The Hazards Of Law Blogging When You’re Married To Boris

On Thursday, 1 Crown Office Row barrister Marina Wheeler wrote a post for the UK Human Rights Blog in which she suggested that some temporary protest camps in Parliament Square may not be illegal.

An interesting but pretty niche piece of legal news, you might think.

However, add in the fact that Wheeler’s husband, Boris Johnson, won a legal battle last year to evict the Parliament Square protesters, and you have the makings of a sensational celeb husband-wife clash.

Naturally, the Evening Standard was all over it.

The only problem was that the difference-of-views angle wasn’t quite enough, with Wheeler in reality only having “intervened in the row” about the protesters by expressing some uncontroversial views on the direction the relevant law was taking.

So to jazz it up the Standard found a peace campaigner to slam Wheeler and her observations on the law.

Barbara Tucker, who has been protesting in Parliament Square for ten years and for the last 103 days without shelter, is quoted as describing the “loophole” alluded to by Wheeler as a “red herring as the law itself was invalid.”

Of Boris’ other half, Tucker told the paper: “If she was a real human rights lawyer she would be saying nobody should be arrested, pulled up before the courts and lose their job for protesting against this government.”