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“... On​ 29 June, two days after the government announced it was shelving its Bill of Rights Bill, the Court of Appeal ruled that the government’s policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda breached the European Convention on Human Rights, reigniting calls on the right for the UK to withdraw from the convention. When it introduced the Bill of Rights in 2022, the government promised that the UK would continue to respect its obligations to the convention, but the Bill would have introduced various mechanisms to ensure that domestic courts interpreted those obligations more narrowly than the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ...”

“... Keir Starmer​ has made several eye-catching appointments to his new government from outside Parliament, continuing the practice of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who appointed David Cameron as foreign secretary last November, making him a peer in order to do so. Many find the practice of making outside appointments constitutionally suspect. However, the constitutional issue that requires rectification isn’t so much the way in which prime ministers appoint ministers but the way in which prime ministers themselves are appointed ...”

“... In the end,​ the government lost its appeal to the Supreme Court in the Rwanda case hands down. In a unanimous ruling on 15 November, the court held that asylum seekers transferred to Rwanda faced a real risk of being wrongly returned to their countries of origin. The court could have said simply that there was no legal error in the Court of Appeal’s assessment of the evidence ...”

“... The United Kingdom​ might soon have its first bill of rights since the English Bill of Rights of 1688. On 14 December last year, the government published the much anticipated Independent Human Rights Act Review (IHRAR), which sets out the conclusions of a ten-month inquiry by an independent panel of experts into the operation of the Human Rights Act 1998 ...”

“... and Tomlinson, the 889 pages of Lester, Pannick and Herberg and the 813 pages of Beatson, Grosz, Hickman, Singh and Palmer. These books are all squarely aimed at barristers seeking to express the interests of their clients in terms of human rights in order to achieve a victory that might otherwise be impossible, or to copper-bottom a legal position that ...”

“... House of the Spirits. The third passage, by now highly self-conscious, is the beginning of Katie Hickman’s A Trip to the Light Fantastic. Niña turns out to be a boa, and despite appearances this is not a novel but a travel book, running after magic in the reality of Mexico. Hickman’s excuse for this reversal of ...”

“... how it started. Dial M for Murdoch is an invaluable account of its evolution, told by Martin Hickman of the Independent, and the MP Tom Watson. Watson has been particularly close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from ...”

“... of mistaken reporting. For two years a handful of people – Nick Davies at the Guardian, the MP Tom Watson – kept insisting that the problem was bigger than a couple of ‘rogue’ journalists misbehaving at the News of the World. But whatever they said, and however often they said it, the world went on much as it had before. A few people got sacked, some ...”

“... in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The most challenging essay in the book is Tom Hickman’s interrogation of Lord Camden’s reasoning, especially on the claimed power of ministers to issue arrest and search warrants. The problem, as Camden himself recognised, was that there was solid authority – four false imprisonment cases ...”

“... was an immediate million-seller, and its success unleashed a flurry of like-minded books. Tom Peters teamed up with Nancy Austin to restate the main arguments in A Passion For Excellence2 – a second-try book which set out to be a little more practical in its recommendations and which also tried to counter the macho-zen bias of the first book by ...”

“... had always to carry two plastic bottles of medication in his pockets, each connected to a Hickman line. He had neuropathy in his toes, ‘numb and brittle as icicles’. His vision disintegrated, eaten away by herpes; he found himself on Charlotte Street, ‘totally helpless, knowing that if one person walked into me I was finished … I crept ...”