Category Archives: Stray memories of life at the English Bar

Reminiscences and Musings, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Barristers, Solicitors and Fees (and a few other things that irritate me)

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Background

As some of my readers will know, I was from 1991 to 2008 a working barrister (sometimes in practice in England, sometimes employed by international law firms); I was also nominally a barrister, but neither practising nor employed, from 2008-2016. In 2016, I was disbarred by reason of a malicious Jew-Zionist complaint against me by a pro-Israel lobby group known as “UK Lawyers for Israel” (see the Notes at the foot of this blog post).

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[photo: me as newly-minted pupil-barrister in or about 1992, aged however about 35]

As matters now stand, I have no personal interest in the Bar or the legal professions (the Bar, the solicitors’ profession etc); I do have a general socio-political interest, however, as well as a liking –perhaps excessive– for walking down Memory Lane (my natal chart has Saturn in Scorpio, for those with interest in such things).

I was impelled to write today having seen the Twitter output of someone calling himself “Abused Lawyer”:

https://twitter.com/AbusedLawyer

Thoughts

I start from the premise that a society of any complexity requires law, a legal system, legal rights and duties etc. By way of example, as long ago as the Babylonian Empire (c.600 BC), there existed laws dealing with the ongoing liability of builders to purchasers of houses (English law only caught up with this in, I think, the 1970s). At any rate, any complex society requires correspondingly-detailed laws.

Legal complexity is a sign of a complex society, just as the existence of “celebrity chefs” and “celebrity” sportsmen (etc) is a sign of a decadent society (as in the latter days of the Roman Empire: discuss).

Laws alone, however, are only the start. In order to have effect, laws need pillars of support: (equitable) enforcement, at the very least. Stalin’s Russia had laws on paper, but was very arbitrary and unjust in enforcement. English law has always said that “where there is a right, there is a remedy” and that that remedy will consist in, at root, enforcement of criminal law by a criminal penalty, or in civil law a civil ruling providing for compensation or a mandatory compulsion or prohibition.

There is a further point. In order to get from right to remedy, you need a mechanism with which to do that. In an ideal society, every citizen would be educated enough, have sufficient will or resolve (and the means necessary) to be his/her own lawyer. In reality, there is a need, in every society beyond the smallest and most primitive, for a group of lawyers, so that citizens can be advised, protected, fought for, defended, and also so that society functions with relative smoothness.

As societies progress, they go from having no lawyers, to having a few who are supposedly unpaid amateurs or monied gentlemen who receive only gifts (honorarii) from the grateful, then on to having lawyers who are paid freelancers (or, in some countries, salaried employees of the State).

The question arises as to how to remunerate lawyers. In England, there were at one time several kinds of lawyer: barristers, “attorneys”, “sergeants”, “notaries” etc. These categories were whittled down (for most purposes) to only two by the late 19th Century: barristers (in four “Inns of Court” in London) and solicitors. The barristers, when paid, were paid by the solicitors, who in turn were paid by their lay clients (the term “lay” coming, like much else, from the ecclesiastical vocabulary of the late Middle Ages).

The first State-paid legal aid scheme (criminal) in England dated from the 1890s and covered only the most serious offences (particularly murder, then a capital offence). After WW2, it became gradually clear that both justice and convenience required State funding for at least the more serious criminal offences dealt with at the Assizes and Quarter Sessions (from 1971, the Crown Courts). Civil legal aid dates from 1949 and expanded greatly until 2010, when it started to be drastically cut back, along with criminal legal aid.

When I started at the Bar in 1993 as a real working barrister and not a mere “first six” pupil (spectator and dogsbody), I did quite a lot of publicly-funded work: criminal “rubbish” (in the charming Bar term) in the magistrates’ courts and (far less commonly) the Crown Courts; Legal Aid-funded and also privately-funded civil work in the County Courts (housing, landlord and tenant, contract, various tortious disputes) and in the High Court: judicial reviews (mostly housing or immigration-related), which were via Legal Aid; also contractual problems, libels etc, which were privately-paid.

Even in 1993, criminal legal aid was not too generous (I was in the wrong sort of chambers to get lucrative frauds or other really serious criminal cases), though I still recall the unexpected pleasure at getting a £5,000 fee for 5 days at City of London Magistrates’ Court, an “old-style” committal in a cheque fraud case which later went to the Old Bailey for trial. A Nigerian solicitor and another Nigerian, a recently-Called barrister, cheated me out of that trial, but that’s another story….

I do recall that I did go to court from time to time for “Mentions”, a nuisance involving going somewhere, dressing up, then appearing for (usually) 5 minutes before a judge, all for £45, if memory serves (I was told about 10 years ago that the fee for that was still below £50, 15+ years later!).

On the other hand, I knew several people who, having gone to the Bar in 1988 or 1989 with relatively modest academic qualifications, had started to get lucrative and legally-aided criminal work by 1993. One was making around £100,000 p.a. by being led (i.e. by a Q.C.) in large-scale frauds. The average salary in the UK at the time would have been around £15,000 to £20,000, I suppose.

It is a question of where the line is drawn. The general public read of the few barristers making millions (some from legal aid) and are unaware of the fact that many barristers (solicitors too) make almost joke money, such as (in 2018) £20,000 a year, £30,000 a year etc. That applies especially to criminal barristers (and solicitors). The barrister has many expenses to pay, too, from Chambers fees and rent (which work out at as much as 20% of gross fees received) to parking, fuel etc (in the 2002-2008 period I myself travelled all over the UK, and also to mainland Europe and beyond by car, ferry and plane).

Lawyers must be paid, but how well? Unfortunately, this cannot be left to public sentiment. Just as, per Bill Clinton, “you can’t go too far on welfare” (because the public love to see the non-working poor screwed down on), it seems that the public have, understandably but ignorantly, no sympathy for lawyers! The newspapers make sure of it. On the other hand, read what “Abused Lawyer” has to say…

Further Thoughts

My first thoughts are that the governments since 2010 and perhaps before have had no real interest in the law as a major pillar of society. The court buildings themselves are often not much to look at. Many of the newer (post 1945) Crown Courts are in the “monstrous carbuncle” region, though there are a few modern courts that are better, such as Truro and Exeter, both of which I visited often when practising at the Bar out of Exeter in the years 2002-2007.

Some County Courts are appalling to look at: I once had to appear at Brighton County Court, which is or was like a public loo in almost every respect. Again, I was once only at Walsall County Court: I saw a magnificent 18thC building in the neoclassic style (pillared frontage etc) with the legend “Walsall County Court” on it. However, it turned out that that building had been sold and that the real County Court was now situated nearby in what had obviously been a shop, possibly a furniture emporium. Now, about 14 years later, I have just read that the original building is a Wetherspoon’s pub! Britain 2018…

If you visit courts in the United States, you often find that they embody “the majesty of the law”: pillars, atria, broad stone steps etc. Not all, but most. Even the modern courts make an effort to seem imposing. Not so in the UK! You might ask “so what?”, but image and impression are important. The same is true of the Bar. It is infuriating to see some barristers hugely overpaid, particularly at public expense, but at the same time law and society are diminished if the Bar is reduced to penury.

The question is not simple: the Bar has become overcrowded. Even now, we see that every other (or so it sometimes seems) black or brown young person wants to become a barrister (quite a few English people –so-called “whites”– too).

When I was at school and vaguely thinking about the idea (in 1973, the year in which I in fact dropped out of school!), the Bar had about 4,000-5,000 members (in practice in chambers), whereas now, in 2018, there are 16,000 (but the official definition now includes some —perhaps 3,000— employed barristers). In very broad terms, you could say that the number of practising barristers has tripled in 40 years. However, it seems that in 2017 and 2016, the number exceeded 30,000! Has there been a cull in the past year or so? I do not have the information with which I might answer my own question.

Looking at the situation from my present eyrie of objectivity, it seems to me clear that the Bar (and also the solicitor profession) as a career for many is going to disappear. Britain is getting poorer and the plan of the international conspiracy is to manage that. How? By importing millions of unwanted immigrants (who breed); by getting the masses used to the idea that Britain is getting poorer and/or “cannot afford” [fill in whatever: the Bar, the law, the police, the Welfare State, defence, decency…]. Also, by labelling the few non-sheep standing up against it all as “extremists”, “neo-Nazis”, “racists” etc.

The fees for the criminal Bar and the lower end of the civil Bar will only become more modest. Large numbers of often rubbish barristers will compete for the badly-paid cases going (and some more affluent young barristers, with family money supporting them, will willingly work for peanuts anyway). There is also the point that, when I was at the Inns of Court School of Law in 1987-88, you had to go there for a year in order to take, eventually, the (then) three days of the Bar Examination. Now, all sorts of poor places offer a “Bar Finals course” (now, I believe, called the Bar Vocational Course or BVC, or some even newer name). Thus the supply of (often poor) barristers has increased.

A final word on fees. Traditionally, barristers were not supposed to care about fees. They could not sue for their fees. These attitudes still exist, though in very modified form, today. At the same time, some solicitors take advantage. I suppose that my critics will call me biased etc, but I found that the non-paying solicitors were mostly the smaller, often Jewish or other “ethnic”, firms who, almost invariably, were also very lax on ethics (i.e. were crooks, in blunt language). I suppose that some will ask why I accepted instructions from such firms. Well, there are ways to get out of things, but the “cab rank” rule limits what you can say and do, and the joke “Code of Conduct” would make it impossible to say “no Jews, no blacks, no browns” (etc)…

Looking further ahead, the legal profession is likely to be hard-hit by AI (artificial intelligence).

Notes

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/

Update, 1 December 2018

A tweet about a Crown Court trial by the author of a recent high-selling book on the broken justice system of the UK continues the theme:

As to why (criminal) barristers are now working for peanuts in many cases, see above blog post, and also:

  • most criminal barristers cannot do anything else and are by no means always of much interest to those who might pay more, i.e. employers of whatever type;
  •  most criminal barristers are “me too” pseudo-liberals with the backbone of a jellyfish, as witness their lack of (public) support for me when a Jew-Zionist cabal (“UK Lawyers for Israel”) made malicious and politically-motivated complaint against me to the Bar Standards Board in 2014 (hearing 2016);
  • following above theme, most barristers (not only criminal ones) are scared of the (absurd) BSB, the Bar Council, their instructing solicitors, their own shadows (etc);
  • some have family money and/or are trustafarians.

