfazed and apparently quite sure she knew better, opened her reply with a lofty “how extraordinary.” The Tories bellowed their approval.
Blame Games and Budget Arguments
She shot back that Conservatives had starved the courts of money.
The problem with that claim, several MPs noted, was that the latest Budget had spent lavishly on welfare programmes — making it hard to pin every gap on “fourteen years of Tory decline.”
This point, delivered gently by Sir Desmond Swayne, sailed straight past Sackman, who claimed not to understand his “rant.”
It hadn’t been a rant. But perhaps gentleness is an unfamiliar dialect.
Concerns About Bias, From All Angles
Labour’s Kim Johnson suggested that juries were less prone to racism than judges.
Her colleague Brian Leishman, recalling years on Scottish golf greens, distrusted judges because many had emerged from private schools.
He had likely seen enough blazer-and-tie rule-bending on the fairway to last a lifetime.
Sackman reacted as though she’d been told the Earth was square, rhapsodising about the absolute purity and independence of judges. It was quite the performance.
Warnings of Authoritarian Shades
Sian Berry of the Greens went further, calling the proposal a “toolkit for authoritarianism.”
Sackman bristled again, insisting that modernisation was overdue and repeatedly leaning on the example of rape cases — pointedly refusing to say “alleged victims.”
A ribbon for a rape-awareness campaign, pinned prominently on her outfit, served as her visual punctuation.
A Misstep and a Scolding
Sir Edward Leigh, who earlier had described juries as the nation’s bulwark against tyranny, chuckled at a remark from a colleague during yet another of Sackman’s references to rape victims.
This was all the excuse she needed to paint him as some prehistoric villain — a manoeuvre that showed just how dangerous emotional politics can become in the wrong hands.
A Pin to Burst the Bubble
Then Lincoln Jopp stood up. If Sackman was so appalled by long waits for justice, he asked, how could she support pursuing soldiers over Northern Ireland incidents half a century old? And with that, one small but gleaming bubble of legal self-assurance burst.
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