Martin Hammond, Boris Johnson’s housemaster at Eton, once wrote that his former charge “believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the obligation which binds everyone else”.
Nothing has changed. Three decades later British courts routinely rule that Johnson and his government have broken laws. They illegally prorogued parliament to thwart opposition to Brexit. They have acted unlawfully by preventing asylum seekers from working, locking up cross-channel migrants in a Kent barracks, failing to publish details of lucrative Covid contracts and handing a £560,000 market research contract to friends of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. The Good Law Project is now going to court to challenge Johnson’s award of a peerage to Peter Cruddas, a Tory donor (who gave £500,000 to the party three days after taking his seat), despite opposition from the Lords Appointments Commission.
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