Update, 13 December 2018

Another relevant contribution, from a barrister calling himself Cayman Taff…

Update, 16 December 2018

Solicitors: civil legal aid firm numbers reduced by well over 1,000 (from about 3,600 to 2,500), so a reduction of over a quarter. The BBC says “decimated”, but I have ceased to expect much literacy from BBC (or other msm journalistic) staff…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46357169

and I just noticed this tweet (see my mention of “Mentions” in the body of my blog post, above)…

Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Fragments of Memory…#From Pupillage: Neil’s Party

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Foreword

Some reading this may also have read my previous blog posts [see Notes, below] about my rather untraditional Bar pupillage in 1992-93, and also about my early post-pupillage days in Bar practice. I thought to write about a few other stray incidents from those times. Humour was rarely entirely absent, though sometimes in the context of events which were, especially for the people advised or represented, taxing and upsetting. I was, of course, in the first six months of my pupillage not allowed to advise or represent, and so was basically a spectator and supernumerary.

Anyway, here is one event that has stuck in my recollection. It is not directly “legal”, but connected to some lawyers I knew.

Neil’s Party

At the time, in 1992, I was very friendly with a young barrister called Neil M. and his charming wife, Helen. Both had been in the same small “Practical Exercises” group at “Bar School” (the Inns of Court School of Law in Gray’s Inn, at the time the only place where aspiring barristers could study and be examined) in 1987-88. Our surnames all started with “M” (Neil and Helen had different surnames at that time, being unmarried; in fact they first met in that little group of 7 or 8 people).

I had gone to the USA (initially in 1989, but somewhat commuted UK/USA in the following few years) and had married a US citizen; I also qualified by exam (and pretty tough it was) at the New York Bar. Neil M. had started pupillage in London and, by 1992, was already a rising barrister at the criminal Bar. Helen, his wife by that time, had left the Bar for the solicitors’ profession. In 1992, when I returned to the UK after one of my sojourns in New Jersey, the country was just going to hold the General Election of that year.

I was not actively political at the time, though I of course despised the System parties. Neil M., on the other hand, was a Labour Party stalwart, a political position which originated from his upbringing in the North West of England: he was the son of an amiable “tankie” Communist (literally so, a member of the C.P.G.B.), whom I met a couple of times in later years.

Neil M. was, I suppose, somewhere in the middle of the Labour Party, ideologically, close to the outlook of John Smith, the Scottish advocate who led Labour for about 20 months until his death in 1994. I should characterize Neil’s outlook as “tribal Labour”; to me that had no greater weight than that of someone who supports this or that football team, or Oxford/Cambridge in the Boat Race. In fact, Neil M. concurred with my view up to a point, saying that I could not understand why people like him were so partisan in favour of a System party; for him it indeed was like “…supporting a football or rugby team; you don’t understand that either!”

I was invited to attend the special election night dinner at the beautifully-refurbished National Liberal Club, once the haunt of Gladstone, Lloyd George and Asquith, later (in the 1970s) the decayed and dilapidated place where the likes of Cyril Smith and Jeremy Thorpe had stayed and behaved badly. By 1992, most members were “non-political” (meaning not Liberal Democrats). Much later yet, in 2001-2002, I was myself a member.

Large TV screens had been set up in the Club dining room, in order to relay the election results from the BBC as they came in.

Older readers will recall that the opinion polls made Labour favourite to win the 1992 General Election. Neil Kinnock was widely expected to become Prime Minister, though later his triumphalist and arguably too-“Labourite” speech at Sheffield was blamed for putting off floating voters:

At any rate, Labour went into the final day and evening confident, a position echoed by many of those at the dinner I attended. In fact, I noted that many were not pro-Labour, but were quieter than the Labour partisans. At my table, I sat near Neil M. and his wife, as well as another barrister, a markedly iconoclastic (and amusing) Jew commercial barrister called Robert L. and his extremely engaging, attractive and articulate wife, a City of London banker, with whom I had an interesting and slightly barbed conversation.

All went well at the dinner until, after midnight, it started to become very obvious that Labour was not going to win the election. The scene in parts of the large Club dining room reminded me of a smarter and English (and far less sexualized) version of Don’s Party, the Australian film about a party which unravels when the expected victory of the Australian Labor Party (in 1969) fails to occur. I left the Club very late but still before most of the diners. I was told later that, after I left, scuffles and the like broke out between mocking “Conservatives” and angry, frustrated and drunken “Labour” partisans.

I myself was highly amused by the outcome of the election, mainly because, to me, it was obvious that most of the Labour MPs in the Shadow Cabinet were a bunch of fakes and/or hypocrites, led by Kinnock himself, a creeping crawling doormat for Zionists, and an apologist for mass immigration and finance-capitalism ameliorated slightly by a Welfare State already beginning to show signs of disappearance.

Neil M. was angry at me (and years later admitted to me that he had come close to hitting me! In the sacred precincts of the Club, at that!). He himself later became a local councillor in Islington and was informally offered the chance to become a Labour MP, but turned down the opportunity on the ground that as a barrister doing very good criminal work, he was making about twice an MP’s salary and needed the money. Years later he ruefully explained that he had thought that MPs lived off their salaries! He had no idea back then that not only did they have very generous expenses (and in many cases cheated badly on those!) as well as the really quite good salary (compared to most people), but also often had offers of lucrative “work” from all sorts of “consultancies” etc. Disguised near (or actual) corruption. Pity that Neil M. did not become a politician in the Westminster monkeyhouse. He would have been a good and conscientious constituency MP.

Final Word

In fact, Labour improved their position in the election, with an extra 42 MPs, though that still left the Conservatives under John Major with an overall majority of 21. It took 5 years before Labour under Tony Blair could sweep away the Conservatives and many of their MPs. Neil Kinnock ceded control of Labour to John Smith and then (after Smith died in office) to Tony Blair.

As for my friends Neil M. and Helen M. (I shall not say too much, to save them from embarrassment, now that the Zionist Jews label me in the msm and on social media as a “far right” “extremist”, “anti-Semite” and “neo-Nazi”), I maintained friendship for another 15 years, and in fact still regard them as quite close friends today, though I have not seen them now for a decade. I always send them a Christmas card (I’m like that, a bit like Jacob and the Angel: I will not let you go until you bless me…).

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/an-embarrassing-morning-in-court/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/first-steal-a-chicken/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberal_Club

http://www.nlc.org.uk/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1992

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27s_Party

 

Alison Chabloz, Campaign Against AntiSemitism, free speech, historical revisionism, Ian Millard, Jewish lobby in UK, Mark Lewis, Reminiscences and Musings, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

“Mark Lewis Lawyer” Tries to Have Part of the Case Against Him Thrown Out

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  • The Jew-Zionist lawyer (solicitor) Mark Lewis, best known for the UK phonehacking cases of some years ago, is facing a disciplinary tribunal under the auspices of the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority, and is trying to have part of the case against him thrown out on the specious basis that he was “merely responding” to rude comments about him by “a Who’s Who of neo-Nazis” (as if that were a defence? Oh well, let’s leave that aside…he’s not my solicitor, thank God!). I post the link to the Law Society Gazette report below.

I should add that I am neither party nor witness in those disciplinary proceedings.

I shall be blogging further about this unpleasant individual, probably in considerable detail, at a later time. For the moment, I shall confine myself to saying that

  • Mark Lewis started to send me a small number of abusive tweets (unprompted by any tweets from me to him) in 2012 or 2013. I did not reply in kind and blocked him on Twitter;
  • Lewis’s then wife (a short-lived marriage), one Caroline Feraday (a “Z List” would-be “celebrity” about 20 years ago) was in fact the first to abuse me on Twitter, having seen a tweet by me about the “WW2 Jewish looted art” “restitution” scam, reported on by the Radio 4 Today Programme. Lewis joined in her hysterical abuse against me. (The marriage failed after less than a year and after a few years —in 2018— she had a child by another man in Southern California, to where she —and Lewis, for a while, in 2013— had relocated);
  • I had to block both Caroline Feraday and Mark Lewis on Twitter because of their unpleasant abuse; I should add that, until they started to abuse me online, I had never heard of either of them;
  • Some time after I blocked Mark Lewis on Twitter, I was informed (and saw evidence from his own online output) that he had tried to make complaint against me to the Metropolitan Police in or around 2013. I know the name of the police officer who was (in Lewis’s words) “dealing with the case”, a woman who had previously served in the Royal Military Police. The complaint failed (in fact, I was not even contacted by the Metropolitan Police);
  • Mark Lewis is or was a leading member of, and office-holder in, two Jew-Zionist organizations, UK Lawyers for Israel [UKLFI] and the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism [CAA]. The first cabal (UKLFI) made complaint against me to the Bar in 2014 (6-7 years after I ceased practice, a purely political and malicious complaint based on a small number of tweets, none of which were addressed to any individual but were general comments on society). I was disbarred in 2016 as a result of that complaint. The second cabal (the CAA) has tried on several occasions to have me prosecuted, via malicious complaint to Essex Police [see link below] and elsewhere (but now is itself under investigation by the police in relation to several matters);
  • Mark Lewis has from time to time posted other rude or abusive comments about me online, the last being about a year or two ago;
  • Mark Lewis is supposedly now relocating to Israel, and the London law firm which employed him for a couple of years, Seddons, parted company with him a while ago.

Unfortunately, I was unaware until recently that Lewis was being “tried” for abuse online against others, and was only aware today that Lewis had made preliminary application to throw out the case in part on the basis that he was merely “replying” to abuse by “neo-Nazis” (in which category he apparently places me). In my case, I was tweeted by Lewis; I was neither rude nor insulting, still less abusive to Lewis, yet he was –unprompted– horribly rude and abusive to me, as was his short-term and hysterical then wife, though she soon moved on and concentrated on (risibly) trying to convince her Twitter followers —mostly bought– that she was still, really, a “celebrity” (apparently a few people still remember her reporting on London traffic congestion etc);

  • It is important to underline that I was never even rude, still less abusive, to Lewis. His abuse was unprompted, unexpected both in itself and in its ferocity, and not the result of anything I tweeted to him (he addressed me “out of the blue”).

I await the results of the disciplinary proceedings with interest.

