By the close of 2015, Doughty Street Chambers had been operating for twenty-five years. We hired Shakespeare’s Globe to celebrate, with by now over 100 barristers (half of them women) and thirty-four QCs (eleven women), with thirty support staff, occupying five houses alongside and opposite the Dickens Museum. My co-heads of chambers over the quarter-century had personally progressed: Peter Thornton was Chief Coroner, Keir Starmer an MP and Ed Fitzgerald was generally rated as the best public lawyer in the land. Helena Kennedy was now a baroness and a truly doughty fighter for justice, while several of my old juniors had gone on to become High Court and circuit judges, and even a Lord Justice of Appeal. Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, the most distinguished of our original associates, was about to turn ninety, still engaged on his lifelong crusade to reform the law of murder.
The Globe that night was heaving, and I didn’t need a jukebox, because this time I had a stage, from which to declaim Shakespeare’s lines about refugees from a scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More, which is never performed (because he did not write the rest of it). The London mob is protesting against the city taking refugees – Dutch Protestants, fleeing the Inquisition. They are led by George Betts, an Elizabethan shock jock, who says to the Chancellor, ‘The removing of the strangers cannot choose but much advantage the poor handicrafts of the city’ (i.e. British jobs for British workers). More’s response:
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
Shakespeare’s answer, it seemed, to Nigel Farage. The following year came my seventieth birthday – the Bible’s ‘three score years and ten’ – although I was rushing around the world, increasingly to see my ageing parents in Sydney and doing cases in international courts while taking pride in the achievements of my children. I gave no thought to old age, let alone to death. There were a few funerals, of friends like Snoo Wilson and Alan Rickman, but Jeremy Hutchinson reached his century. I gave the speech at his birthday celebration, reliving the ABC case and The Romans in Britain, thirty-five years before, as if they were yesterday. Jeremy always said that the life of a barrister is ephemeral – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – but his own provides a refutation.107
Then, inevitably, came the expatriate’s nightmare, which I had been spared for so many years – to be woken by telephone in the small hours and told that a parent was dying. It was Christmas and the flights to Sydney were full, even on Malaysia Airlines, but I managed to find the last seat on Singapore Airlines – first-class only – leaving in a few hours’ time. It was expensive, but if you can’t drown your sorrows in Krug and caviar, flying 12,000 miles to your mother’s deathbed, when can you?
Although I have seen bullet-ridden bodies in my human rights work, I had never been at a deathbed. I assumed it would be like the last scene in La bohème – the heroine, reclining and declining, singing in a lower register, the tenor turning his back to gaze out the window while his friends are first to realise that the fat lady will not sing again. A modern version would have doctors and social workers – the real ‘grief counsellors’, I suppose – singing to relatives their resigned aria ‘Miracles Do Not Happen’. I teased them by telling about my grandmother, who at the age of seventy-three stepped on a rusty garden rake and developed tetanus, from which all the doctors advised she would shortly die. ‘She’s had a good innings,’ they said (for those days, she actually had) and offered an easeful death. For some reason my parents refused their offer to turn off her life support, and she recovered to live to a sprightly ninety-six. ‘Oh, but her case was written up in the medical textbooks,’ they said, as if that made all the difference.
Public hospitals are now predisposed towards the ‘easeful death’ philosophy of Peter Singer, a philosophy I had championed when I acted for the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. That did not stop me from questioning it, although in my mother’s case it was a no-contest. She had left us clear instructions to end the kind of pain that I had watched her endure over the past two nights. She died on Christmas Day – an auspicious date for death, so the Eastern Orthodox Christians believe, because it signifies a fast track to heaven. This is a theological superstition, but one I could not help mentioning at her funeral. My eulogy raised a few laughs at my brother Graeme’s expense (particularly from his children) when I told how Mum had wrestled with the dilemma of what to do about the cannabis plant that, as a rebellious teenager, he had grown in her beloved garden. Should she uproot it, or should she report it to the police? In the end, she decided to leave it. ‘But I am certainly not going to water it!’
