A Newcastle-based judge was removed from office after a public judicial-conduct scandal involving a “highly sexualised image”, unwanted physical contact, inappropriate staff communications, and gross misconduct. TCAP now asks the obvious question: if that kind of culture can sit inside the same court ecosystem, how many people have been judged by an institution that could not judge itself?
The Building Wants Respect
Courts love respect.
They demand it from claimants. From witnesses. They demand it from litigants in person who turn up scared, sick, confused, exhausted, disabled, broke, or already chewed to pieces by whatever dispute dragged them into the room. And they love the ritual. The hierarchy. They love the idea that the robe, the bench, the seal, the room, and the “all rise” theatre should make ordinary people shut up and behave.
Fine.
Then the building had better fucking deserve it.
Because Newcastle Civil and Family Courts and Tribunals Centre is now attached to a public judicial-conduct scandal involving former District Judge Andrew Simpson, who was removed from office after allegations involving a “highly sexualised image” sent to a member of court staff, unwanted physical contact, overly familiar and unprofessional conduct, inappropriate contact with staff by text and social media, and highly inappropriate language from his judicial email account.
That is not a rumour from a car park. Or TCAP gossip scraped from a WhatsApp sewer. That is now public-source material, reported nationally and sitting beside the judiciary’s own disciplinary machinery.
So forgive TCAP for asking the obvious.
What the fuck was going on inside that building?
Cock Culture Is A Question, Not A Punchline
The phrase is ridiculous because the situation is ridiculous.
A judge based at a court centre sends, or is alleged to have sent, a “highly sexualised image” to court staff. There are allegations of unwanted physical contact. And allegations of inappropriate communications. There is a finding serious enough for removal from office. The disciplinary panel, astonishingly, reportedly recommended a reprimand first. Then the Lady Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor went further and removed him after finding gross misconduct and a serious failure of integrity.
That is the public record as TCAP understands it from available reporting.
Now here comes the question they will hate.
Was this one man being a fucking embarrassment, or was it one visible symptom of a workplace culture that had already learned how to minimise, excuse, laugh off, ignore, soften, process, and contain bad conduct when it came from inside the room?
Because institutions do not usually become rotten in one isolated square inch. They become comfortable. Then they become defensive. And then they pretend to become procedural. Then, when caught, they call everything “seriously misguided”, “contextual”, “informal”, “friendly”, or “not intended that way”.
The public has heard that song before. It usually comes with a lanyard and a safeguarding policy nobody wants to read.
Same Court Ecosystem, Same Public Confidence Problem
Let us be precise.
TCAP is not saying Andrew Simpson heard my case. And TCAP is not saying Employment Judge James was involved in Simpson’s conduct. TCAP is not saying every judge in Newcastle is implicated in one man’s reported misconduct. That would be lazy, and lazy is for people who need wigs to sound important.
The point is different.
The point is that public confidence does not sit neatly in separate little filing trays. The public does not look at a court building and think: “Ah yes, the civil district judiciary scandal belongs in one moral cupboard, while the Employment Tribunal’s character judgments about disabled claimants live in a totally separate ethical pantry.”
No.
The public sees the same court ecosystem. The same building. Same costume. The same institutional voice demanding respect from people outside the machine while the machine itself quietly processes its own embarrassment.
And once that happens, every pompous word from the institution starts to sound different.
“Integrity” sounds different.
“Standards” sounds different.
“Conduct” sounds different.
“Harassment” sounds very fucking different. Like a different fucking jurisdiction. Perhaps too distracted to realise.
Criminal-Coded Language For Bloggers, Professional Consequences For Judges
In my own case, Newcastle Employment Tribunal was perfectly comfortable with criminal-coded language about my blogging.
Harassing. Intimidating. Scandalous. Vexatious. Remorseless. Gratuitously insulting. Egregious. Unwilling to accept Tribunal authority.
A whole adjective buffet, wheeled out against a disabled claimant who used a blog, public documents, regulator complaints, criticism, satire, and receipts to respond to what he says was discrimination, procedural pressure, legal aggression, and institutional asymmetry.
The underlying discrimination allegation was not merits-tested. Cepac did not get a clean public finding that it did not discriminate. Page did not get a clean merits exoneration either. The case was struck out through conduct reasoning, costs were imposed, and the judgment made me the problem.
That is why this Simpson scandal matters.
Because while I get publicly smeared by a court for blogging, the same broader Newcastle court ecosystem now has to carry a public scandal in which a judge was removed for gross misconduct after allegations involving a “highly sexualised image”, unwanted physical contact, staff distress, and abuse of position.
The contrast is not subtle.
One side gets criminal-coded words in a public judgment for publishing facts and criticism.
The other side gets professional discipline after conduct so serious that even the judicial machinery could not keep the furniture over it.
Is that two-tier?
TCAP has asked the question. Northumbria Police have now received a Freedom of Information request asking whether the Simpson matter was referred, reported, logged, or assessed after his public removal from office.
Let us see what the paper trail says.
The Reprimand Problem
One of the ugliest parts of the reporting is not merely the alleged conduct itself. It is the reported initial recommendation.
A reprimand.
