But in the light of his elevation to the High Court, Beech-Jones does not appear to have suffered from his past criticism of two of federal Labor’s bogey men.

There is no suggestion that the newest High Court judge did this in order to burnish his credentials with any future Labor government.

This is almost certainly a case of Labor choosing a judge based on Labor’s view of merit. It is just a coincidence that Labor and Beech-Jones both found fault in people who ended up on Labor’s enemies list.

Beech-Jones comes to the High Court after a long and illustrious career in the law. But he clearly had that certain extra quality that put him ahead of the competition.

The incident at the heart of this affair took place in 2018.

Beech-Jones found it necessary to issue a statement for the Judicial Conference criticising remarks by former High Court judge Dyson Heydon, and the Coalition’s Christian Porter who was then attorney-general.

In remarks published in this newspaper on March 21 of that year, Porter had endorsed Heydon’s devastating critique of a threat a year earlier by the Victorian Court of Appeal to have three Coalition ministers charged with contempt for criticising soft sentencing.

Without naming either man, the Beech-Jones statement singled out the report of Porter’s remarks and the extensive separate critique by Heydon. Beech-Jones asserted that “none of the contributors” to The Australian’s coverage, “including the author” of Heydon’s critique, had confronted the issue that three Coalition ministers had engaged in co-ordinated personal abuse of judges.

According to Beech-Jones, the article quoting Porter’s endorsement overlooked the distinction between criticism of court decisions “and personalised sledging”.

Porter saw things differently. He believed Heydon’s essential observation was that “the right to debate the reasoning and outcomes of our courts should not be unnecessarily constrained by conflating regular criticism with the quite specific act of contempt”.

In 2012, Heydon was present when Beech-Jones was the subject of a ceremonial welcome to the bench of the NSW Supreme Court. Three years later, Heydon infuriated Labor at his royal commission into union corruption. He accused Bill Shorten, who was then Labor leader, of giving non-responsive answers.

On September 1, 2015, Mark Dreyfus, who is now Attorney-General and helped select Beech-Jones for the High Court, told ABC radio that Heydon had not approached the royal commission as a “fair-minded person”. Beech-Jones might well have described that as personal abuse.