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Lord Pannick invites court to rule @BorisJohnson improperly used royal prerogative to suspend parliament on basis of principle rather than precedent. Which - and I may be wrong - feels like slightly shaky ground.
The counter-argument of course would be that @BorisJohnson has created a precedent which the Supreme Court may regard as heinous and that it should rule as illegal to rein in the potential for the executive to become over-mighty
One Supreme Court judge has just hit nail on head when saying it would be “comforting to have some authority” [or precedent] for determining the limit of executive power in this case. In other words, the Supreme Court is doing something quite fundamental, which is to determine...
that limit. This is to confirm quite how important this case is. It is all about establishing the balance of power between MPs and the PM.
To state the obvious, this is all about where politics ends and the law begins. And under our unwritten constitution, there is a very heavy responsibility on the judges to get this right
There is a further very heavy implication of Pannick’s argument, that the UK is fundamentally a representative democracy and sovereignty is with MPs, not what the PM borrows from the monarch - and that ministers are the “constitutionally junior partner, with MPs...
the senior partner. There is an implication that Boris Johnson’s populist argument that he is obliged to extract the UK do or die from the EU on 31 October, citing a mandate from the 2016 referendum, is completely alien to and at odds with the British constitution
Pannick: “The basic principle is that parliament is supreme. The executive is answerable to parliament...This is a unique case. It has never before occurred”. His nutshell: the inferior body, the executive, cannot prevent the superior body, parliament, from exercising its powers
One Supreme Court judge asks the reasonable question why this is a matter for the court, when MPs failed to exercise their right to throw out the PM through vote of no confidence to ward off the prorogation. I think this will turn out to be important
Pannick’s response is that his argument is a pure matter of law, that the PM advised the Queen illegally. And that therefore the failure of MPs to throw out Johnson is neither here nor there.
“Is it an invalid use of [prerogative] power for the pm to exercise it to avoid parliamentary scrutiny?” The deceptively simple question that the Supreme Court must settle, says Pannick
We’ve got to the heart of the matter. The judges will have to decide whether the five-week prorogation was disproportionately long to pave the way for a Queen’s Speech and new legislative programme, whether the more important and noxious effect of sending MPs home is to...
undermine Parliament’s ability to scrutinise the executive at a historically important time.
We now come to the Kwasi Kwarteng issue, as it were - which is that many people see judges as improperly wading into politics. Pannick says that just because the suspension of parliament has inflamed political passions does not mean there is no proper case to be heard, that...
the issue is not justiciable. He is trying to put fire in the bellies of the judges, steel in their backbones.
If this is not a justiciable issue or a case for them, Pannick warns the judges, they must then bear in mind that another PM might feel justified in suspending parliament for six months or a year. In other words he is saying that what is at stake in this case is whether...
the law can prevent a PM becoming an elected dictator. Pannick closes. Time for lunch