We knew the risk – when one long-term partner dies, the other often follows within a few weeks. My father evinced that intention by the simple expedient of refusing to eat. Before long he was being treated in hospital – with enough success for me to return to England for a few weeks and leave my brother to hold the fort. The medical bulletins from Sydney were optimistic at first, but then came another refusal to eat, and a return to hospital for force-feeding, then home again, and the doctors’ use of the ‘p’ word – ‘palliative care’, which seems to mean nothing except basic care until death. I made plans for an early return, disrupted by a bout of bronchial pneumonia picked up in the freeze of the English winter. The inevitable email arrived: my father had died peacefully in his sleep – and it was off to Heathrow again. I arrived the night before his funeral and painfully coughed my way through the eulogy.
We had been through it all so recently, this ritual in the crematorium chapel, the arguments over the music and which photographs to put on the memorial card, the rounding up of grandchildren for the funeral readings. It’s not an ordeal I want my own (currently hypothetical) grandchildren to go through: if I have any forewarning of my own death I shall choose the music (the judge’s song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, the human rights duet from Don Carlo, ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal’ by Phil Ochs and Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’), the place (a small theatre, or perhaps a rented courtroom – definitely not a church), and (be warned) I will if possible pre-record my own eulogy – my final speech, so to speak, although there is something to be said for ending with a blast. The best conclusion to a commemoration that I have attended was for Sir Tom Bingham, that brilliant Law Lord, in Westminster Abbey. After all the gloomy reminiscences (at seventy-five, he was too young to die) there emerged from behind the catafalque a fully-fledged New Orleans jazz band belting out ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.
After my father’s funeral, I walked into the leafy grounds to observe the resting place of my parents’ ashes, beneath a straggling shrub that needed watering. There was space for more containers, the crematorium official heavily hinted – perhaps I might purchase a place? I have always been a bit leery of ending up as ashes, ever since a client – a defendant in the massive ‘Operation Julie’ LSD bust – had the container on his desk seized by police, who sent it off for forensic analysis believing that the substance inside would be some exotic drug. It was, however, his mother. Ashes cannot be spread in the Old Bailey (although perhaps someone could climb up and leave mine in her scales). I was as a child much taken by Robin Hood, who roused himself from his deathbed, called for his trusty bow and one arrow, and used the last of his strength to shoot it into Sherwood Forest. ‘Bury me where you find it’ was his dying instruction to Friar Tuck, presumably his executor. But I have always fancied a tombstone, which could elliptically be inscribed ‘Rather his own man’. Spike Milligan has an appropriate epitaph: ‘I told you I was ill.’ Novelist Kathy Lette wants on hers ‘At last, a good plot.’
* * *
Back in Britain, life had never been so boring. ‘Brexit’ was an IQ test that its citizens failed, and for the next few years we will be condemned to hearing of all these tedious negotiations with Europe about the terms for departure. I had a bet on the result with the philosopher AC Grayling some months before the referendum. ‘Oh, the British are far too intelligent to vote to leave,’ he had declared.
‘They will,’ I countered. ‘I’m Australian and I know how Anglo-Saxons can panic at the prospect of swarthy people in boats coming towards them.’
There would be lots of refugees in boats on the Med in the summer, just when the referendum was to be held. AC bet me a dinner, which I accepted. But he’s smart and was first to ask where I would take him when he won. ‘Oh,’ I said expansively (and expensively). ‘To Skye Gyngell’s new restaurant at Somerset House. Where will you take me?’
‘To the Garrick,’ AC replied, referring to his men-only club which serves overcooked meat followed by spotted dick. I have not bothered to collect my winnings.
