This by Joshua Rozenberg on MoJ appointments (from fb)
A NEW MINISTRY OF JUSTICE
Despite acquiring its sixth Secretary of State in as many years, the Ministry of Justice seems to have emerged well from the reshuffle.
David Lidington was well liked but failed to persuade the Prime Minister to launch the Courts Bill that Theresa May had promised in the Queen’s Speech more than six months ago. That bill was meant to reinstate provisions in the failed Prisons and Courts Bill that senior judges regarded as “essential” to the success of the current £1bn courts reform programme.
Less than 24 hours into the job, Lidington's successor David Gauke put in a measured and unshowy performance answering questions about the Parole Board’s decision to release John Worboys on licence. Gauke announced a departmental review of the board’s (lack of) transparency, to report by Easter, while reaffirming its independence. This was the right call.
Gauke is a commercial lawyer by training and the first solicitor to hold the post. As Bob Neill MP observed, it’s nice to see it’s still possible for a lawyer to become Lord Chancellor. Let’s hope Gauke's experience at the Treasury will stand him in good stead if there are more funding cuts in the offing.
I’m not sorry to see Dominic Raab leave the Ministry of Justice — in a sideways move to Housing rather than the promotion he must have hoped for. Writing in the October issue of Counsel Magazine, I argued that Raab had not yet acquired the self-confidence and judgment that should come from ministerial experience.
He also ordered HM Courts and Tribunals Service to turn down the request I made last summer for a further briefing on the court reforms programme, about which I shall be delivering a major lecture next month.
Raab's successor, Rory Stewart OBE, is a man used to weighing up risks and he will surely see that the damage caused by Raab’s insistence on a publicity blackout for the reforms since the last general election outweighs any advantage to be gained from keeping the public in the dark.
Finally, Sam Gyimah has been replaced as prisons minister by Lucy Frazer QC. I’ve only visited two or three prisons during the past two or three years and I don’t follow subject closely. But reducing the prison population remains an urgent priority.
Lidington has managed to keep the lid on the looming prisons crisis during the past few months and his junior minister can share some of the credit. But Gyimah has always struck me as something of a lightweight.
Frazer, by contrast, was a commercial barrister, a pupil of the hugely impressive David Anderson QC and a member of South Square Chambers in Gray’s Inn before she became an MP less than three years ago. Lidington chose her as his parliamentary private secretary. A former president of the Cambridge Union, Frazer took silk at the age of 40. She comes from a Jewish family in Leeds and is married with two children.
I have high hopes of these new ministers. I’m sure the Foreign Office and Department for International Development were surprised and sorry to lose Stewart as their Minister of State. But their loss is the MoJ’s gain.
Dr Philip Lee remains a junior minister and, at time of writing, Lord Keen of Elie QC remains the Ministry of Justice spokesman in the House of Lords (when he’s not being HM Advocate General for Scotland).
The Attorney General Jeremy Wright QC and the Solicitor General Robert Buckland QC remain in post, doing rather better at surviving than most of their colleagues at the Ministry of Justice. And Shailesh Vara, a junior minster there from 2013 to 2016 and a solicitor, is back in government at the Northern Ireland Office.
There are huge challenges ahead and those of us who follow these matters will do their best to hold these new ministers to account.