On June 9th I wrote a post (CPS drops charges against Jonathon Seed......'insufficient evidence'. Really?) on the anomalous decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to suddenly drop charges against Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner candidate Jonathon Seed, the former huntmaster of the notorious Avon Vale Hunt who spent years foxhunting and years saying he would repeal the Hunting Act presumably so that he or his colleagues could go foxhunting again without the bother of pretending they’re trail hunting…
I won’t go through the entire story again, but I wrote at the time:
I can’t possibly second-guess why the CPS - after such careful consideration back in September remember - should now decide - weeks before the court appearance - that there is ‘insufficient evidence’ [to charge Seed] but it doesn’t sit well…anyone of a certain age might well be tempted to ask in a Mrs Merton styled question, “Well, CPS, just what was it about the well-connected, fox hunting Tory councillor Jonathan Seed that made you think you had insufficient evidence to convict…?”
Today - coincidentally at pretty much the same time as Conservative Deputy Prime-Minister Dominic Raab was tying himself in knots during the morning media round as he distanced himself from yet another story about duplicity drifting like toxic fog from 10 Downing Street - news surfaced on social media of a highly unusual intervention by the Judge in the Seed case. According to the Oxford Mail, Judge Michael Gledhill QC has ordered the attendance of a senior CPS lawyer to ‘tell me in public why this decision has been taken’, adding for good measure that he ‘is not a rubber stamp’ and that in such a ‘high-profile and sensitive’ case the public was ‘entitled’ to a ‘full and proper explanation’ from the Crown. Damn right…
Of course, while I don’t know precisely what the Judge had in mind when he described the case as ‘sensitive’, for anyone campaigning to keep wildlife safe in Wiltshire Seed’s candidature as Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) was at minimum hugely controversial.
That’s because of the influence inherent in the role of a PCC. While a PCC can not (or should not) be telling the police how to do their job (the enforcement of laws passed by Parliament), they do have responsibilities that include setting out a force’s strategy and policing priorities through the Police and Crime Plan. They can also appoint and dismiss Chief Constables. That can give PCCs a huge amount of influence over ‘direction of travel’.
Pro-hunting lobbyists clearly recognise how they might gain if elected PCCs are on their side. Back in January 2021 ‘Hunting Leaks’ provided a link to the minutes of an April 2020 Hunting Office meeting where this was discussed: Vote-OK (a lobbying group set up to try to ensure that hunt supporters are elected to positions of influence), the Masters of Foxhounds Association, and Countryside Alliance, are all namechecked. (The highlighting is mine.)
PCCs are required to swear an oath of impartiality when they are elected to office, incidentally, but that is largely political impartiality – and the same ‘oath’ that is taken by forces attending fox hunts up and down the country…
During his election campaign Seed repeatedly quashed any debate about his decades-long hunting at the very same time that serious questions were being routinely asked about the way Wiltshire Police (who - like the Met Police - are now in ‘special measures’ of course) were chaperoning hunt meets - including meets involving Seed’s former hunt the Avon Vale.
It is of course a serious matter to question the impartiality of an elected official, but with his history (and what looks to me like supportive silences for foxhunting from local Conservative MPs like Michelle Donelan and James Gray), perhaps those same concerns raised during Seed’s canvassing for PCC have also caused Judge Gledhill to speak out now?
Or maybe a principled, experienced judge (he took silk - or became a QC - in 2001) simply wants to ensure that everyone is treated equally under the law?
It may well be that whatever senior lawyer the CPS sends out does indeed present a plausible reason for dropping charges against a (similarly senior) Conservative councillor who ended up standing in an election he wasn’t eligible for and costing Wiltshire taxpayers an estimated £1.5 million for a re-run. While it is (to put it mildly) incredibly irksome that it will have taken a senior judge to get the explanation that so many of us wanted, that will be fair enough.
It’s difficult though to understand why the CPS didn’t foresee questions being asked about Seed’s potentially preferential treatment - because dropping this case immediately smacked of cronyism, of an arbitrary, undemocratic, unhealthy ‘one rule for them’ decision taken to protect a Conservative in a very Conservative county. Perhaps the CPS assumed that whether questions were asked about their decision or not they would never have to defend themselves?
If that is the case it seems they are wrong, and just like No 10 has discovered as they backpedal and splutter to explain away the ‘Pincher by name, Pincher by nature’ furore, there really is only so far you can push people before they push back…