Notes

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/lewis-prosecution-is-disgraceful-considering-hate-campaign-against-me/5068417.article

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/practice/fee-dispute-i-wasnt-sure-what-work-mark-lewis-was-doing-law-firm-chief-tells-court/5063455.article

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184723/RICHARD-KAY-DJ-Caroline-Feradays-brief-encounter.html

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20140519/282273843396961

https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster63/lob63-mark-lewis.pdf

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/mark-lewis-my-ms-consultant-told-me-not-to-do-anything-stressful-so-i-went-after-murdochs-phone-6370688.html

 

Debate about this on Twitter…

https://twitter.com/IKWiltshire186/status/1065911406162309121

Update, 23 November 2018

It appears that the hearing has in fact now started and that Lewis failed to get part of the evidence (and so the case) thrown out:

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/lewis-regulatory-action-inevitable-after-death-threat-tweets-tribunal-hears/5068449.article?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Lewis apparently has given evidence that, at times, he “had no idea what he was doing” because of the drugs he was prescribed! Glad that he is not my solicitor!

download

170217-lewis-die-e1533384703639

Psychotic (or maybe the MS he has afflicts mind as well as body); he himself, at trial, blamed drugs for some nasty tweets, but he stands by those shown above!

Update 26 November 2018

Lewis was given a fairly lenient penalty by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority for his sins: £2,500 fine plus £10,000 costs. Pity he was not struck off the solicitors’ roll. He admitted that he sometimes has no idea what he is doing because of prescription drugs. He’s on the way out.

On Twitter, the whole UK Twitter Jew Zionist cabal (many of them lawyers, several of them Jews with not obviously-Jewish names) is out in force, defending Lewis’s behaviour. Take a look on Twitter under “Mark Lewis” or “@mlewislawyer”.

Also, compare the lenient treatment given to Lewis (whose ferocious abuse was aimed at named individuals and addressed directly to them) to that meted out to me, disbarred for tweeting 7 (reduced to 5) tweets critical of or mocking Jew Zionism!

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/

Update, 27 November 2018

Jews immediately set up crowdfunding pages for Lewis. Already, about £8,000 has been given (by Jews, presumably and judging from names of donors) and it seems likely that the SRA financial penalty and costs will all be paid that way. Lewis may even make a profit on it all! I cannot imagine that Lewis and his “carer”/”partner” Mandy Blumenthal (a property “investor”) are exactly short of money anyway.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the debate continues:

https://twitter.com/arryTuttle/status/1067334995449126912

https://twitter.com/Tir_Tairngire/status/1067329329749737472

The division is sharp: Jews and a few “useful idiot” non-Jews supporting Lewis (I dare say that most are unaware of the true facts of Lewis’s persistent and long-term abuse of people or have been misled by the story his Counsel put forward on his behalf); non-Jews mostly not supporting his position.

Here for example, we see Aisha Ali-Khan, an oddly pro-Lewis Muslim woman (and married to a one-time policeman, himself given a suspended sentence for a criminal offence as well as dismissed from the police), supporting him. She often calls on Twitter for the prosecution of supposed “anti-Semites” etc. Strange hypocrisy: she herself has been imprisoned two or three times for contempt of court, harassment and so on. Maybe she considers Lewis, as another abuser, to be a kindred spirit! I forgot to mention that, at one time, she was assistant to ex-Labour and Respect former MP George Galloway. I wonder what she was up to…

https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/16171212.george-galloways-former-parliamentary-assistant-jailed-for-contempt/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-26873650

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jealous-copper-spied-george-galloways-3943177

Pathetic minor academic Ben Gidley (another Jew-Zionist), here posing as one of his other Twitter faces, “Bob From Brockley” (yet another of his aliases is “@antinazisunited”; he was also “@TheSoupyOne” but was expelled from Twitter for –again!– harassment! Those Zionist Jews never seem to learn…), and here supports Lewis in reply to Katie Hopkins, dragging me into it all! Note that my featured tweet is not addressed to Lewis…In fact Gidley/BobFromBrockley is once again wrong: I have not been on Twitter for about 7 months now; I no longer have an account. Ben/Bob also falsely implies that I was part of “a concerted campaign” to harass Lewis. No…in fact I never tweeted to him except perhaps (and politely) once, when Lewis started his campaign against me (mostly from the shadows).

and it seems that Mandy Gargoyle is not very well thought of, either.

Here is some pseudonymous Jewess, “Anna”, attacking Katie Hopkins, and also persecuted singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz. I have seen tweets identifying “Anna” (and other accounts) as… Mandy Gargoyle, but I have no idea whether she is or not. Maybe not: probably straight from Tel Aviv, judging by the poor English (eg Alison Chabloz as someone’s “son“!). No matter. [note, 29 November 2018: the Twitter account “Anna” has now disclaimed being Mandy Blumenthal, though claiming that she is “honoured” that “one antisemite” “keeps on” making the association. No idea who that might be….I’m looking but not finding, today].

Here’s an amusing one. Jew (odds-on) who thinks that Lewis should not have been prosecuted by the SRA because tweeting in a personal and not professional capacity.

Well, I pleaded that (inter alia) when Jew-Zionists had the Bar Standards Board “prosecute” me (2014-2016). The tribunal decided (quite wrongly on the facts) against me. I never held myself out as barrister on my Twitter profile or in any of the 5 supposedly offending tweets (none of which was addressed to a named individual). Lewis has always (typical…) self-promoted as a “lawyer” (solicitor) on his Twitter profile. I shall be blogging about the so-called “top lawyer” in greater detail at a later date.

Anti-Zionist Jew, Gilad Atzmon, mentions Lewis and his behaviour here:

https://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/11/26/gilad-needs-additional-support

This is an amusing one, from Simon Myerson QC, who is part of the Jewish Zionist troll group called “@gnasherjew” on Twitter. My impression over the years is that he constantly tweets “as a Jew”, but here he claims not! In fact, his Twitter profile used to self-describe as “ocean-going Zionist QC”, a neat way of wearing his Jewishness on his sleeve while also bragging (about being both a QC and an ocean yachtie).

Update, 3 December 2018

The Jews continue to pile in for Lewis. Twitter is still full of Jews wishing Lewis well in his move to Israel (supposedly the day after tomorrow), and Legal Business magazine here quotes a lawyer saying things helpful to Lewis. Was the lawyer a Jew, one wonders?

https://www.legalbusiness.co.uk/blogs/media-lawyer-mark-lewis-fined-2500-in-controversial-sra-antisemitism-row/

and Legal Business continues:

“The partner added: ‘Is it the role of the SRA to intervene in Twitter rows? This is a case about boundaries, and it suggests that the SRA’s boundaries are in a different place to that of the public.’”

Well, how very supportive. Where were all these supporters of free speech when the Jew-Zionists had me disbarred for 5 tweets about society generally?

In fact not every tweeter has supported Lewis and his appalling behaviour:

Update, 4 December 2018

Another Jew lawyer weighs in on Lewis’s side, at the same time wishing him bon voyage to Israel…

A day or two premature, nicht wahr?

Update, 6 December 2018

Yes, the dog has indeed left!

Landing in Israel, Lewis said to TV reporters that Jews should clear out of Europe:

“In my opinion, Europe has ceased to be a place for Jews, we are a wandering people and it is time to wander again,” Lewis concludes”

https://www.10.tv/news/177728

https://www.timesofisrael.com/europe-is-finished-leading-lawyer-says-as-he-leaves-uk-for-israel/?fbclid=IwAR0zICcsod6xz3RfW92qUvwO_0ZgX3o4ovK-32XjGK9b2u6WVe8AGcCRwjs

Lewis says that “Europe is finished”, when what he means is “finished” in the sense of “no longer so easily exploited by Jew-Zionists”!

As for “finished”, he looks pretty finished himself, a shambling wreck in fact, as shown in this clip from RT News:

In fact, Lewis’s remarks seem to be almost incoherent. It is not clear whether that is because of disjointed RT News editing, the long flight to Israel, the effects of his medication on his brain (as mentioned in his recent “trial” before the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority) or some other cause (such as any degenerative effects on the brain caused by progressive MS). It has occurred to me several times over the past 6 years that Lewis’s brain might have been affected by some side-effect of his MS condition itself, but I do not know enough about MS or medicine generally to say whether that is possible (I read that it is, though) or likely. He often seems to me to leave rationality behind.

What would “Golda Meir” have said?

Dt6s0pEWwAEylHO

Anyway, here’s someone calling himself “Golden Anglo”, a tweeter who seems to be yet another critic of Lewis and his attitude etc…

https://twitter.com/GoldenEagle_BBC/status/1070710098660638720

Reminds me of this amusing ten-minute cartoon:

Update, 7 December 2018

Some (a random selection of) very recent tweets about Lewis and Blumenthal (funny though how RT News seems to have swallowed the same bs as the “British” msm about how Lewis is or was a “top lawyer”…)

https://twitter.com/DundeeBloke/status/1071088207360679936

https://twitter.com/AuldgitzFarts/status/1071116522452647937

https://twitter.com/MomentumCV/status/1071119262142607362

https://twitter.com/D_HairyLemon/status/1071140634055114753

https://twitter.com/bigfatgit/status/1071144086558658560

https://twitter.com/xMATTxLAWx/status/1071144408282775552

 

Lewis denying that he has property in Israel:

Lewis may or may not have a house in Israel (yet), but he certainly has or had (I suspect still has) an apartment, as he admitted in this 2011 interview with the [London] Evening Standard:

“I was devastated,” he says. “I’d been turned down for so many jobs, I’m thinking to myself, I can’t go on any more, you can only get so many knockbacks. I’m giving in and going to my flat in Israel and retire in Eilat.”

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/mark-lewis-my-ms-consultant-told-me-not-to-do-anything-stressful-so-i-went-after-murdochs-phone-6370688.html

Lewis, like Israel, prefers to get his “defence” in first…

In other words, Lewis (and Blumenthal) now exhibit their primary (in fact, really, only) loyalty, i.e. to the state of Israel and to their fellow-Jews. Yet Jews always say that it is “anti-Semitic” to say that Jews have (even) dual loyalty, let alone that they put Jewry and Israel first, before the host country (in this case, the UK). Here we have a typical case: while in the UK, Lewis and Blumenthal were “British” “patriots”, even putting themselves above real British people in that regard, but as soon as they have emigrated to Israel, Europe (not just the UK) is “finished”, “anti-Semitic”, “unsafe” and Britain is not a home for the Jews but just a “Hotel California” where they spent a few years, or a few generations…

The people I despise are the British ones who, out of naivety, or bribery, or fear of career repercussions etc, doormat for the Zionists. Most barristers, for example, are either such doormats or are silent through fear of being blackballed by the Jewish-Zionist lobby in the legal professions, and particularly by Jewish solicitors who might withhold work. The same applies in the world of entertainment and the msm in general.

