Thank goodness the Supreme Court has ruled that Prince Charles’s ‘black spider memo’ letters to parliament can be disclosed:
full judgment and press summary as PDFs on the Supreme Court site.
Judgment read out on youtube:
R (on the application of Evans) and another v Attorney General
This relates to letters predating the coalition legislation under which the royal family are exempt from freedom of information law: see 37 here (PDF).
But attention quickly concentrated on the use of an exclamation mark in the judgment (fortunately in a dissenting opinion):
LORD WILSON: (dissenting)
168. I would have allowed the appeal. How tempting it must have been for the Court of Appeal (indeed how tempting it has proved even for the majority in this court) to seek to maintain the supremacy of the astonishingly detailed, and inevitably unappealed, decision of the Upper Tribunal in favour of disclosure of the Prince’s correspondence!
Jack of Kent on Twitter:
Jack of Kent @JackofKent
So Lord Wilson has brought a long distinguished judicial career to an end by using an exclamation mark in a judgment pic.twitter.com/s8KF8QgMEJ