Meanwhile, I have watched the lemming-like progress of the Great British nation over the white cliffs of Brexit. I blame David Cameron for promising the referendum in the first place, and then for failing to make its result conditional upon achieving a majority of the electorate (Leave obtained support from only 37 per cent of the voting public, against 35 per cent for Remain, and 28 per cent who did not vote at all) or a two-thirds majority of actual voters or a majority in all parts of the UK (Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain). These are the sort of conditions that other countries which make political decisions by referendums generally apply. Instead, this referendum was merely ‘advisory’ – a fact about which the ignorant media, the BBC in particular, failed to inform voters: they presented the referendum as if its verdict would be binding, thus arousing the general expectation that the result would be conclusive and that the UK would be bound to exit. This was such a common belief in the days following the result that I penned a comment for The Guardian pointing out that as a matter of law Parliament was not bound by an advisory result and that MPs had a duty to decide for themselves:
Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.
This opinion trended astonishingly, as if some new take on democracy, although it merely echoed the views of eighteenth-century conservatives like Edmund Burke. When the Court of Appeal judges more or less agreed, and ruled that Parliament must take the decision to leave, they were demonised in the Daily Mail as ‘enemies of the people’. In which case, count me in.
As I suspected when I made my bet with AC Grayling, fear of refugees was an important factor – Nigel Farage, a man whose bonhomie hides a nasty racist streak, played up in UKIP propaganda the prospect of an influx of people with dark skin. This is a fear that works for governments which promise to ‘turn back the boats’ from my native Australia, and its impact should come as no surprise in Britain – after all, 35 per cent of French voters backed Marine Le Pen. But there were other factors, quite apart from the Russian bloggers who now appear to have been active in pursuit of anarchy in the West. It was interesting, after the Leveson Report and all the attempts to encourage a fair press, to note how journalists on The Sun and the Mail and even the Telegraph abandoned all pretence of professionalism and simply became political propagandists. (Murdoch cunningly allowed The Times – his ‘paper for intelligent people’ – to be fair to the case for Remain.) It was a complicated issue, of course, and the Leave case was simple, and supported by simple lies (£350 million a week for the NHS!), while the Remain camp was complacent and ineffective. It failed to reassure that class of protest voters who made the difference for Leave and for Trump – who had seen their standards of living and of life reduce and could not envisage them improving by sticking with Brussels or with Hillary. Things could not get worse, they thought, but they were wrong.
The nation has no notion of how to ‘Brexicate’ – to extricate itself from the referendum result. With a few exceptions, MPs who know very well that Britain’s best interests are to stay, or at least to secure a ‘soft’ departure, dare not speak out against the lie that ‘the British people’ voted to leave, when only 37 per cent did. The Prime Minister, a recent convert once she realised she could not be Prime Minister unless she converted, talks about achieving a ‘good deal’ and of her revulsion at the prospect of a ‘bad deal’– the idea of a ‘fair deal’ does not seem to have occurred to her as the only way forward. As for her ministers, Andrea ‘down with experts’ Leadsom seems the worst, although rivalled by Chris Grayling, who was a truly awful Lord Chancellor, depriving prisoners of books and legal aid of money, and having little understanding of the principles of fairness that must underpin any Department of Justice. His successor, Michael Gove, did understand those principles and is a man I quite like: at private dinners he strikes me as an enthusiastic and clever ex-journalist teeming with ideas – some good, some bad, and one terrible. That one is Brexit.
For some years, while Boris Johnson was editing The Spectator, we had been neighbours in Doughty Street – I came close to running him over as my car dodged his bike. We have had some enjoyable encounters, none more so than at a celebration on the night he was first elected Mayor of London. He came down a long line of Tory well-wishers, his trademark ebullience dimmed as he was forced to shake hands and utter replies of no consequence. Then he came to Kathy Lette: ‘I can’t think of you as a Mayor, Boris. To me, you’ll always be a stallion.’ His face lifted, his lips salivated and he was about to make a suitably obscene reply when suddenly he disappeared: enclosed by his minders, directed by Lynton Crosby to remove him immediately from the temptation to be his old self.
