Former Downing Street adviser lashes leading lawyers over Brexit views
Dominic Cummings has lashed out at “charlatan campaigning lawyers”, including some of legal Twitter’s best-known commentators.
Taking to Twitter late last night (embedded below), the former Downing Steet adviser and Vote Leave campaign director suggested that solicitor David Allen Green, academic Steve Peers and QCs Jessica Simor and Jolyon Maugham had called Brexit badly wrong and were “really bad at politics”.
He included a screenshot of a Green tweet from two and a half years ago saying that if parliament wouldn’t vote for a Brexit deal or for no deal, the only other possible outcome was no Brexit.
If tempted to believe charlatan campaigning lawyers on Twitter, NB this is good example of their 'expert' analysis, from 7/19 they told Remain supporters 'VL idiots are doomed, genius Grieve will beat them'. Simor, Peers, kimono Jolyon, DAG… They're *really* bad at politics pic.twitter.com/ZAISi4A7Fd
— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) July 25, 2021
“Genius Grieve” is Dominic Grieve, the former MP, Attorney General and leading player in the 2019 parliamentary manoeuvres over Brexit that ended with Cummings’ and the Conservatives’ victory in December that year.
Some of those targeted have also dipped their toes in the water of electoral politics. Simor stood for Change UK in the 2019 European Parliament elections, while Maugham once floated the idea of a pro-EU outfit called “Spring The Party”.
In a blog post responding to Cummings’s tweet, Peers called the views attributed to the group an “unsubstantiated assertion” and noted that, as a lawyer, “judging me on whether I’m ‘bad’ at politics is as relevant as judging me for my skills at pole vaulting or astral projection”.
Simor tweeted: “Is it defamatory to call an honest lawyer a charlatan?”
Meanwhile, Green posted a thread saying “at the time I posted the March 2019 tweet, that was my view based on the evidence available”.
Cummings’ beef with lawyers extends beyond Brexit rows. In other recent tweets, he has charged that “rancid lawyers at the bar line their pockets” with dodgy Russian money and said that “if you’re a serious government lawyers are hired help, you don’t let the lawyers run things”.
