Paul Dacre: Do I regret the ‘Enemies of the people’ front page? Hell no!

So what to make of the extreme language, veering from the histrionic to the hysterical, dominating political discourse? The words ‘surrender’, ‘treachery’ and ‘sabotage’ ricochet around Westminster. According to Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Supreme Court’s verdict is a ‘constitutional coup’. For the Sun it’s ‘an incendiary coup by political judges’. David Cameron describes Michael Gove as a ‘foam-flecked Faragist’. Boris Johnson is painted as the Antichrist. All of which puts into perspective my own somewhat hackneyed contribution to this lexicon of acrimony. It is nearly three years since the Mail’s headline ‘Enemies of the people’ detonated a national debate over whether judges were hijacking political powers. Written five minutes before deadline, this somewhat clunky reference to an Ibsen play was meant to capture Brexit ministers’ rage at the court’s ‘undemocratic’ decision to insist parliament must vote on triggering Article 50. Interestingly, the Telegraph’s front page that day, ‘The judges versus the people’, was almost identical, but it was the Mail, the chatterati’s favourite bogeyman, that was criticised. Was this fair?

Let me be clear: I revere the independence, intelligence and integrity that, by and large, characterises Britain’s judiciary, just as I hold sacred the principle of press freedom that has defined this country for 300 years. But I also bear copious scars from losing millions of Rothermere shekels in libel courts that didn’t seem to believe in press freedom. And I’ve broken bread with too many home secretaries — particularly David Blunkett — who raged at unelected judges using the Human Rights Act to thwart elected politicians from expelling terrorists. The truth is judges are no less fallible than editors and ministers, all of whom see life and truth through very different prisms. But in this country there is a childish fiction that judges are Olympian figures who, chosen in penumbral obscurity, are unaffected by their political or personal beliefs and therefore beyond scrutiny.