He proved a feckless Foreign Secretary. I had been advising the Reuters Foundation about the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen who worked for its charity and who had been arrested in Iran when she went back to show her new baby to her parents. She was jailed for five years on a bogus charge of spying, and for fifteen months the FCO did absolutely nothing to support her – not even uttering a diplomatic protest when, contrary to the Vienna Convention, the Iranians denied her any visits from the British consul. After a year, this inaction so infuriated me that for the first time in my life I took the last resort of a pompous Englishman when the steam rises out of his ears – a letter to The Times. It had absolutely no effect.
Meanwhile, the other saga making Britain a laughing stock had arisen, as usual, from a moral panic – in this case, from the revelation that Mrs Thatcher’s favourite celebrity, Jimmy Savile, had been a serial paedophile. So, in the fevered imagination of the tabloids, must be other famous men accused by fantasists of dismembering small boys in drug-crazed satanic rituals in Westminster apartments and guesthouses in Pimlico back in the ’70s and ’80s. So profoundly did these stories of high-level ‘cover-ups’, orchestrated by the then Attorney General Michael Havers, take hold that the government set up an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) to investigate, marking its ‘independence’ by appointing a redoubtable ex-judge, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, as its chair – until it realised that she was the sister of the late Sir Michael. After replacing her with another worthy woman (it must, illogically, be a woman) who turned out to be a friend of another prime suspect, the Home Office hired at vast expense a female judge from New Zealand. It could have established (as I did) by a few calls to local lawyers that this lady was the least esteemed member of the New Zealand judiciary. The IICSA wasted eighteen months under her chairmanship – she resigned after admitted unfamiliarity with relevant English law and a disinclination to learn it (although she could have mugged up on it during all her taxpayer-funded trips back to New Zealand).
I kept an eye on this unfolding disaster because I had some evidence to offer: the only example I had ever encountered of a cover-up of the crimes of a high-ranking paedophile. Back in the early ’80s, I had received a brief to appear for executive members of an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), at committal proceedings to examine whether conspiracy charges (to send indecent letters by post) should put them on trial. I was something of an expert on conspiracy law, with a duty to accept this unattractive task (a taxi on the rank has sometimes to drive to dark suburbs) and at least the ‘stipe’ (stipendiary magistrate) listed to hear the case was one of my favourites. Mr Branson SM was an austere but fair man who would not suffer any prosecutorial impropriety. We spent a week examining the evidence: PIE was essentially a perverts’ correspondence club, where members wrote to each other, in sickening detail, their fantasies about grooming and abusing children, in copperplate schoolmasterly (many were in fact schoolmasters) handwriting. The legal issue, at the committal, was whether they had done so by agreement with the defendants, and so the letter-writers had to be called and cross-examined. They cut pathetic figures, these old men in crumpled suits and dandruffed collars who had all been required to plead guilty to an offence of sending indecent material through the post before they testified. Now they were paraded in shame before Mr Branson, forced to admit to their depraved imaginations and answer my questions. There was, however, one great curiosity about the prosecution case: the most prolific offender, the hub of this daisy-chain of pornographic penmanship, whose writings I found stomach-turning and slightly sinister, had not been arrested or called to give evidence. His name, the police assured us, was Mr Henderson and they were unable to trace him.
Looking back, I think my rat-smelling antennae, so vital for a defence counsel, may have been dulled by disgust at the effusions of these PIEmen. Mr Branson committed them for trial – he was a principled enough beak to have refused to do so had the abuse of process revealed later come to his attention at the time. Only when the trial (at which I did not appear) was over did a whistleblower – an outraged policeman, I suspect – leak to Private Eye the fact that a decision had been taken ‘at a high level’ that the key figure in the case, whose name was not in fact Henderson, should not be identified or prosecuted. His name was Sir Peter Hayman and he had recently retired as British High Commissioner in Canada after a long and distinguished career in MI6, in which he had served as a deputy director (and where he should have been recognised as a proselytising paedophile). The story caused some scandal, and to hose it down the DPP put out a misleading press statement, claiming that Hayman had not been given preferential treatment (he had: unlike his fellow paedophiles, he had not been prosecuted or called to give evidence or put in a position where his central role could be examined by Mr Branson). It was, indeed, a classic British cover-up, which continued in this way after it had been uncovered.108 I trust that the IICSA will manage to find out how and by whom Sir Peter Hayman was protected – from me, and from Richard Branson’s dad.
