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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Cindy Yu

and I'm joined by Katie Bors and James Forsyth. So today the Supreme Court starts a three-day

trial to decide whether or not Boris Johnson's decision to paroch Parliament was illegal. Katie,

just catch us up on how we got here. So there have been several legal efforts to try and overturn Boris Johnson's decision

to Paroic Parliament. You had one brought by Gina Miller, the anti-Brexit, we could say,

campaigner, and backed by John Major, the former Prime Minister, which argued that it was unlawful.

However, judges said that the suspensions of Parliament is essentially a political decision

for the Prime Minister.

So even if he is doing it to hide scrutiny or to avoid scrutiny, that's up to him to try

and do that.

And that's for Parliament, not for the courts.

But then we had a similar case, which is brought by a cross-party group of MPs.

So the SMPs, Joanna Cherry, led it. And that was successful in the Scottish courts because

they deemed that he was trying to avoid scrutiny. And that was unlawful. So you have this clash.

And now it was going to the Supreme Court and it's to find which do they agree with and there'll be

one collective decision there have been some signs of for example the fact that the number of judges

sitting on this has risen from nine to 11 and people are saying that's because it could be very

finely balanced and it's such an important judgment that's why you you bring more in. I think it's interesting.

I mean, I am not a legal mind.

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