When it comes to being appointed as a High Court judge, it is not what you know that counts, but who knows you.
That is what a great many people have suspected for a long time. Now, finally, we have confirmation that these suspicions were well founded. It comes in the form of a damning report into the High Court appointments system by the Commission for Judicial Appointments. The picture it paints is of a confusing, unreliable and unfair system that hands the top judges, together with the Lord Chancellor, the freedom to champion certain candidates more or less on a whim. The most senior judges can influence the process at every level, by nominating candidates, commenting on them in the consultation round and then helping the Lord Chancellor hand-pick the successful applicants. The judicial watchdog found that many of the recent changes designed to make the process fairer and more transparent were cosmetic – not least because of the way a list of 90 suitable candidates drawn up by civil servants was whittled down by the Lord Chancellor and the senior judges. While the civil servants did their best to identify the best candidates – a difficult task given the lack of information available about many candidates and the slapdash references given by many judicial consultees – the judges deployed their own unpublished criteria to choose the winners.