Update, 8 December 2018

Tweeters are still commenting…

https://twitter.com/The_JPR/status/1071281996268093440

https://twitter.com/BLOG7O7LOL/status/1071307229545025541

She made money out of a contrived Zionist stunt? It might not be on the “Ann Frank” scale but still, “not a bad little earner”…

…and Lewis’s ex-wife Caroline Feraday cannot stop herself from commenting! Well, why not? After all, he cannot slap her from Israel!

Dt6s0pEWwAEylHO

Meanwhile, Lewis answers one of hundreds of critical tweeters. Note that he —a Jew born and brought up in Manchester, UK— describes the Jews as “my people”: he’s left behind the fiction that he is “British” except in terms of one of his passports (he now proudly holds up his new (?) Israeli one). He’s an Israeli now even officially. I hope, though without much confidence, that he now shuts up about UK matters.

…and Mandy Gargoyle has now joined in, trying to intimidate a tweeter who is tweeting under a pseudonym. She is not very intelligent. Just as well. Malice and intelligence would be harder to laugh off.

Update, 10 December 2018, P.M.

Meanwhile, dirty little pro-Zionist propagandist Douglas Murray blogs in favour of Lewis. His brief piece made me laugh out loud, so credit where due! Lewis, says he, never sought limelight for himself! Hardy ha ha! “Modest” (ha ha!), “self-effacing” (ha ha ha!), “cerebral” (what on Earth is Murray on?!), “upholding…the principles of a free and fair society” (!). Ah, so that was what Lewis and his fellow Jew Zionists (of “UK Lawyers for Israel” and “Campaign Against Anti-Semitism”) were doing when they had me disbarred for daring to tweet the truth, when they had Alison Chabloz prosecuted for singing songs, when they had Jez Turner imprisoned for speaking the truth in a public speech…

“Though he was near to limelight, he never sought it for himself. A modest, self-effacing and cerebral figure, his career was not about seeking personal notoriety, but of practising the law, representing his clients and upholding what he saw to be the principles of a free and fair society.”

https://unherd.com/2018/12/why-are-jewish-people-wandering-again/

Update, 16 December 2018

Here below, at the foot of this section, is one of Lewis’s tweets about me, from over 2 years ago. As you, the reader, will see, he refers to me as “failure as a barrister and as a human being”, among other things.

I suppose that most people who read that tweet were unaware of the irony: until Lewis got onto the “phonehacking” wagon, he himself was at rock-bottom. He had parted company with a firm of solicitors in Manchester under unclear circumstances (rather a theme…see below), had been divorced (ditto), and in or about 2009 was only making about £9,000 a year (as he admitted to a newspaper interviewer a few years later).

The phonehacking stuff paid off, and soon Lewis was busily “creating” a legend as “top lawyer”. The phonehacking stuff did not last long of course. Technology moved on and phonehacking is now just a footnote in legal history (it’s a purely UK story anyway: hardly anyone in the USA has heard of it). Lewis left his next firm, in London (where he was a “consultant”), under acrimonious circumstances (he much later sued that firm and they countersued, but it is not publicly known how that ended, the matter presumably having been settled and sealed).

Lewis married, in 2013, one-time local radio presenter Caroline Feraday. “Top lawyer marries celebrity”, or at least that is how the narrative went. Stories were seen in the Press about how Lewis “had clients in the USA” to where he and la Feraday would be relocating (to her new apartment in West Hollywood, no less). She, in her turn, seemingly had various Hollywood opportunities lined up, the newsreading public was told.  She already had a part in a TV sitcom arranged —had “been cast” in it—, the gullible (?) readers were told. More than that! She was busy “writing a book”, which was to be turned into a film and “several studios are interested…”

Lewis, the Daily Mail’s tame showbiz reporter was told by Feraday, had clients in the U.S. and would “commute” between LA and London. As 1950s people were wont to say, “get you!”…

Lewis and Feraday moved to West Hollywood, flying Virgin Upper Class (well, after all, they were, er, “celebrities”, weren’t they?) to LA. They joined the West Hollywood branch of the Soho House club, on Sunset Boulevard. “Celebrities” have more than a few thousand Twitter followers, of course, so they both “acquired” tens of thousands of new “followers”, Lewis ending up after a week or so with about 80,000!

Sadly, all that hype seemed to disappear like a mirage in Death Valley. La Feraday never did get into an American sitcom (or if she did, it must have bombed, or been pulled immediately…there never was one, I am guessing). I have no idea whether she ever got any part in American film or TV. Her breathless “look at me, people—a celebrity in sunny Hollywood!” Twitter account said nothing (that I saw, anyway) about her getting a acting part, but that is unsurprising. After all, why should an acting part on American TV, or in a film, go to someone without any acting experience, and who was nearly 40? The supposed book deals and film options also vanished without trace.

As for Lewis, his brave new Californian world crumbled into ashes. American lawyers soon realized that Lewis (unlike, er, me) had never qualified at the Bar of any American state and so was not qualified to practise in California (or any other state). Those lawyers made sure that the California Bar was aware of the foregoing. The upshot (whatever the causes…and I have heard a few stories) was that the marriage foundered after only a year (including a few months in LA) and Lewis returned to the UK in 2014 with his tail between his legs.

By the following year, Lewis had joined the well-known London law firm, Seddons, as a partner (salaried “partner”, not equity partner). At the time, I was surprised that Seddons had taken him on, but there it is. He left in 2018, just as it became known that he was coming up for “trial” in the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal (where he was found guilty on all charges). Seddons’ statement was that Lewis had resigned as a partner because of his upcoming “aliyah” (emigration) to Israel (he is now an Israeli citizen).

Lewis’s second ex-wife, Caroline Feraday, stayed on in LA, did some amateur comedy appearances there and a few 2-minute reports about the Oscars etc for the British local TV news show, BBC South-East Today (cheaper than actually sending someone, I suppose), and eventually had a child in 2017 by another man.

Lewis is now an Israeli citizen and resident (he has or had a flat there). He is not now a partner or employee of any law firm in the UK and has stated that he will not seek admission to whatever Bar may exist in Israel. He has a degenerative progressive medical condition and is, apparently, on medication.

[note: much material about Lewis, including some newspaper coverage, has mysteriously disappeared from the Internet, or at least from Google searches]

Update, 12 January 2021

For further information, please see: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/12/20/self-publicizing-supposed-top-lawyer-mark-lewis-full-transcript-of-disciplinary-hearing-judgment-now-released-by-tribunal/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/01/11/update-re-mark-lewis-lawyer-questions-are-raised/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/12/22/mark-lewis-lawyer-latest-update/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/12/19/the-latest-revelations-about-zionist-supposed-top-lawyer-mark-lewis/; and https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/12/11/mark-lewis-lawyer-disciplinary-case-now-updated-to-11-december-2018/.

Lewis is pretty much washed up in every way now.

Reminiscences and Musings, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

An Embarrassing Morning in Court

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Another in the series of vignettes about my perhaps slightly unusual life at the English Bar. The disaster recounted below occurred in early 1994.

A children’s author called Lemony Snicket wrote a book called A Series of Unfortunate Events. I once represented someone who had suffered a series of such events.

A Nigerian, X, had been born in the UK where his affluent parents had been on holiday. A few weeks after the birth, the family returned to Nigeria, where X went to school. It was then decided to send X to university overseas. An American university, I think in the Midwest, was chosen and X attended that institution for a few years. During that time, X also engaged, like many Nigerians, in business activities of some sort. Unfortunately, as a result of these, he was charged and convicted of a Federal offence of fraud, subsequently serving a one-year sentence in Federal prison.

X had entered the USA on a visa which was invalidated once X was convicted of a Federal offence. Thus, when the year in prison had finished, X was incarcerated in another Federal detention facility as a person facing deportation. X wanted to appeal his conviction and so resisted deportation by filing an appeal against that too. He was moved to a Federal facility in Louisiana. According to his own account, the place was a “concentration camp” amid heat and mosquitos in which place, every day, he was offered the chance to be released if only he would agree to drop his immigration appeal and return to Nigeria. He resisted these invitations for some time, but eventually, worn down by the conditions, conceded.

It was at this point that it was discovered that X had been born in London. The US authorities thenceforth refused to deal with the Nigerian Consulate on his behalf and took him under guard to the UK Consulate in Houston, Texas, apparently the nearest one with authority to deal with the matter. He was issued with a British passport and was then sent to the UK, a country he had only seen as a newborn baby.

X said that he had never been violent, but only argued with the US officials accompanying him, to the effect that he wished to go to Nigeria, not the UK. As a result, X travelled from Houston to Gatwick handcuffed throughout the flight, also forced to wear a weighted leather device attached to one leg, and with two guards guarding him.

X’s travails continued after landing. All other passengers were disembarked, then a police car was driven up to the aircraft and steps brought. X was told to get up but could not, by reason of his leg having gone to sleep. The handcuffs and leg weight were removed. He was then manhandled by the guards and the British police off the aircraft, then literally dragged down the aircraft steps and into the waiting police car. It got worse from there.

Having (according to his own evidence) not wanted to be sent to the UK, X was now held at Gatwick police station and then an immigration detention centre near Portsmouth on the basis that he had no right to be in the UK  and was, notwithstanding the recently-issued British passport, an illegal immigrant! After two weeks in British immigration detention, X was driven back to Gatwick police station, told “OK, you have been checked out and you do have the right to be in the UK”, whereupon he was given the bus fare to Crawley, the nearest town, and released. Thus X found himself in the UK with only pennies in his pocket, nowhere to stay, knowing no-one and nothing.

X eventually managed to get some kind of emergency help with housing from the local council but wanted to move to London. He left Crawley for various reasons and went to London. He applied for housing to seven London boroughs, most of which refused even to consider his request (he claimed). This was the basis for his wish, over a year later, to seek judicial review of the decisions to refuse him and/or the refusal to consider his request(s) at all. I have no idea why his Nigerian family did not help him out with money or air tickets. Maybe the American events had estranged them.

X in person was irritating: an obsessive, fast-talking West African who had obviously decided to stay in the UK and to extract as much benefit as possible. Having said that, I thought that he had been treated very badly both in the US and UK. His case seemed at least arguable. His solicitor was a small Nigerian, almost a pygmy in size, who did not inspire confidence.

