Nary a day passes without Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe finding an opportunity to publicly accuse the media, and particularly Daily Maverick, of waging some form of a 'campaign' against him.

On a little-known YouTube channel and later on Newzroom Afrika, Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe placed Daily Maverick in the same naughty corner as Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, Western Cape Deputy Judge President Patricia Goliath and at least 10 other judges in the division who are deemed co-conspirators in a perceived "plot" to discredit the judge president.

Mogoeng and Goliath, said Hlophe, are perjurers who colluded to cook up a fake charge of assault against him. Hlophe has gone as far as accusing the duo of meeting secretly to set up Judge Mushtak Parker and coercing him into making a false allegation that Hlophe had assaulted him in chambers in 2019.

One of South Africa's finest satirists, Pieter-Dirk Uys, used to regularly remind apartheid-era ministers and politicians that he did not need to make up anything for his shows as the government wrote his scripts for him.

So too Judge President John Hlophe who, since his appointment to head the Western Cape division in 2000, has starred...