Mountain or molehill?

It is said that mid-summer is “the silly season” for reporting of news, when stories about somewhat less than momentous happenings take up the space occupied by more weighty news items at other times of the year. So it was that in mid-summer last year, in the dying days of July, a technical Court of Appeal decision, concerned more with entitlement to state benefits than with controversy, received much more media attention than most Court of Appeal decisions. Reports on the BBC Today programme, and headlines in many newspapers of the “shock, horror” variety—such as “A court ruling has cast doubt on the sanctity of our final wishes” and “Where there’s a will, there’s a way to betray the deceased” (both in The Sunday Times, 2 August 2015) followed the Court of Appeal decision in Ilott v Mitson [2015] EWCA Civ 797, [2015] All ER (D) 290 (Jul). It also has to be said that the outrage of certain