On the morning of the “application to apply” of the 2-stage process, I was at the Royal Courts of Justice, my by-then-usual stamping ground, in order to appear before Mr. Justice Laws (later a Lord Justice of Appeal). I had invited an old friend, an elegant European aristocratic lady, to see me in action and then, after my hoped-for initial triumph, to join me at lunch in Hall at nearby Lincoln’s Inn.

Greek tragedy placed hubris as inviting Nemesis. The courtroom was quite crowded with other barristers coming on after me. At first, things went well, despite the fact that, instead of neatly-organized files, the pygmy solicitor’s filing system appeared to be a large black bin-bag. The judge was listening, even perhaps slightly nodding at times (or was that wishful thinking on my part?). Then I struck the reef:

“Mr. Millard, where is the document from each council refusing Mr X?”

“My Lord, there are no such documents. Part of the case of the Applicant is that he requested a written decision in each case and was refused even that.”

“Mr. Millard, I think that I have to see something in writing.”

It was at this point that I felt a tug on my barrister’s black gown. Turning slightly, I saw the pygmy waving a piece of paper excitedly, smiling manically and nodding like a mechanized Victorian toy. Rashly, very rashly, I replied to the judge,

“I in fact appear to be in a position to assist your Lordship”

and only then looked at the paper. Big mistake. It was blank. I turned it over. Blank. I turned it over again, not quite believing this. I must have looked like a character out of a Laurel and Hardy film. I caught, peripherally, the incredulous looks of a couple of the waiting barristers. Sadly, no flying saucer appeared to beam me up and away from it all. I had to say something.

“I regret, my Lord, that in fact I am not in a position to assist your Lordship.”

Thus it was that Mr Justice Laws, later Lord Justice Laws, turned that colour, a mixture of pink, red and purple, that I now call Judicial Livid. His final remarks, in refusing our application, were curt (though not insulting; they did not have to be…).

On the way out of the courtroom and into the corridor, my guest, swathed in furs and jewels, and whom I had hoped would see me achieve a successful result, sympathetically said, “poor Ian”…

Update, 6 April 2020

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8190231/Dominic-Cummings-uncle-retired-judge-Sir-John-Laws-dies-coronavirus-diagnosis.html

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. … They have their exits and their entrances, and in his lifetime a man will play many parts, his life separated into seven acts.“

[Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7]

Update, 30 August 2023

I see that, since my last update of this blog post, it has received more hits, including a single hit today.

I also saw Laws’ Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Laws_(judge).

Life is famously short, even when not “nasty” and/or “brutish” [etc], as Hobbes put it in Leviathan. A mere (?) 28 or 29 years ago, there I was, highly embarrassed before the (seemingly) all-powerful and very irritated High Court judge. Now, I am where I am, and that judge is no longer even on the Earth. All things pass…

Incidentally, I only now notice that that judge, Laws, was a mere 11 years older than me, having been born in 1945. I had thought much older. On the sole occasion when I appeared before him, I thought (or would have assumed) that he was at least 20 years older, with his almost circular red (indeed, livid) face surmounted by judicial short wig.

Life is a puzzle, really…

immigration, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

First, Steal A Chicken

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This post is one in the line of reminiscences of my life at the English Bar. More exactly, it is another story of my days of pupillage (“on the job training”) as a newly-minted barrister in 1992-93, still under the control of a “pupilmaster” (though, as explained in other posts, my “pupilmaster” was in fact the same age as me, a consequence of my “rolling stone” or “wander-bird” youth). It tells the story of a fairly minor series of thefts, but at the same time says something about UK and even European society generally.

A timeworn joke says that the first line of an old Hungarian recipe for chicken goulash starts, “First, steal a chicken”…Well, in this story there was no chicken but what there was was an Arab Gypsy woman in East London who was expecting a baby. Well, a baby needs all kinds of things and especially clothing, so the family of that woman– a man, a boy of 14, the pregnant woman, our defendant (an exceptionally beautiful girl aged about 18 who was a cousin of the pregnant woman), and another woman– set out one fine morning to steal the requisites. Their chosen emporium was British Home Stores, Ilford, part of East London.

The aforesaid shopping expedition was initially successful, but came to an abrupt end when the “shoppers” were arrested by police as they were getting into their car, laden with their “acquisitions”. A woman store detective had noticed them and had alerted her colleagues and the police.

It is at this point that the story becomes interesting from the “crime and punishment” point of view. The man arrested was not charged, on the basis that he had not entered the store, not handled the goods and had not admitted knowing anything of the thefts. The 14 year old boy, having admitted acting as a look-out (a pretty poor one, as it turned out), received a police caution. The other women admitted theft in the magistrates’ court and were fined £50 each. So that left our defendant, who was called something like Maroush or Marousha.

Now it transpired that Maroush was also going to be sentenced for being part of a gang which had visited towns in Dorset and Somerset and had stolen quite large amounts from shops by distracting the cashiers while the tills were open (in fact, they could somehow get them open, silently and in seconds, even when the tills were closed). Maroush was a minor player in that game but would be sentenced with several others, they like her having pleaded to those offences, after the conclusion of her shoplifting trial.

Now the point was that theft is an either-way offence and Maroush could have pleaded guilty in the “mags”, in which case she would no doubt have received a £50 fine like the others. Why she had decided to elect Crown Court trial, God knows. We only got her case at the Crown Court stage.

So it was that we all appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court one day. Snaresbrook is a large rambling building near the end of the Central Line in Essex, and which even then had, I believe, 26 courtrooms (Wikipedia says 20, but that was in 1988; trial was in 1992; it’s pretty big, anyway…). One thing that struck me was when pupilmaster and I were provided (by the Crown Counsel) with a copy of a short Home Office report marked “Restricted”, all about Maroush’s clan origins.

It seems that Maroush came out of a clan of Arab Gypsies who lived (no doubt in poverty and on the margins of Arab society) in pre-WW2 Libya. The Second World War dislocated the states and colonies around the Mediterranean. The clan took the opportunity, after the war finished, somehow to get to Italy. They were eventually granted residency, and some, citizenship. The EEC/EC/EU arrived, with its “free movement” provisions. The clan then moved to somewhere where they could live off the host population more easily– the UK. The Home Office report was fairly direct, which perhaps was why it was “Restricted”: one would not want the British people or Press to see the truth…In fact, the report made it clear that few if any of the 5,000 Arab Gypsies of that clan then living in and around London had remunerative work. They all lived from theft, begging and State benefits.

The trial itself should have taken a day, but in fact took three, to the irritation of the judge. Pupilmaster was usually extremely long-winded, almost absurdly so. In fact, because the trial only ended late on the third day, sentence had to be put off to a fourth, because the other “£50 note trick” defs would be sentenced alongside Maroush. In the event, she was –almost inevitably– convicted of the Ilford shoplifting, and was sentenced to, if memory serves, 22 months’ imprisonment, though most of that was for the Dorset/Somerset offences. Still, she would have been better off pleading to the shoplifting, in the mags. She cried in the dock. I felt sad (I was younger and perhaps more sensitive then).

Not sure why that trial has stuck in my mind: the Home Office report? The youth and beauty of the defendant? The manifest silliness of her decision both to fight the shoplifting charge and, far worse, to do so in the Crown Court? All was put to one side over a few beers in the nearby Spread Eagle pub (if I recall the name aright) not long after. Life went on.

Note:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snaresbrook_Crown_Court

 

Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged…

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This blog post has been triggered by my happening to have seen a couple of minor news items while idly browsing the Internet. The first reported that my old head of chambers –shall we call him M.B.?– from when I practised as a barrister in Exeter (2002-2007), has been elevated to the Bench as a Circuit Judge and is now styled His Honour Judge M.B.

The other news item was that the old (dating from 1905) Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court and police station have been turned into “a luxury boutique hotel”. Sign of the times.

These reports have led me to muse on some of my own experiences with the judicial classes.

M.B. will probably make an effective judge. An erudite civil lawyer, I met him when I decided to stop being an employed lawyer (a situation I was in, intermittently, from 1996 through to 2002) and re-start Bar practice in England. I had been living and/or working overseas for much of those six or seven years, and in London, where at one time I was the leaseholder of property in Gray’s Inn (I lived at that time at Higher Denham, Buckinghamshire, from where I travelled in by rail from Denham Golf Club halt to Marylebone, a short journey lasting about 20 minutes).

I was in Kazakhstan for a year (1996-97) and after that also lived in or made shorter visits to a number of other countries: Egypt (where I lived for a while in Aswan, on a remote Red Sea beach under canvas, in a flat in Alexandria and in the desert oasis of Siwa); Turkey (I drove UK-Turkey-UK in 2001, which was quite an adventure at times: France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, a 4-month trip); the USA (based in Charleston, South Carolina, but I also stayed for a while in Tampa, Florida); Qatar; Liechtenstein; the Channel Islands, the Eastern Caribbean (several islands); the Cayman Islands, Minorca, Czech Republic, Northern Cyprus etc.

I remember one member of my future chambers remarking at my interview that my CV read in parts like that of James Bond. I had to point out that any resemblance between me and James Bond was purely co-incidental and very implausible (and not only because I have never belonged to any secret service!).

Still, I joined that set and in general found it OK, though at first it (and so I) had very little work. I had taken on the lease of one of the largest country houses in North Cornwall and liked the relaxed lifestyle of the Cornwall/Devon upstream Tamar River area.

As to M.B., not long after I joined the set, M.B. and I won a multi-day action in contract and trust together (though appearing for different people) at Plymouth County Court. After that, we did appear on opposite sides a couple of times during my 5 years in chambers, but he lost out despite being (arguably) a better advocate and (unarguably) a better lawyer than me.

I may as well add that, despite what some Jewish individuals claimed after I was disbarred in 2016 (about 8 years after I had left chambers and ceased Bar practice!), M.B. and the other fellow members of chambers (with one, possibly two exceptions: see below) did not want me to leave chambers, whether for political or any other reasons. Indeed, M.B. wanted me to stay on despite my having decided to resign.

In fact, I was commuting on a weekly or 2-weekly basis across the Channel to Finistere, where my wife and cats were living. This resulted in financial strain, in that I was only available for half the time, was paying out large amounts for ferries (return trip with car, luxury cabin too, about £300 return, every week or so…), hotels in the UK for 10-20 nights per month.

Putting the seal on it all, I was starting to have “discussions” with the Revenue (which only ended in 2012).

