Stephen Sedley, a distinguished retired judge, has written a lovely commentary in the LRB on the Supreme Court’s judgment that Boris Johnson’s prerogative of Parliament was unlawful. I particularly enjoyed this passage:

On a memorandum from the government’s director of legislative affairs, Nikki da Costa, which at least attempted to face some of the constitutional issues, Boris Johnson had written:

(1) The whole September session is a rigmarole introduced [words redacted] t [sic] show the public that MPs were earning their crust.

(2) So I don’t see anything especially shocking about this prorogation.

(3) As Nikki nots [sic], it is OVER THE CONFERENCE SEASON so that the sitting days lost are actually very few.

The excised words, it turns out, were ‘by girly swot Cameron’. A minute of a cabinet conference call on 28 August was also disclosed, revealing little more than a concern not to be wrongfooted in manipulating a prorogation. Any suggestion that Johnson had given informed and conscientious consideration to the constitutionality of what he was doing will have withered on counsel’s lips.

Lovely stuff, which led me to read the extended text rather than relying on the live-streamed summary that I had watched on the day. The “girly” in “girly swot Cameron” is very revealing about Johnson’s pubic obsessions.