Dr dear Dr: Is it true what the PM said in PMQs last week that the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir, was once head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and in 2009 failed to prosecute the case of Sir Jimmy Saville, when his case came up for discussion and formal review? Can this astonishing assertion really be true?

Well, Sir Lyndsey Hoyle did have occasion to reprimand the PM for such an assertion, so the PM must have said such a thing in open session of Parliament. But that is not the point really. Of course from a procedural point of view, what the Dickens a CPS hack is doing leading a free democratic political party in Parliament at all is a subject of much wonderment to older style lawyers, since the old rules of governance forbade a prosecutor or a judge from becoming a spiritual leader or vicar or priest precisely for a perceived lack of Christian compassion, propter defectum, an institutional lack of compassion, and indeed in the older rules still of the old Codex, magistrates that had judged and adjudicated condemned working-class men, and particularly those that had passed the death sentence on the lower classes were formally impeded from becoming vicars or priests, without a special and laborious dispensation from the local bishop, so strong was this public impediment at law. The ban on such figures assuming high office was placed in the old Codex and originally came from the decretal laws and episcopal letters of the Early Christians for whom detractors and ex-civil prosecutors were deprived of active legitimation and an active voice in the accusal of the priests, chiefly because of their lack of compassion, and this came from ancient custom, from the time of Pope Anacletus I, around 77 AD (see TRP, I, 1, 3). Personally many lawyers are amazed to see this sort of figure in the leading position of a political party of free speakers in a free nation in a time of the need for compassion as evidenced from NHS workers. Goes against the whole legal tradition. Yes, truly astonishing. Amazed many truly are. Well done Prime Minister for speaking out about this terrible institutional scandal.