A Judge's Journey: the former Supreme Court Judge discusses his new memoir with renowned lawyer Richard Rampton QC

From judges being denounced as ‘Enemies of the People’, to speculation on the symbolism of Supreme Court Judge Lady Hale’s spider brooch, the UK’s justice system has been a surprising subject of recent media attention.

A former Supreme Court Judge himself, John Dyson is no stranger to the spotlight, most famously presiding over the 2013 case when a Christian B&B owner refused a room to a gay couple. The grandson of Eastern European Jewish migrants, Dyson attended Leeds Grammar School before studying classics at Oxford. In 2016 he retired as Master of the Rolls, the second most senior judge in England and Wales.

Richard Rampton QC has also hit the media – for his defence of Deborah Lipstadt in the David Irving Holocaust denial case and for representing George Galloway against The Daily Telegraph over allegations that the politician received money from Saddam Hussein’s regime. These eminent lawyers met to discuss Dyson’s memoir, A Judge’s Journey, and the future of Britain’s judiciary.

Richard Rampton: Anthony Julius has been pressing me to write a book on the causes of antisemitism. They are hard to find. Can you throw any light on that?

John Dyson: Many people have written about it including Anthony in his Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. I touch on it in A Judge’s Journey.In Leeds, there was a Jewish boy in my class. He was a real pain. The teacher was very mild-mannered but this boy tipped him over the edge and he suddenly bellowed, ‘You people, you people are all the same!’ I can still hear him saying it. Then he realised he shouldn’t have said it and carried on as if nothing had happened. This was in the 1950s and although I’ve never experienced anything like that since then, I’ve had this feeling of it existing on a low level around me.

RR: I’m an outsider and I’m conscious of it. When I was growing up there was all this talk about, “We can’t have Jews in the golf club, they don’t drink enough”.

JD: When I joined the legal profession, you heard the same. Jews had to set up their own practices in the West End and these posh pukka City firms turned their noses up at them. Now that’s all changed.

RR: It changed slowly. I was one of the protégés of Arnold Goodman. He started the law firm Goodman Derrick but he was a one-man band for a long time. He felt an outsider but eventually it was the other way round – gentiles were asking to join the firm.

JD: In Leeds Jews had to set up their own golf club. But now non-Jews form the majority of members.

RR: Antisemitism is surfacing more. The CST, which monitors antisemitic incidents, logged 1,652 serious cases in 2018 – the highest on record. There were 892 cases in the first six months of 2019, also a record. I grew up in a left-wing family. But none of us can go near the Labour Party now.

JD: For Jews, their natural habitat was the Labour Party. It’s deeply upsetting to see MPs such as Luciana Berger and Louise Ellman go through this. Isn’t it a sorry state of affairs that Labour is being investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission? That is a terrible condemnation of the party. We need a strong opposition at the moment.

RR: How is the judiciary regarded by the public?

JD: I think they are respected and held in high regard. More so than earlier in my career, when there were a couple of home secretaries who were unpleasant about the judges. You still get the odd criticism – it was ridiculous that the business minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, used the word ‘biased’ about the judges’ decision on the proroguing of parliament [in September 2019] – but that sort of thing is rare.

RR: Our main strands of freedom are our free press and an independent judiciary. Are there ways we can make the judiciary more secure than it already is?

JD: Elected judges are not a good idea. On the coat tails of the first Gina Miller decision [that parliament should authorise the triggering of Article 50] there were politicians such as Iain Duncan Smith who said parliament has to have some input in appointing judges. But we should not go for the US system, which is terrible.

RR: When you worked in the court of criminal appeal did you get complaints that judges summed up in a biased way because defendants were black?

JD: No. But we have a long way to go regarding black and Asian judges. There are lots at the lower level but very few at high court level. You‘ve got to encourage them to apply.
But the number of women on the Bench is increasing. In my four years as Master of the Rolls the number of women on the court increased from four to nine out of 36. It’s still low. But you can’t have positive discrimination. Many women have told me: ‘People will say I’m only here because I’m a woman, not because I’m good enough.’ But things have changed since the days when my pupil master told me, ‘The bar is not a profession for women because they get emotionally involved in their cases and have high-pitched, squeaky voices.’

RR: What about human rights after Brexit? Is membership of the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights under threat with people like Boris Johnson in charge?

JD: Brexit alone will not affect human rights law. For a long time there was a lot of rhetoric from the Tories, such as Theresa May’s ludicrous remark that the Human Rights Act [passed in the UK in 1998] protected an illegal immigrant from deportation on the grounds that he had a cat. There is a danger. Chris Grayling once said to me, “Mark my words, we will get rid of the Human Rights Act.” I’ve heard it expressed that once the Conservatives have got through Brexit they will turn their attention to the Convention on Human Rights and get rid of the Human Rights Act.

RR: Is there too much interference in our domestic law by Strasbourg?

JD: There was a criticism that Strasbourg was too interventionist and not paying regard to local culture. But this concern is not confined to the UK. France and Switzerland have also expressed that concern. Recently, Strasbourg has shown more appreciation for the culture of member states. For example, there were French laws which banned religious clothing in public. The French have the tradition of ‘laïcité’ (secularism in public affairs), and that was the inspiration for these laws. I thought Strasbourg would say that French law is contrary to human rights law but it recognised that laïcité was embedded in French culture.
One controversial case concerned the radical preacher Abu Qatada. Qatada was detained in the UK under anti-terrorism laws in 2002, but was not prosecuted for any crime. The UK decided that he could not be deported to Jordan to face a trial there because the evidence that would be used against him had been obtained by torture. Our decision was not well received in the press, but it accorded with the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg court that a person can’t be sent anywhere where he might face the death penalty or face a trial in which the evidence against him has been obtained by torture.
I understood why people said he was an awful man, and asked “what about the human rights of his victims?” To which the answer was and is: we should uphold the high standards of a civilised society. The most appalling criminal is entitled to the same standard of a fair trial as everybody else.

John Dyson will appear at Jewish Book Week, Sunday 8 March, in association with JR. The event is now sold out, but tickets are available to a concurrent screening of the discussion, also at Kings Place. 11am. £9.50. www.kingsplace.co.uk

This article also features in the Jan 2020 issue of JR.