Ever-energetic courts minister Sarah Sackman MP donned the traditional hard hat and Hi-Vis vest this week for a visit to Legal London’s most impressive building site – the Salisbury Square courts complex going up off Fleet Street. Luckily, a Press Association photographer was there too. (The Gazette was not invited.)

Sackman used her visit to announce ‘a new chapter’ for the courts service, with the conversion of four ‘Nightingale’ sites into permanent premises. ‘We’re ending the Nightingale era and making a lasting investment in justice,’ she enthused. 

A casual observer might assume that the Fleet Street complex, which will provide 18 new state-of-the-art courtrooms to handle Crown, magistrate and civil cases, forms part of Sackman’s ‘lasting investment’. Obiter, who has been around the block a bit, knows better. The development, which we heartily welcome, was actually an initiative of the City of London – it will also house luxury apartments and a new headquarters for City of London police (great news for Lower Fleet Street’s licensed premises). 

There’s an even bigger skeleton in the closet. The development’s foundation stones were laid on 18 October 2022 by one Brandon Lewis CBE MP, whom older readers will remember was Liz Truss’s lord chancellor. The stone’s inscription had been hurriedly recarved to substitute Lewis’s name for that of his predecessor Dominic Raab – though if they’d held the ceremony for a couple of weeks, Raab would have been back in post. 

So, barring any Animal Farm-style nocturnal rewrite, when the complex opens next year, it will be Lewis’s name in granite for future generations to look on and despair. 

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