Otherwise, its work might do some good by refuting all the absurd stories about cabals of distinguished conservatives killing small boys after beating and buggering them in Pimlico apartments. I acted (very briefly) for Scallywag, a scurrilous magazine which dreamed up much of this scuttlebutt in the early ’90s. No one paid any notice until it alleged that the then Prime Minister, John Major, was having an affair with a Downing Street caterer, and the story ‘went viral’ (as we did not say in the days before the internet). The New Statesman then commented on the phenomenon of how ‘The Strange Case of John Major’s Mistress’ had become an overnight urban legend. It did not endorse the story, and when Major sued I thought it had a good defence – I could convince a jury that a serious political magazine was simply discussing the role of rumour in Whitehall, and not accusing John Major, that scion of ‘family values’, of adultery. Major’s lawyers pulled a fast one by choosing to sue WH Smith, the Statesman’s distributors, as well: its board immediately grovelled and settled by paying Major a large six-figure sum (which the New Statesman by contract had to reimburse, even though it maintained that the article was not libellous). The Statesman was snookered, and ended the case by offering Major the libel raspberry – the sum of £1, which he was happy to accept. I thought we should have pressed on to trial, to defend the right of journalists to discuss politically significant allegations without endorsing them. Had we done so, of course, we might have proved that John Major did indeed have a mistress – not the rather nice caterer alleged by Scallywag but the altogether more embarrassing personage of his Cabinet minister Edwina Currie, who later wrote about their sex life in excruciating detail in her autobiography.
Scallywag’s inventions, twenty years later, were picked up and passed off by fantasists whose stories found a ready audience among senior policemen. One stood outside Ted Heath’s old home, declaring the allegations ‘credible and true’, while other senior officers – including a chief constable – gave similar endorsement to stories about a murderous ‘No. 10 paedophile ring’. How did it come about that those senior police officers took leave of their senses and authorised raids on the homes of old and sick (in Leon Brittan’s case, dying) public figures of yesteryear? The moral panic induced by Savile was one explanation, as was a ‘trust the victims’ approach to historical abuse claims (notwithstanding that such a claim can bring compensation – a ready motive for some false allegations). There is another reason, which I gave incautiously to a radio news programme which interviewed me ‘live’ after a good dinner: ‘Britain has the most stupid police force in the advanced world.’ I should not have put it like that, although police I met afterwards had been amused and thought I had a point, and Home Office boffins earnestly contacted me for more details. The truth is that we do not like our police to be too clever: Constable Dogberry and Gilbert and Sullivan’s policemen of Penzance are more to our liking, and the BBC is always there to give reassurance – the intelligent Inspector Morse, who usually gets his man (or woman), is about as realistic as Dixon of Dock Green was back in the ’60s. The IICSA has yet to make headway on its more urgent task of reviewing child abuse in churches (especially the Catholic Church) and church schools, and recommending the safeguarding measures (no communion or confession for children until they are teenagers, for example) that The Case of the Pope demonstrates to be necessary. It has just announced that its 2019 inquiry will be into the ‘VIP paedophile ring’ – it is depressing to think that for the next few years, the British media will be full of Brexit and VIP sex abuse and (no doubt) royal babies.
* * *
This is a prospect that makes me wonder whether I should bother to stay in my adopted country, or to return ‘home’ now I have reached three score years and ten, the biblical allotment of sentient life. As a boy I had always assumed I would follow the Australian retirement dream of ‘travelling north’, to a home on a beach to fish and listen to the cricket until the inevitable heart attack. It is a measure of medical progress over my lifetime that my inspiration these days is Donald Trump, who does so much (well, so much damage) at my age. I have been fortunate in having Australia, that sane and beautiful and relatively happy country, as a fall-back, and was touched in 2018 to be awarded its equivalent of a knighthood, an ‘Order of Australia’ – I am entitled to call myself an AO, although people here would think it stands for ‘adults only’. Although I sometimes discourse over the back fence with my neighbour in north London, Dame Edna Everage, about Sydney retirement homes where we could spend our dementia years, I shall stick with my fantasy of good old liberal England for a few years yet.
