Caught in the middle was Elizabeth Truss, the justice secretary. The next morning, Truss wrote to her fellow ministers stressing that the judges were independent and urging them to desist from further attacks. However, Truss herself came under attack from the Law Society and one of her predecessors as Lord Chancellor, Labour’s Charlie Falconer, who said that since the judges ‘can’t defend themselves’ it was Truss’s ‘constitutional duty’ to do so.
