Jonathan Sumption (London, aged 73) is said to be staying at the Tower of London along with the rest of the Crown Jewels. ‘Britain’s brightest mind’, as friends and rivals have dubbed him, has an unusual capacity for analysis and rhetoric, and from time to time is the source of information to shake off clichés and prejudices about a complex country, even in his own clumsiness.
Rebellious and adamant when it comes to defending what he passionately believes in, the former UK Supreme Court Justice has been one of the most critical voices of confinement during the pandemic. Governments – he fundamentally criticized that of Boris Johnson – had succumbed to fear and ignorance and imposed draconian measures that were financially and psychologically ruining younger generations and exacerbating other public health problems, such as untreated cancer cases.
Just in the week that the final report on Downing Street partying during lockdown was released, he says he shares the general anger over the Partygate scandal, but for different reasons than most.
“The rules were ambiguous and poorly worded. You couldn’t leave the house if you didn’t want to work. Then what happens if during your workday someone shows up with a bottle of champagne and another 10 join them? It’s not entirely clear that this was illegal, so I think the only fine Johnson ever got was for the party at his 10 Downing Street flat. There are very good reasons to get rid of a politician like Johnson, but this holiday season doesn’t seem like the strongest to me. If he’d been an exceptional prime minister, it wouldn’t have cost me a damn if he broke those rules. The real problem with this story is that it has made Johnson’s level of integrity ambiguous. His statements to Parliament [negando las fiestas] They were intentionally misleading when not simply lying. And this is something very serious. There are people like me who believe the rules were an outrageous abuse. Others thought it was right. But both agree on something: Johnson has to go. Though I suspect he’ll come up with that, too,” Sumption admits, still smiling.
When Sumption commented on the perennial conflict between London and Brussels over the protocol for Northern Ireland’s accession to the EU, Sumption caught his interlocutor unprepared. He has dual citizenship, one Irish and one British. He knows that most English people “give a fig” in this remote part of the UK. But he understands that a tariff barrier separating this region from the rest of the country is unsustainable.
“It was an agreement dishonestly signed by the British government. I don’t think Boris Johnson ever intended that. The idea of creating a tariff barrier within the UK is absolutely intolerable. I think we have no choice but to change the protocol unilaterally. But I will never forgive Johnson for putting us in such a deeply damaging situation, where we must choose between honoring an international treaty we have signed or defending a vital UK interest. It’s an unbearable situation,” he argues.
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– But it’s about avoiding a new border in Ireland that reignites sectarian tensions…
“I never bought the argument that a new border would revive terrorism. Among other things, because the IRA now has a completely different position than before the Good Friday Agreement [el acuerdo de paz de 1998]. He has an increasingly realistic prospect of seizing political power. Sinn Féin, which was their political arm, is the most voted formation in the two Irelands. I think they discovered a long time ago that they could do a lot more with the ballot box.”
He graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford University, with a degree in Medieval History. As he approached 40, he decided that practicing teaching would leave him unsatisfied. He trained as a barrister, that very British type of lawyer who, unlike the solicitor, neither has anything to do with the client nor gets lost in the dirt. Your task is to find the best legal argument to convince the judge or the court. Sumption was convincing enough for Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to emerge victorious in the grand trial that pitted him against his former partner Boris Berezovski. Or that Tony Blair’s government would overturn a sentence for allegedly inflating data on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the primary reason for the invasion of that country.
Without going through an intermediary court, Sumption was appointed a judge at the UK Supreme Court, where he remained from 2012 to 2018. He was one of the most powerful voices within the institution in defense of the ruling that forced the British government (Theresa May was Prime Minister at the time) to go through Parliament and invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty that marked the point which there was no going back to Brexit, to be approved by law. Only the parliament, not the government, had sovereignty to press the exit button on the community institutions.
“I think Brexit was a very unfortunate thing, but not crazy. It was a rational decision. I do not share the arguments linking it to xenophobia, lies, or imperial nostalgia. The British preferred independence to prosperity,” Sumption said at a meeting on Monday. “Britain made a mistake and I fear there is no turning back now. The only way to return to a united Europe would be after a major overhaul of the community’s institutions, and that would only happen if there was an economic catastrophe first. Something unlikely,” he concludes.
“Brexit is a defense of a British foreign policy with a 500-year history that has always fought to ensure that no single power dominates the continent. Whether Napoleon or Hitler. Everything indicates that the EU will become something of a big federal state in the long term. The paradox is that by leaving the United Kingdom, it has weakened the part of the European Union most opposed to federalism, bringing closer what it feared: a large continental bloc over which it is also no longer in control will have. The reality is that British politics and economics continue to be dominated by Europe without having the rise that we have had. A serious mistake,” he says.
Between trial and trial, Sumption wrote four historian-acclaimed volumes on the Hundred Years’ War, which underscore his high level of analysis and attention to detail. Interestingly, the story has made him very skeptical about the law’s ability to improve people’s lives. “When you multiply rights, you increase complaints,” he has occasionally written.
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