And it is still an endearing and enduring country, for all its current craziness. As I conclude this book, I am summoned to the palace. A party for the Commonwealth – usually a pleasant occasion to meet fellow expatriates who have contributed a lot to British culture as authors and singers and journalists and arts administrators. Of them, tonight, there is no sign – only High Commissioners and business people and (oddly) Theresa and Philip May and senior members of the Cabinet. The penny drops – the royals have been co-opted in the quest for post-Brexit trade deals. The Queen is her seemingly eternal self – we reminisce about Kathy’s corgi dress, which she remembers well. Her husband (‘Phil the Greek’ we called him at school) is not present, so I cannot chat to him about the days when he ‘sat’ for Stephen Ward. Prince Charles is there, as an added attraction, looking confident of becoming the next head of the Commonwealth (I do not reveal my preference for Obama). We mingle, and I avoid the Prime Minister (as Home Secretary, she made distasteful remarks about human rights lawyers), but I collar Boris to ask the latest on Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whose case he was forced to take up after making some mistaken remarks about her being a journalist (whereupon the Iranians gleefully proposed to add another five years to her sentence as a spy). ‘Privy Councillor terms, old chap, Privy Councillor terms,’ he insisted (apparently unaware that I was not a Privy Councillor), but revealed nothing more than I already knew. We were in the Long Gallery at the palace, and it was an opportunity to view the Queen’s art collection – those remarkable Rubenses and Poussins so wisely recommended by her adviser, Sir Anthony Blunt. He could have been executed as a traitor before his appointment, as he had been a Soviet spy, but MI6, his former employer, covered up his crime. As, perhaps, they did for Sir Peter Hayman.
Nonetheless, as the bus pass and the pension serve to remind, I am entering my final act – and in life, as in opera, the final act is always the shortest. So this might be a good time to hang up the wig and gown for ever and revert to some of the wishful projects of my younger days, abandoned whenever my cab was hailed to take me to the Old Bailey or away to some far-off courtroom. I once started a crime novel featuring (of course) an international lawyer, and a play with music on the life of the ’60s troubadour Phil Ochs. I wrote a screenplay about John André, the brilliant spymaster who almost won the war of independence for Britain when he engineered the defection of Benedict Arnold, Washington’s best general, with the help of the general’s wife, a judge’s daughter. André was hanged by the Americans despite intercession from Hamilton, now of eponymous musical fame. The ending on the gallows, Kathy says, is moving, but the sex scenes are dreadful. As I was wondering whether to revert to these projects, I suddenly realised that I could not stop thinking in the language of the lawyer (‘revert’ being the word they use when they promise – usually insincerely – to get back to you). Then came a call from Lula for help in Brazil, a request from Qatar for an opinion on the legality of its blockade, a victim of Harvey Weinstein wanting to challenge non-disclosure orders, and the prospect of an oil and gas arbitration in Paris in the spring – so the appearance of this memoir does not mean my trials are at an end. I will remain a cab on the rank, although more mindful of the adage on John Mortimer’s coffee cup: ‘Old lawyers never die. They just lose their appeal.’
Notes
107 See Thomas Grant, Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories (London: John Murray, 2015), and Guardian obituary.
108 The DPP gave a highly questionable account of why Hayman was not prosecuted, which did not in any event explain why he was allowed a false name and not, like other correspondents, called to give evidence. See The Times, 11 May 1981, and ‘Pain, Anguish and the DPP’ in the Sunday Times, 22 March 1991. More accurate reports of the cover-up will be found in The Guardian and Private Eye in this period.