The unfair attacks on Liz Truss prove that Parliament has too many lawyers

If there were any doubt that there are too many lawyers in Parliament it has been removed by the meeting, on Monday evening, between backbench Conservative MPs and the justice secretary Liz Truss. The subject was Truss’s alleged failure to defend the judiciary from criticism of last week’s High Court judgement on the enactment of Article 50. One MP was reported as saying: ‘Her job is to defend the judiciary from attack.’

No it isn’t. Liz Truss has special duties as Lord Chancellor – but she is the government’s justice secretary, not CEO of a judges’ trade association. Her duty as Lord Chancellor is to uphold the continued independence (from the government) of the judiciary – not to protect it from public criticism. And her role also involves managing government policy on the legal system, which is often going to require standing up to the vested interests of judges, barristers and solicitors, not sucking up to them.