Brexit: Shakespeare Was Dead Right About Lawyers…

Founding partner of SCM Private LLP Gina Miller (C) leaves after the High Court decides th
Dan Kitwood/Getty

“Kill all the lawyers.”

 This has got to be my favourite line from Shakespeare – especially after the British High Court’s decision on the EU Referendum whereby a trio of left-leaning activist judges were able to overturn the democratic will of 17.4 million people by ruling: “No. That thing you all voted for. You can’t have it because obscure technical detail…”

Some cynics saw this coming a mile off, among them the redoubtable Peter Hitchens.

Before the referendum he correctly predicted what he now calls “the greatest constitutional crisis since the Abdication of Edward VIII.”

If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?’

I’m not as pessimistic as Peter Hitchens, partly because no one ever could be, and partly because I don’t want to give succour to the enemy.

Face it, we Brexiteers have enjoyed more than four deliriously happy months bathing in bitter Remainer tears, feeding on their sorrow like misery-sucking vampires, relishing every moment of their denials, their tantrums, their toys-cast-from-prams. So it’s only natural that with the roles temporarily reversed, the Remaintards should seize their brief moment in the sun and begin crowing as if somehow those three lefty ponces in ermine (or whatever it is that left-wing High Court Judges wear: thongs? Gimp suits?) were now going to stop us exiting the EU.

What’s very important, though, in these circumstances is for us not to show we’re upset, like the Remaintards have been doing since June 24. As I delicately put it on Twitter yesterday, they’re already beating themselves off pretty frenziedly as it is – and the very last thing we should do is give them any more masturbatory material.

Anyway, I interrupted myself: the real purpose of this piece was to use a topical news item about Brexit as an excuse to reiterate how much I loathe and detest lawyers.

Some of them, it’s true, are my best friends – but that’s pretty inevitable if you’re university educated: of course lots of your contemporaries will inevitably have gone to the dark side. But doesn’t mean that I don’t view their profession in much the way I view the giant orange slugs that destroy my vegetable patch or the evil squirrels which insinuate their way into my fruit cage and eat my strawberries or the fungal infections I sometimes get between my toes or the swollen mite with a mauve body and purple legs I once found clinging to my left testicle in a bucket shower in the Western Sudan in 1984. And at least with a bit of soap and gentle easing I got rid of the mite; at least I can squash the slugs and decapitate the squirrels in my squirrel trap. Lawyers on the other hand just won’t go away…

Which is as good a way as any of introducing my latest Breitbart podcast with this week’s guest Gary Bell.

He is – you might have guessed – a lawyer. But I fear, try as you might not to, that you’re probably going to like him. He’s fat, rude, cocky but he’s funny and quick on his feet and razor sharp, as you need to be when you’re one of Britain’s top criminal barristers.

One of the things that’s interesting about him is that he used to be a criminal himself. In his misspent youth, he narrowly escaped a prison sentence for slot machine fraud. Also, he used to be a football hooligan with the nickname Animal. (Hence the title of his very readable autobiography which is absolutely begging to be made into a film, probably starring the late John Candy as Gary – Animal QC)

Another reason why you shouldn’t hate him is that Gary is one of the very few people at the bar who is not a liberal-lefty tosser. He definitely voted Brexit and, if he weren’t so infuriatingly career-safe when there’s a recording device in front of him I expect he’d have some trenchant, possibly even Shakespearean words to say about those three activist judges in their ermine gimp suits who think that their wanky and probably erroneous understanding of Constitutional law should take precedence over the will of 17.4 million British subjects…

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