The most serious sanction short of removal, yes. But still a reprimand. Still a system looking at a judge accused of this kind of behaviour towards staff and apparently starting from the position that the man might keep the office after a sufficiently stern bureaucratic cough.
That matters.
Because cultures reveal themselves not only by what happens, but by how hard the institution tries not to react properly when it finally has to look. If a judge’s conduct involved inappropriate behaviour towards a number of staff, unwanted physical contact, and a highly sexualised image, the public is entitled to ask why removal was not the obvious first institutional instinct.
A reprimand sounds like something you give a judge for being sharp in an email, not for dragging the judiciary’s reputation through a bedroom-shaped hedge backwards.
The fact removal ultimately happened does not erase the question.
Why did the machine need overriding?
What Else Gets Softened?
This is the part that should worry anyone who has ever stood in front of a tribunal or court and felt the room had already decided what kind of person they were.
If the same institutional culture can soften a judge’s conduct into professional language, what else does it soften.
Does it soften admin failures?
Soften missing documents?
Does it soften unanswered file-integrity questions?
And does this soften gendered framing?
Does it soften prejudicial correspondence?
Or does it soften one side’s ambush tactics while treating the other side’s reaction as the real scandal.
Does it soften institutional embarrassment until the person pointing at the mess becomes the problem.
In my case, Newcastle/HMCTS has still not, to my satisfaction, answered basic questions about what was on file, what was missing, what was considered, what was uploaded, what was ignored, and why asymmetry kept benefitting one side while the disabled litigant in person was framed as the danger to process.
Now add the Simpson scandal.
Not as proof of my case. As context for public confidence.
The public is entitled to ask whether Newcastle’s court ecosystem has a judgment problem in more ways than one.
Blogging Facts Is Not Harassment
Here is the cleanest question in the room.
When the BBC reports facts on a website about a judge and a “highly sexualised image”, is the BBC harassing the judge?
No.
It is reporting.
So why does TCAP reporting facts, criticism, documents, legal conduct, regulatory complaints, procedural concerns, and institutional contradictions suddenly become harassment-coded in a public judgment?
That is the double standard. A shambles. That is the point.
Courts do not get to enjoy public transparency when it exposes someone else and then call it misconduct when the same basic method turns back towards them.
If a public court judgment can smear a claimant’s blogging with criminal-coded language, then a public blog can absolutely ask whether a court environment containing this kind of judicial misconduct is fit to hand down moral lectures about anybody else’s behaviour.
That is not harassment.
That is the receipt coming back stamped.
Public Confidence With The Groin Pixelated
The generated image for this article is a clown judge, in full robes, lying on a bed with the groin area pixelated.
There is no nudity. No explicit content. No real likeness. Just satire.
And yet it captures the problem better than any Ministry of Justice boilerplate ever could.
Because this is what the system has done to itself. It has taken the solemn costume of justice and dragged it into a room where the public now has to ask about sex scandals, staff conduct, disciplinary minimisation, public confidence, policing referrals, and whether the same court ecosystem has been judging others while failing to govern itself.
The pixelation is not there to hide a body.
It is there to show what the institution keeps trying to hide behind process.
The Question Stays Live
TCAP is now asking whether anyone else has suffered adverse judgments, procedural mistreatment, or public character-smearing from Newcastle Employment Tribunal or the wider Newcastle court ecosystem while this Simpson scandal sat in the same institutional air.
That is not a claim that every adverse judgment is unsafe.
It is not a claim that Simpson infected unrelated cases.
To be clear, this is not a claim that Employment Judge James and District Judge Simpson were part of the same conduct.
It is a public-confidence question.
When a court ecosystem has one judge removed after a gross-misconduct scandal involving staff, power, inappropriate contact, and a “highly sexualised image”, people are entitled to ask whether the culture inside the building was healthy, whether complaints were handled properly, whether authority was abused elsewhere, and whether litigants outside the institution were judged by people working inside a culture they themselves would not tolerate if seen from the public gallery.
That is the question.
It will not be going away.
The Bill Has Arrived
The courts can keep demanding respect. They can keep issuing judgments. And they can keep writing grave little paragraphs about conduct and propriety. They can keep pretending the public should tremble every time someone in a robe clears their throat.
But respect is not owed to a costume.
Respect is earned by conduct, consistency, fairness, record-keeping, transparency, and the basic ability not to become a national punchline involving a judge, court staff, and a “highly sexualised image”.
Newcastle wanted authority.
It got a BBC article.
A JCIO scandal.
It got TCAP.
And now, every time the institution moralises about tone, blogging, conduct, public confidence, or respect for process, it can expect the same question back.
Was the court culture judging the public while cocking up its own house?
Because from where TCAP is standing, the robe is doing a lot of work.
And the groin is still pixelated.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- BBC – Judge sent “highly sexualised image” to colleague
- Judiciary – District Judge Appointment: Simpson
- Judiciary – Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
- Independent – Judge sacked for sending “highly sexualised image” to court staff
- GB News – Judge sacked after sending “highly sexualised image” to court colleague
- Greatest Hits Radio – Newcastle judge removed from office after complaint
- TCAP – Newcastle Embarrassment Tribunal : Judge James – Blogging Is Not A Crime