Do you remember “the Supremes”? Not the great Motown girl band of the 1960s, but that classic episode of The West Wing from March 2004. It concerns a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court and the machinations that President Josiah Bartlet has to go through in order to nominate a progressive woman.
If a Bake Off-deprived BBC commissioned a new “Great British” political drama, the equivalent episode would be no less poignant. The Prime Minister meets with her new Justice Secretary—both of them women. Yes both women, and not only because the Westminster Wing would be set in a liberal fantasyland, but because that’s where reallife politics has progressed to in the age of Theresa May and Elizabeth Truss. But the anxious discussion of their screenplay equivalents concerns why the judiciary in general and Supreme Court in particular has failed to keep up. Each laments the fact that after well over a decade in our highest court—and due to retire in a few short years—Baroness Hale of Richmond remains the first and only woman. I don’t want to spoil the suspense for you, but in short they resolve that something must be done.