Obiter is picturing the scene outside the robing room of the Royal Courts of Justice, a bright June day, round about lunchtime, some years ago. The lord chief justice, master of the rolls and other judicial luminaries are handed a novel garment.
‘A t-shirt, you say?’ one of them queries.
‘A casual garment, m’lud,’ replies a patient assistant. ‘To be worn on today’s London hashtag Legal Walk.’
‘I see. Well this is for charity. I suppose we’d better put them on. What do hashtag do again?’
A few minutes later the judges emerge, casual garments worn over their double cuffed shirts, cufflinks in place, and the stiff collars of their shirts neatly folded out over t-shirts reading ‘Courts and Tribunals Judiciary’.
It was always a reassuring sight on the 10k walk – a sort of visual representation of judicial detachment from our casual world of care.
Except that this year… it didn’t happen. Lord Burnett and his colleagues, no less distinguished in learning and experience than their predecessors, lined up wearing t-shirts with nothing on underneath.
Well, it was awfully hot, you might think. But Obiter has another theory. This is simply the penultimate phase in the completion of the ambitious, modernising, court and tribunal reform programme, begun in 2016, and due for completion in 2024.
As the HMCTS modernisation blog admits: ‘We’ve taken stock and looked realistically at what we can achieve and by when.’ Removing judicial dress shirts would seem to be low-hanging modernisation fruit compared, say, to full digitisation in 2023.
All well and good, but walkers may also have noticed that the lord chancellor, Alex Chalk MP, has rather gone the other way. He eschewed the traditional t-shirt, retaining a dress shirt - and adding a suit jacket.
It was a bit of a surprise, given how many members of the government are regularly seen jogging in running shorts in public or cycling in lycra. Perhaps cuts at the MoJ have now culled an adviser post too many, leaving Chalk unadvised on this aspect of his role.
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