Here is his summary from JR yesterday.
His feed is hard to read because he reposts a lot of other stuff, and I can’t always find his summaries.
https://x.com/boswelltoday/status/1962827145517912295
Jane Russell’s Closing: A Masterclass in Wishful Thinking
Jane Russell KC’s closing argument for NHS Fife and Dr. Upton was a performance in the art of inversion - turning reality inside out and expecting the tribunal to applaud. She spoke with elegance, but what she asked the panel to believe was preposterous: that a nurse of thirty years’ service was a bully, that a man in a women’s changing room was harmless, and that the law demands women silence their instincts to preserve a colleague’s feelings.
She began with her little parable about hoofbeats - “think horses, not zebras.” According to Russell, Peggie had conjured up a fantasy of danger. Yet the “horse” standing there was obvious: a male body in a female space. Only a lawyer desperate to deflect would try to convince a roomful of adults that it was the zebra.
Her biblical comparison was worse. The tribunal, she claimed, need not decide whether sex is immutable, any more than it must decide if Noah built an Ark in seven days. This was sophistry dressed as wit. Everyone knows that sex matters in law - in medicine, crime, safeguarding, and equality. It is written into the very statutes she pretended to interpret. To wave it away as mere belief was not clever - it was insulting.
Russell then invoked Goodwin and Article 8 as though they were magic words. She insisted that Dr. Upton’s “right to live as a woman” was inviolable. What she omitted was the parallel right of women not to be forced into states of undress with men. Balance, in her telling, meant women bend - always bend - so that one man may feel affirmed.
On the Christmas Eve incident, she painted Peggie as a seething aggressor, her voice full of anger rather than fear. The “prison rape” comment was held up as a cardinal sin. But what Russell ignored was the obvious truth: fear and anger often walk hand in hand. A woman alone, cornered by a man where she should have been safe, is entitled to feel both. Peggie named what was in front of her. That is not harassment. It is honesty.
The evidential gymnastics were almost comic. No “smoking gun” was found, so Peggie must be imagining things. No other women complained, so there must be no problem. In reality, every woman watching this case unfold knows exactly why others stayed silent. Peggie was dragged through suspension, investigation, and character assassination for daring to say what many quietly think. Silence in that climate is not proof of contentment - it is proof of fear.
Russell’s low blow came at the end: the attempt to smear Peggie’s character. Out came the old Facebook scraps, the half-heard rumours of intolerance, the lazy attempt to tar her as racist and homophobic. Thirty years of spotless service, gone in a puff of innuendo. Meanwhile, Upton was burnished as the picture of gentleness, compassion, and saintliness. A fairy tale ending, if one ignored the facts.
And then, the final irony - a hymn to NHS values: kindness, respect, inclusion. Yet there was no kindness in forcing a woman to undress beside a man, no respect in silencing her, and no inclusion in hounding her out of her post.
Russell’s speech was polished but hollow - a plea for the tribunal to forget common sense, biology, and fairness. She dressed fantasy as law and asked the panel to call it justice. The truth is simpler: Peggie asked for a women’s space. Russell told the tribunal that was chasing zebras. In reality, it is Russell who is running after unicorns.