I was in court 68 at the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday morning (30 October) to hear the Press Standards Board of Finance’s (PressBoF) urgent application for interim relief – an injunction – to stop the government from getting the cross-party press regulation Royal Charter granted by the Queen in Privy Council this afternoon. The Privy Council was due to ‘meet’ at 5.30pm (these are very short meetings in which everyone stands, I’m told; the meeting would be a constitutional formality); the hearing began at 10.30am.
Right from the start, Lord Justice Richards made clear he thought the court could deal not only with the application for the injunction, but with the question whether permission for judicial review should be granted. That surprised me, and I suspect some others in court.
