Roy Greenslade - The contradictory attacks of the Brexit-loving press
Napoleon famously
said: “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
I don’t think he had
the Daily Mail, Daily
Telegraph, Daily Express and the Sun in mind, but three senior British
judges may well share Bonaparte’s opinion today.
They were castigated
by the Brexit-loving newspaper quartet because
of their ruling that parliament should trigger article 50 to start the
UK’s resignation from the European Union and not the prime minister, Theresa
May, using royal prerogative powers. These judges are “the
enemies of the people”, says the Mail. They stand accused of frustrating the
will of the people, says the Telegraph. And the Express’s front-page comment
indulges in hyperbole to register its disgust:
Today this country
faces a crisis as grave as anything since the dark days when Churchill vowed we
would fight them on the beaches.
The Sun is more
exercised by the “motley
handful of EU-based campaigners” who launched the legal action. It is
particularly upset about the action being “led by a foreign-born
multi-millionaire”. (This is a newspaper, incidentally, published by a
foreign-born multi-millionaire.) The Telegraph, owned
by multi-millionaires living outside of mainland Britain, sticks to the
constitutional drama, arguing that the high court should never have treated it
as “a justiciable question”.
It argues that Lord
Thomas, the lord chief justice, Sir Terence Etherton, the Master of the Rolls,
and Lord Justice Sales “should have dismissed the case as an abuse of the legal
process”. Oddly, the Telegraph
then states: “This is a political dispute to be settled in parliament, not by
judges.” Sorry? Isn’t that the very point of the ruling?... read more:
