In the attorney general, Boris Johnson has the ideal stooge for his reckless nation-splitting policies
If you wanted to be kind, you could say that the attorney general is no worse than any other politician on the make: she advances her career by telling her party what it wants to hear. If you wanted to be unkind, you could say that the attorney general is a deluded dogmatist who feeds the paranoia of the Tory party’s base while betraying her professional principles to please its dictatorial leaders.
I want to be unkind because the British constitution (what’s left of it) says that the law officers should not be like other politicians. The lord chancellor, as head of the Ministry of Justice, swears an oath promising he “will respect the rule of law”. The attorney general is the government’s barrister, who, in the words of the Conservative MP and former solicitor general Oliver Heald, must make sure that “ministers act lawfully, in accordance with the rule of law”.
