Last Monday was a good night for solicitors, Obiter thought – at least on TV.
With those pesky barristers in fancy costumes usually grabbing the screen, there was a good run for folk on the roll. It started, unexpectedly, with the last episode of Silk, where the barristers who’d grabbed our attentions throughout the series were mostly shown up as a bunch of oversexed, amoral, venal backstabbers.
By contrast, the chap who had been played as the slightly sinister criminal defence solicitor turned out to be a supergrass ready to meet a gangland death to right some wrongs – but not before lecturing peers at the bar for treating justice as a game.
Sadly for the SRA, religion, not a quick look at principles-based regulation, seemed to be the reason. On to BBC2’s Rev, to find the vicar’s solicitor wife, now ‘head of legal aid’ (there’s a household of the squeezed middle), playing a key role in securing an unauthorised gay church wedding for friends (a stance she at least has Chancery Lane’s full policy backing for).
Thence to Newsnight, where it was left to a solicitor – Loughborough MP Nicky Morgan (pictured), economic secretary to the Treasury and former corporate and in-house lawyer – to explain away a few numerical errors in the chancellor’s ‘full employment’ speech.
Quite a night – three programmes, three hero-solicitors. Given the disappearance from chambers of Silk’s one sympathetic barrister – Martha Costello QC – at the end of the programme, Obiter wouldn’t be surprised if she had gone off to requalify.
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