My only misgivings about M.B. as a judge would be that, firstly, he tends to stick with black-letter law; in my view, he is unwilling to bend the law to fit the justice of the case. Whether that is a strength or a weakness is a matter for debate.

Secondly, when I decided to leave chambers, I quite liked the idea of remaining as a door tenant [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_tenant] and M.B. said that that would not be a problem and implied (indeed expressed, though in some other words) that it would be nodded through, but that the correct form would be for me to resign my tenancy first and then apply for door tenancy, though approval would “in my case” be automatic.

However, when it came to it, a couple of new tenants (I believe) cut up rough because one was married to some kind of Indian and was very hostile to (what he assumed were) my political views; I think (guessing) that a recent ex-pupil (a humourless bespectacled woman with an invisible sign round her neck saying “Politically-Correct Virtue-Signalling Christian”) may also have blackballed me.

In the event, the door tenancy would have been a waste of time because the Revenue was on my back at a cross-Channel distance. Still, that made me think that M.B. was not necessarily reliable, a thought that had occurred previously once or twice.

Now to another judge of sorts. Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court, long before it was (quite recently) turned into a luxury boutique hotel, was for some years often presided over by one Jacqueline “Jackie” Comyns, a notoriously despotic “stipendiary magistrate” (the rank now renamed “District Judge Criminal”). Her reputation was fearsome.

I only appeared once in front of this gargoyle: I was “briefed” at 11 am to appear at 12! That was in 1993. I read the brief on the way to court. The defendant had refused to get off a defective bus and had then assaulted the conductor and gone on to smash the side window of a police car. She was pleading guilty.

At court, the case came on minutes after my arrival. The magistrate interrupted my mitigation to ask some petty question about the defendant. I did not know the answer, having not had time for a brief conference.

Instead of simply asking the defendant for the information, this ghastly frustrated prize bitch, sitting on her seat of petty power, told me venomously that Counsel had to be properly prepared when appearing in her court, and told me to go ask the defendant! I did, the pitying or amused eyes of dozens of police, court staff, members of the public on me as I traversed the unusually large courtroom and extracted the information.

I was told that that magistrate was going to be elevated to the Circuit bench in Essex, but that turned out to be wrong, because I see from the Internet that she was still dispensing justice from Thames Mags (on the other, i.e. North, side of the river from Tower Bridge Mags) as recently as 2013, the year that she retired (aged 70).

The problem of “judge-itis” (the tendency to be a despot sitting on the pedestal of power) is worse, usually, the further down the pecking order you go. It is rarely found in the higher courts.

At one time (1993-1995) I appeared on a frequent basis, at least once weekly, in the High Court. If I had a problem, it was never because the judge was reprising am-dram Nero or Caligula.

In the County Courts, the problem is occasionally encountered. HH Judge Overend, the presiding civil judge for Devon and Cornwall until 2006, was often a horrible despot when seated (at Plymouth County Court, usually), but in his case his bullying manner, and apparent tendency to make up his mind before you had finished —or even started— speaking, was mitigated by fairness and compassion for those suffering (so long as they were not Counsel!).

The barristers of the South West used to describe bruising encounters with that judge as one having been “Overended”…I have to say that on the odd occasion when he saw me outside court, he did always nod affably and even briefly smiled at times.

The magistrates’ courts are often the zoos where the wildest judicial animals roam their constricted territories. I once saw a stipendiary magistrate in London refuse bail to a defendant who was in court on a stretcher and on a drip !

Other judges have the opposite tendency, a pretty fatal one for a judge, a difficulty in deciding anything, especially if it would involve penalizing (eg imprisoning) those who break court orders. Judges whose Bar practice was entirely in civil work tend to fall victim to this; at least, that was my experience.

I have to say that I only found a few judges who were completely impossible. One was not a judge proper, i.e. the lady who presided over Tower Bridge Mags; another was one whose name escapes me now, but who sat at Uxbridge County Court 25 years ago. His connection with justice was, as far as I could see, purely formal. A horrible man. The many others, particularly on the High Court bench, might not always have seen eye to eye with me on the law or facts, but were almost always courteous in manner and impressive in their grasp.

Notes

Reminiscences and Musings, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Paid Bar Pupillages

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There is, currently, discussion yet again at the Bar of England and Wales about whether all sets of chambers should “tax” their members in order to pay pupils (i.e. trainee barristers) a certain minimum during their year of pupillage. The figure mooted has been put by some at £25,000; others put it at £12,000, i.e. about where the present legal “minimum wage” is set. Not all barristers agree. I saw a contrary-leaning article by Jew-Zionist silk Simon Myerson QC. I expect that this is the only issue on which I would ever agree with him (I attach his views at the bottom of this blog post).

I understand that chambers are currently not forced to have pupils, but if they have them they must be paid £12,000 p.a. Apologies if that misrepresents the current position; I have little contact now with affairs at the Bar. [update: see below]

Many who know me or of me may wonder why I am bothering to write about this. After all, I ceased Bar practice in 2008, and was actually disbarred –for political reasons– in 2016, after a pack of malicious Jews cobbled together a complaint to the Bar Standards Board about my socio-political tweets. My answer to such a query would be that I have a view and the time in which to express it. Simply that. I can revisit Memory Lane, too.

The idea that all chambers must fund at least one pupil has superficial appeal to many. Poorer people of merit would be assisted etc. The problem with that is that most young (as most are) Bar pupils are not very poor anyway, and many come from families with considerable incomes and capital. In short, from affluent families. No-one forces chambers to take poor pupils rather than rich ones. In other words, chambers might be forced to pay for pupils who do not even need the money.

When I myself was looking for pupillage in the late 1980s and then early 1990s (interrupted by my going to live in the USA and travelling back and forth in those years), I had handicaps: apart from lack of money, I was, having been born in 1956, about a decade older than most candidates, and (worse) until late 1988 had a beard. That last might seem a small matter, but at least two barristers who interviewed me mentioned it…

I found that, at that time, the Bar was even less well-run than most things in the UK. We (students at the Inns of Court School of Law, at the time the only place where the Bar Finals course was offered) were told by some stuffy blue-stocking administratrix that we should write our applications by hand and preferably in ink, using a fountain pen (though CVs could be typed)! By some miracle, quill pens and parchment had been superseded. Well, I laboured to write maybe a hundred applications (though not with a fountain pen). Most went unanswered. Imagine that… that a letter written in good faith on a quite usual subject (after all, it happens at least annually that people apply to such places) will simply be ignored. Arrogant. Rude.

Of the interviews I had, a few stand out: there was one at a leading commercial set, in which interview I was interviewed by one Christian du Cann and some young woman who was obviously very junior. Du Cann was the son of perhaps the best Bar advocate I ever heard, Richard du Cann QC, who wrote one of the best books on the subject, The Art of the Advocate (highly recommended, by the way, if any Bar students are reading this). Du Cann junior was OK, even pleasant, but the young woman was unpleasant, scornful, contemptuous. Huge chip on shoulder from somewhere. I think that she felt inferior, so abused her half hour of power. Fortunately for her, I have forgotten her name.

Then there was the interview elsewhere, which obviously was not going very well, though in a low-intensity way. One barrister saw me out and made two suggestions: one, never shake hands with another barrister; two, beards are usually unacceptable.

Another interview that was (perhaps on purpose, to put one on one’s mettle) very hostile was with three then fairly well-known people, often in the newspapers: Michael Worsley QC [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12118332/Michael-Worsley-barrister-obituary.html], who died in 2016; Roy Amlot (later QC) who was often seen prosecuting IRA bombers etc (and, later, defending in huge fraud trials such as Blue Arrow), now 75 and retired from the Bar; a blonde woman smoking like a chimney (I cannot quite recall after more than a quarter-century whether that was Joanna Korner, now QC and a judge, or Ann Curnow QC, now deceased). All in a room got up to look like a cross between a country sitting-room and a study: panelling, soft-ish lighting, leather sofa etc and a couple of desks. In summary, Worsley appeared to be a stuffed shirt (very different from the figure portrayed in the Daily Telegraph obit), Amlot a funereally-serious and hugely self-important little man, and the blonde woman someone whose interview style seemed to rely on ill-bred mockery.

I did have one interview which was almost Kafka-esque. At that time, my mother and brother were both Members at Ascot (my brother also owned a racehorse at the time). One frequently-encountered fellow-member was a woman whose son happened to be a head of chambers in the Temple. The two ladies arranged an interview for me. I was loath to go for interview under such conditions, but went out of politeness.

In those pre-Internet days, it was not always easy to find out what a particular set did in detail. I went thinking that it was a general Common Law set. On my arrival, on a Friday early evening, about 1800, the members were all enjoying glasses of champagne; bottles of Bollinger were everywhere. I was given a glass. Turned out that they did this every Friday at sundown. The head of chambers, obviously talking to me because his mother had asked him to do so, was not very pleasant and asked me what I knew of family law. I replied not much, never having studied it. He said “We only do family…” End of “interview”.

In the end, I went back to the USA, though I did get a pupillage in London in the end, in 1992, unfunded and making the first six months (when you are forbidden to accept fees) a trial of strength.

In my last few years at the practising Bar, I was based in Exeter. The head of those chambers decided that we should take pupils and (a year or two later) also fund them. At least one per year. Everyone would be “taxed” for this. I think that my share was about £50 a month, something like that. I thought that absurd. Those funded were not in real need of money (as I had been when a pupil) and I saw no need for us to have pupils in chambers anyway. I was there to make a living, not to provide the English middle classes with career or CV opportunities. My Head of Chambers disagreed though. He no doubt wanted to keep in with the the Bar Council etc, and I note that he has since then (in recent years) sat as a Recorder in civil cases.

Thus it is that, for once, I find myself in agreement with Myerson QC, whose view is linked hereinbelow:

https://www.legalcheek.com/2012/02/simon-myerson-qc-12k-minimum-pupillage-award-is-fair/

Update (July 2018)

My one-time Head of Chambers has, since I penned the above, been elevated to the Bench as a Circuit Judge, I read somewhere or other. May he temper the law (of which he has an impressive grasp) with not only justice but also mercy…

Update, 23 August 2019

I saw this:

So those fortunate enough to find a pupillage at all (only about 1 in 10) will be paid the above sums per year (or pro rata— many pupils are in two different sets for the two halves of their pupillage year). Nice for them.

My objection to the above is not merely (in fact scarcely at all) that “I had to struggle; they should also struggle”, because in any case most Bar pupils are from relatively affluent (sometimes very wealthy) backgrounds. They do not really need the money.

