Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied by Neil Hickman

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This review appears in the Conference issue of Liberator (Liberator 425), which you can download free of charge from the magazine's website.

Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied

Neil Hickman

£24.95 from Amazon UK

Gordan Hewart is a figure from those Dark Ages of the Liberal Party between the end of the First World War and the revival under Jo Grimond. Born in Bury in 1870, Hewart came to prominence as a radical journalist in the North West before becoming a barrister. He was elected for the two-member seat of Leicester in a 1913 by-election and, with the help of the Coupon from the Lloyd George coalition, won the new single-member Leicester East seat in 1918. He had served as Solicitor General from 1916 and became Attorney General in 1919.

Hewart left the Commons 1922 on being appointed Lord Chief Justice, having already turned down the chance of becoming Home Secretary. No doubt this offer was a tribute to his talents, but it may also have been a sign of the limited number of people who were loyal to Lloyd George even at that early in his premiership.

Neil Hickman’s book is concerned to defend Hewart’s performance as Lord Chief Justice – he has gone down in history with a poor reputation – and to press the relevance of his thought today. His most important writing is to be found in The New Despotism from 1929, and the route by which he fears despotism arising has much in common with the practice or ambitions of recent Conservative governments: pass only skeleton legislation, fill in the details with orders parliament cannot vote on and bar legal challenges to the new laws. Hickman argues that the danger to democracy from such processes is graver than it was when Hewart was writing.

Hewart may be best remembered today for his maxim that “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done” – though he never arrived at such a concise formulation of it himself. This belief was of a piece with his distrust with the ‘Good Chap’ theory of government; this holds that officials need not be bound with burdensome rules if we can trust them to do the right thing because they are the right sort of people.

Those with a passing knowledge of the law may recognise two cases that crop up in Hewart’s career. One is the libel case brought against a newspaper publisher by one Artemus Jones – Hewart came to prominence as a barrister by winning it for him. The second is his decision in the Court of Appeal to support the quashing of a guilty verdict against the Liverpool insurance collector William Wallace for the murder of his wife because it was unreasonable given the evidence the jury had before it. This case has become a favourite with true crime enthusiasts, and the consensus among them seems to be that Wallace did it. I am sure Hewart was not swayed by the fact that Wallace had once been the Liberal agent in Harrogate.

All in all, this is a welcome introduction to the life of a forgotten Liberal. Though written with his legal career most in mind, it says much that is relevant to the politics of Hewart’s era and of the present day.

Jonathan Calder