There is another point: a Bar pupil is almost useless in the first 6 months. Barristers in chambers are therefore not only subsidizing people most of whom do not really require subsidy, but paying out for nothing (unless you regard it as akin to noblesse oblige). A Bar pupil may be helpful in terms of research etc, but the barrister who is pupilmaster has to be pretty sure of the pupil to rely on the results. In other words, the pupillage award is not quasi-pay for work done by the pupil, but a kind of de haut en bas largesse. Oh well, not my problem now!

free speech, Ian Millard, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

A Day Out in Cambridge

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Introduction

This is another vignette from my time at the Bar, specifically from my first six months (of a year, split up into two segments, in 1992 and 1993, with six months sojourn in New Jersey and New York in between) as a Bar pupil, which is a trainee barrister. I have, in a previous blog post, introduced the slightly comical figure of “the pupilmaster”, the anxious little Mauritian Indian barrister who was supposedly supervising me (we were the same age, 35). This account tells the tale of our day out in the university town of Cambridge.

Town and Gown

I had been to Cambridge a couple of times before. The first time was when I was about 25, with my then girlfriend. She was 32, a graduate of Cambridge University, and had contemporaries who were establishing themselves in academia and elsewhere. We stayed for a day or so with a couple who still lived in Cambridge; one of that couple was having his PhD thesis published as a book, and worked at the famous Scott Polar Research Institute.

My second visit to Cambridge, a decade later, was again University-connected, this time invited, by a friend at the Bar doing a Master’s degree, to Queen’s College, to the annual dinner of something called the E Society, a society which existed only to give its annual dinner; a club reminiscent of that written about by G.K. Chesterton in The Queer Feet [http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/QueeStep920.shtml].

That dinner took place in the richly-panelled rooms of the Dean of the College, a pleasant though cunning-seeming host and fellow (or should that be Fellow?), who later became briefly famous in the tabloid Press for two things: firstly, fulminating against “guests” of undergraduates (i.e. girlfriends/boyfriends) staying overnight in College; secondly, having a young woman actually living with him! (I believe that, by tradition, his office was reserved for bachelors living alone). The dinner was for about a dozen and was black-tie.

I also remember the dinner for other reasons: the Wagnerian-themed menu (“Valkyries on Horseback” etc); also the administrative slip when my “vegetarian request” (put in by the person who had invited me) turned out to have been lost in action. I was then ceremoniously served by the butler with a couple of poached eggs on toast! OK for me, but a hard-core veggie or vegan would have had a fit. I also recall the shock with which a fellow guest received my account of a TV programme I had seen about Filipino “psychic surgeons”. Turned out that he was the Something-or-Other Professor of Cardiac Surgery (and was unamused)!

Cambridge Crown Court

I saw Cambridge Crown Court on TV news recently. A horrible building which might be described as “public loo meets nuclear bunker” (with a nod to the Guggenheim in New York, in my opinion Frank Lloyd Wright’s least-successful conception).

https://courttribunalfinder.service.gov.uk/courts/cambridge-crown-court

However, in 1992 Cambridge Crown Court was still held in the ancient-seeming Guildhall (in fact built only in 1939).

It soon became clear that Cambridge was a little behind London in attitude. In London, when someone on bail “surrendered to custody” on day of trial, the “surrender” was nominal: he checked in with the Usher and his name was ticked off a list. In Cambridge, the defendant checked in and, despite having been on bail for months, was shoved into a cell! So it was that pupilmaster and I, having robed, found ourselves witness to an argument between two court guards and our defendant, who had arrived not long beforehand and had been roughly pushed into a cell with an injunction to “get your arse in there”… Having pacified the ongoing argument, we settled down (well, stood there– no furniture) to hear the defendant’s story already read in the brief.

According to the defendant (who was of “gypsy”, i.e. Irish tinker or, in today’s politically-correct terminology, “traveller” origin), he had been invited to travel with his friend (co-defendant) to Cambridge, far from their homes in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, in order to see a used car which the friend wanted to buy. While walking in the centre of Cambridge, he encountered a person described by him as “a hippy”, who had offered him a cigarette. Well, that cigarette “must have been drugs”, said the defendant, because when he regained consciousness he was in the back of a car which was being chased by a police car. He had been unable to understand why the police car, blue lights flashing and sirens sounding, was trying to chase the car in which he was now a passenger. The chase ended and, despite his having tried to explain himself, he had been arrested. Unlikely that he had ever read Kafka’s The Trial, but his surprise echoed that of Josef K.

The police account, which formed the case for the prosecution, was different. In their view, a car had been stolen by the co-defendant and defendant, had been sighted and chased and our defendant had exited the car on a bend and rolled under a parked car. His attempt to hide had been brought to a swift conclusion by a police dog.

This depressing and hopeless case might have caused pupilmaster to think a little unclearly. Never very punctual [see https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/06/19/home-and-away-or-neighbours/], pupilmaster was in danger of yet again irritating a judge by appearing late in Court (a massive discourtesy if the judge has already taken his seat). He poo-poohed my warning about this, saying, “Don’t worry– I know a short-cut into this court; it’s up those stairs. I’ve been here before”, indicating a dark stairway not far away. The defendant was bid au revoir for the moment, and we ascended the stairs.

In the words of Victorian novels, “imagine my surprise” when, instead of emerging outside the courtroom, we found ourselves in the dock! Worse, the judge was seated, looking livid, and the court was packed to such an extent that it reminded me of the famous courtroom scene in the old black and white film of A Tale of Two Cities. This was not good. Pupilmaster hissed at me to find the (hidden) catch so that we could exit the dock and take our proper place. After some fumbling, this was done. The judge, quite the Judge Jeffreys type, had turned that odd red-purple colour which might be called Judicial Livid, and which I myself may have triggered a couple of times in succeeding years. Not good.

The barrister for the co-defendant was there and all we now awaited was the putting-up of the defendants. It was at this point that it turned out that the co-defendant had exercized his non-existent right not to turn up for his trial. As a result, the trial collapsed, the defendant was bailed again and a warrant was issued for the arrest of the co-defendant.

So it was that another day in the pursuit of Justice ended.

Update, 24 June 2026

I happened to see this blog post for the first time in years (it was published in 2018) and, out of mere idle curiosity, looked up online the Scott Polar Research Institute to see whether the academic with whom my then girlfriend and I had stayed overnight was mentioned.

Well, since those days of the mid-1980s, the Internet has blossomed, and what a difference it makes to research! Turns out that the individual in question, though now retired (he must be about 76 or even 78 now) is still connected with that institute, is on its website, and now has a huge amount of academic publication and other activity to his name: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/people/vitebsky/#biography.

I wonder whether he is still married to (I think that they were married, though cannot be sure, after so long) the same lady with whom he lived well over 40 years ago.

Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Home and Away, or Neighbours?

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Prologue on the Stage [with apologies to Goethe’s Faust]

At the belated age of 35, in early 1992, I embarked upon a Bar pupillage (which, for anyone reading outside England and Wales, means being a trainee-barrister for a year broken up into 2 6-month parts). The system was archaic. Having acquired a law degree and completed the 1-year Bar Finals course, and having passed all exams, you were expected, as a “pupil”,  to trail around after a barrister (“pupil-master”) from whom you were expected to learn not so much the law as the practical procedure and habitude of the Bar and the courts.

The pupilmaster was the same age as me (a source of many a joke from him) and was a Mauritian of Indian descent, by name Raj N., whose father had been Minister of Justice, I believe, back home. At short notice, the pupillage had been set up by a friend of mine who shall be nameless (now that I am apparently “notorious” as a “far right” “extremist”– if you believe the “Lugenpresse” aka msm liars). I had to take what I could get. Having said that, Raj N. was basically a very decent little chap and we became quite friendly. His practice was an odd mixture: partly civil law with quite a few High Court judicial reviews; the rest, Crown Court criminal trials ranging from armed robbery to blackmail and almost everything else.

The first six months were unpaid (in those days, but not so now, when most if not all pupils are subsidized); not even unavoidable expenses such as travel were covered. The only expense that could be relied upon, if the pupilmaster were decent, would be a supply of drinks at the Cittie of York pub in Holborn or at Daly’s wine bar in Fleet Street (in Rumpole of the Bailey, “Pomeroy’s”), at the time called something else, a change which the Bar did not accept (and the Bar won that one, because I noticed recently that Daly’s is now called Daly’s again…).

I had come back from the USA to do the pupillage and had very little money. I got by, God knows how…I may have forgotten to pay my Underground fares at times, and one day, en route to Wood Green Crown Court in North London, I noticed, while ascending the escalator at Bound’s Green Underground Station, where –ticket-inspectors permitting–the pupilmaster usually picked me up, if our case was in North-East London or beyond, that the soles of my expensive handmade shoes were starting to part company with the uppers. I was not allowed to do my own cases (initially, “rubbish” cast off from barristers in my Chambers) and so make any money at all until I was in the second six-month period of pupillage. It was hard. Steps had to be taken. They were. However, that would be another story in itself.

One thing that made the first six months of pupillage bearable was the degree to which the pupilmaster got himself into amusing pickles, often in Court. Here is but one example.

The One Where Home and Away was the Alibi

So to that Rumpolian staple, Inner London Crown Court, situate halfway between London Bridge and Elephant and Castle. A rather grim old setting for many a case of serious and often “heavy” crime. In this case, serious rather than heavy. In legal terms, robbery; in lay terms, a mugging. The primary facts were that, on the ghastly North Peckham Estate in South London, a young man was hit in the face and money stolen. What distinguished this case from the many was that the victim had actually met and been introduced to the alleged robber some months prior to the robbery, a fact that (presumably) the defendant had forgotten, but (unfortunately for the defendant) the victim had not. There had been an identity parade, what the Americans call a line-up. The robber had been picked out.

Now, on the facts as stated above, you might think that the best course would be for the defendant to hold his hands up, plead to it and hope that his Counsel might mitigate the sentence. In any case, the Court is supposed to knock a third off for a guilty plea, though that is of course notional, because the guidelines for judges have latitude built in. In this case the defendant insisted on pleading Not Guilty. So there we were: an alleged robber whose victim knew him personally or at least had met him, and had identified him. What did the robber have to say?

The defendant was a rather large West Indian, a former amateur boxer of about 30, with a considerable criminal record for theft, robbery, drug misuse and so on. His alibi was that he not only was he not guilty and not at or near the scene of the crime but that he could not have done the crime, because every single day, without fail, he and his girlfriend (also West Indian) and her sister sat down at (I think it was, about) 5 pm to watch the Australian soap, Home and Away. Needless to say, such an alibi was thin, even with a supporting witness (the girlfriend). He thought, God knows why, that he had a good chance of getting off. In the meantime, he was being held in custody at “high security” Belmarsh Prison.

The first day of trial was absurd, with the perenially-late pupilmaster being told off not once but twice for tardiness. On the second occasion, after lunch, the plump-faced but not unattractive lady judge also waved her beringed fingers in front of her (the middle finger housing a massive rock that looked like it belonged in the V & A) and had taken the trouble to procure a printed copy of a page which she pointedly invited the pupilmaster to “peruse at your leisure, Mr. N.” It turned out to be the responsibilities of Counsel not to waste court time and the power of the judge to recommend that his (Legal Aid) fees be docked accordingly.

When the Defence opened on the second day, it turned out that the judge required that both sides should agree on when Home and Away was screened. Much quiet amusement from public gallery and jury box, but the judge and all Counsel had no idea of the timings. Judging from looks and smiles, the jury already knew the timings. Prosecution Counsel, a jolly fat little man, acquired copies of Radio Times and TV Times. These were perused. At that point, it was discovered that Home and Away was screened twice on every weekday afternoon, once at 5-something and, before that, at 2-something. These were, apparently, identical episodes, so it would have been possible for the defendant to see the first showing and still be free to mug the victim.

In the event, the sole Defence witness, the girlfriend (the defendant did not give evidence) scarcely came up to proof. Prosecution Counsel’s killer question asked whether, if she and defendant watched the first showing on any particular day, they would sit down again 3 hours later and watch it all over again. Her angry “YES!” carried little weight. The jury took little time to convict. When it was all over and the Prosecution Counsel was leaving, he jovially remarked to us, “well, I’m off home, home to watch Home and Away!”, to which the family and girlfriend of the defendant, having heard the remark, addressed a few choice epithets before scurrying off.

When we saw the defendant in the cells below (they are always below…), he was happy enough, despite the pretty stiff 5-year sentence that he had received about an hour before (the pupilmaster liked to give convicted defendants time to cool down…). Defendant’s formerly vice-like handshake was limp, explained by his “Ah’m OK, man. I can do a 5 on my ‘ead. Ah’ve just ‘ad a smoke, ani-way”…Where he got the stuff (cannabis) from, God knows. Better not enquired after.

So there we have it. Justice a la mode. Followed by a drink at a convenient hostelry.

[this little remembrance forms part of an occasional series on the absurdities of Bar practice as it was for me between 1992 and 2008]

 

 

elections, MPs, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Fame is Often Fleeting

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[preliminary note: this is a personal rather than a political or social blog post, though it does touch on both of those aspects of life]

It is hardly original to say that fame often tends to be fleeting, but indulge me. I was thinking about this matter recently in the context of hearing about a number of persons and their life-trajectories. In particular, in the past 6-7 years I have observed the meteoric rise of a Jewish Zionist lawyer (solicitor) to fame; he rose to public prominence (after years of provincial obscurity and a slide into near-madness) on the basis of one type of notorious case, only to slowly deflate ever since. That person’s fate, still unfolding (or should that be “unravelling”?) gave rise to other, connected, thoughts.

I was on holiday in Hammamet, Tunisia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammamet] in 1994 when my then girlfriend and I met with a young Englishman and his girlfriend. They were both struggling or at least very junior young journalists, twenty-somethings. The young man explained that they had been in a not very pleasant hotel and so had upgraded to the one in which I was staying, the Phoenicia, one of the best in the resort, all marble and staff wearing white uniforms topped by a fez.

The young journalist said that his name was Jasper Gerard (the girlfriend’s name I forget). We had lunch and the odd drink in the succeeding days and they were in the grounds of the hotel when they noticed someone nearly get killed when his parascending canopy collapsed at altitude. Yes, that was me (I pulled too hard on one side to descend) and apparently Gerard cried out “isn’t that Ian?!” as I appeared to be about to fall, mortally wounded, to the beach. However, I survived with nothing worse than a minor story to tell.

I kept in touch with Jasper. I invited him, not long after, to dinner at Lincoln’s Inn (of which I was then a member). He attended not with the Tunisia holiday girlfriend but with a pleasant, very quiet young lady who (judging by more recent Press photos) was probably his later wife. A week or two later, in the English way, he invited me to dinner at his club, a members-only but non-traditional place in Mayfair called Green Street. The sort of place full of young or youngish people who were probably pop stars whom I would probably not have recognized even by name. At dinner, the next table was occupied by a lady and her two guests. She was, Gerard whispered, the journalist Marie Colvin, already noted but who became rather famous later on, after she lost an eye and took to wearing a dashing eye-patch. She was killed in Homs, Syria, in 2012, making Gerard’s dinner comment to the effect that connections had helped her into her job seem in retrospect even more envious than it did at the time.

After that, I did not see Jasper Gerard for nearly three years, during which time he had become the head of the Diary column in The Times. After I finished a year working in Kazakhstan, I called him and suggested a drink. He suggested lunch at El Vino, not the original wine bar but the branch at the foot of Ludgate Hill. He failed to turn up and when I called to ask whether a problem had arisen, did not even apologize but got some underling to say that “something had come up”. That was discourteous, but personal loyalty is important to me, so I agreed to a second lunch date. This time, Gerard did turn up, but the pleasant, rather hesitant young man had become a blase, vain fellow obviously very much spoiled by his career uplift and hugely full of himself. He scarcely bothered to talk, obviously found me not famous enough to waste even the lunch break on, then did not offer to pay, or even to pay half the bill, but waited until I did before saying “do you mind if I take the cash and pay, so that I can claim it back”! With such a brazen attitude, it is not surprising that the bastard later tried to be elected as an MP!

I did not meet with Jasper Gerard after that, though I noticed that he was later to be found in the Sunday Times as chief interviewer. He lasted for some years before being removed. He then became restaurant critic in The Observer for a year or two, until 2008. He was even mentioned (once) in celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s memoirs.

Gerard fell into obscurity after that, though he came second in the Maidstone and The Weald constituency in the 2015 General Election, standing as a LibDem (well, after all, the LibDems are now the last resort of the scoundrel!).

The last I heard of Jasper Gerard, in 2016, he had become the Head of Press for the LibDems. Whether he still is, I have no idea.; and his last tweet to the public was in 2015…

The above is just one reminiscence about, mainly, one person. I suppose that the moral of my brief story is that some people really cannot handle fame or even minor celebrity, and that obscurity often beckons.

Update, 29 December 2020

I saw that there were recently a few hits on this rather obscure blog post, so am updating it.

The Maidstone and the Weald election results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidstone_and_The_Weald_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s.

Jasper Gerard’s 2015 vote share of 24.1%, though far below that of the 36% attained by the LibDem in 2010, was still better than that garnered by the LibDems of 2017 and 2019 (16.4% in both cases). Gerard was the last LibDem to get a second place at Maidstone and the Weald; Labour has come second since 2015: 22.1% in 2017, 18.3% in 2019.

As for Gerard himself, it turns out that his full surname is Gerard-Sharp, and that his sister is also a journalist, with a Twitter account: [https://twitter.com/LisaGerardSharp] and a personal website [https://www.lisagerardsharp.com/].

“In the soup for playing down the Lord Rennard scandal (‘It’s hardly Jimmy Savile’) Liberal Democrat candidate Jasper Gerard stands accused of playing down his poshness. Colleagues at Durham University remember him as Jasper Gerard-Sharp. Once he secured the post of head of the university’s Lib Dem society he morphed into plain Jasper Sharp. But by the time he arrived at The Times as a trainee journalist, he reverted to Jasper Gerard. Keep up at the back!” [Daily Mail, in 2013] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2285672/Is-boastful-Vince-Cable-ready-new-challenge.html

Professionally, and politically, Jasper Gerard —or Gerard-Sharp— now seems to have vanished without trace. He may have retired early; he would now be 53, must have been extremely well-paid when he was Chief Interviewer for the Sunday Times, and there may well be some family money, despite his grammar school secondary education.

Update, 18 March 2021

I noticed that there were several hits on this old article today.

I recall seeing an interview in the Sunday Times, in 2003, written by then-Chief Interviewer Jasper Gerard. It was with, and the article about, the wife of Kevin Maxwell, the part-Jew son of MOSSAD chief European agent, millionaire Jew fraudster and later food-for-fish, “Robert Maxwell”. At the time, the Maxwells were trying to sell their expansive country house on the Thames, somewhere near Wallingford.

That is a nice part of the world, one I knew well as a child and teenager in the early/mid 1960s and in the 1970s. I remember, reading the interview, thinking “there is a horrible brash Jewish or part-Jew family living in luxury on the banks of the Thames near Wallingford, and I am scraping a modest living from the law…“. The fact that Kevin Maxwell was living off the proceeds of crime, such as the frauds perpetrated by his despicable father, made the feeling all the stronger.

Well, the wheel of life has certainly turned for Ghislaine Maxwell, “Captain Bob’s” daughter, currently resident in a 9 foot by six foot cell in a US Federal prison.

Hey! I have an idea! Jasper Gerard should go interview the declining Ghislaine before she gets bumped like Epstein, or does herself in. He could write a good (well, adequate…) article about the contrast between her present circumstances and those days long ago with her brother and family by the sweet Thames…If, that is, anyone would now publish him.

Notes

https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/08/11/the-jew-epstein-and-prince-andrew-the-british-royal-family-has-another-scandal-maybe-its-time-to-just-get-rid-of-them/

https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/grey-cardigan-so-where-has-jasper-gerard-gone

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/living-maxwell-house-mtz0crcfv7q

Update, 18 May 2026

Having noticed that the blog post has had a few recent hits, I thought to add a little update.

I discovered, quite a while ago, a few years ago in fact, that Gerard had become the manager or CEO of an offshore gambling outfit based on the island of Alderney. That may or may not be the same one a local resident told me about in 2002, when I made a couple of visits to the island on legal business, and had enquired as to the crowd (about 20) of Chinese girls we drove past; all, apparently, employees of that online casino.

According to Companies House, Gerard was born in February 1968, and so is now 58.

I imagine that the kind of work he now does (assuming he is still there) must be lucrative, but in terms of public profile he is now utterly obscure.