This was heady stuff in 1974; now even the Bar Council has moved from woodwormy gloom and over-priced tenancies in the Temple, and many chambers have put their clerks on salaries. Fee-sharing, like Marxism, never worked and I bailed out as soon as some colleagues made clear that it was my fees they wanted to share. The best argument for the Bar is that it produces lawyers who are independent of pressure, whether from partners or principals or fellow-members of a fee-sharing collective. I wanted to give that argument a chance, if only I could find a chambers that would take someone already labelled on the clerks’ grapevine as a ‘radical barrister’ (a concept I still reckon to be a contradiction in terms). I called on Emlyn Hooson, the wise and humane head of John Mortimer’s chambers at No. 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, to seek a tenancy. It was offered – because, I suspect, John made one of his rare attendances at a chambers meeting in order to support it.
So I took up professional residence for the next fifteen years at the building which bore the name of Dr Samuel Johnson, London’s most illustrious lawyer-baiter. My historic first-floor room overlooked the Temple church. There was dry rot in the walls and mice in the skirting-boards: it was cold enough in winter for clients to keep their overcoats on, and shadows fell eerily from a gas lamp, romantically lit each evening by a Temple retainer. My conferences were regularly interrupted by loud lectures from guides who brought American tourists to stand beneath the windows, looking up to envision the good doctor at verbal play with his pipe and his port and his faithful Boswell. These declamations, I could not help but hear, were designed to leave tourists gasping in awe and admiration at the character and traditions of English lawyers. They were far removed from the true spirit of Dr Samuel Johnson. ‘I don’t care to speak ill of any man behind his back,’ he once said, possibly in my room, ‘but I believe the person who has just taken his departure to be an attorney.’
With a seat in chambers, I could now open my vowels and close my mind to journalism. I had eaten thirty-five dinners (and one de bene esse); I had relatively clean fingernails and a contact on News of the World. Christmas 19741 spent dutifully with my grandmother in a coastal village north of Sydney where, on fishing expeditions, I dreamed of landing what barristers called ‘a big case’. On Christmas Eve, my grandmother ran a mile along the breakwater to tell me some exciting news . . .
‘They’ve caught the cabinet minister who murdered his nanny!’ She was as confused as most Australians when they heard of the arrest by the Melbourne vice squad of John Stonehouse MP, the former Postmaster-General. He had last been seen five weeks before, walking into the water off Miami Beach. His clothes, money and passport had been left in a hotel locker, to help the five life insurance companies with whom he had recently taken out policies to deduce that he had drowned. Stonehouse’s disappearance had come shortly after that of Lord Lucan, whose car was found abandoned near an English beach, inviting the presumption that he had committed suicide after battering to death his nanny, mistaking her for his wife. The British press was busy scouring the exotic locations of the world for both men: the last place they suspected was the unremarkable Melbourne suburb where every morning an elegant Englishman would collect his airmail edition of The Times and then wander off to open bank accounts in the names of Clive Muldoon and Joseph Markham. The local police, alerted to this curious behaviour by a suspicious bank clerk, cabled Scotland Yard to ask laconically whether England was missing any members of its establishment. The Yard cabled back that the mysterious man might be Lucan or might be Stonehouse, and that the former had a six-inch scar on his inside right thigh.
That is why Australia’s most celebrated arrest began with the order ‘Pull down your trousers’. The absence of any scar came as a disappointment to the coppers, who had been hoping their mystery man would turn out to be the bloody aristocrat rather than the runaway MP. Stonehouse had served in the sixties as a minister in the Wilson government but when the Labour Party was returned to power in 1974 he had decided to return to the back benches to go into business in his spare time. His companies soon ran into as much trouble as his marriage – his obsessive dedication to causes had left him insensitive to the needs of others, whether they were creditors or members of his family. (As one psychiatrist later put it, in evidence at the Old Bailey, John Stonehouse ‘had been reared as a socialist rather than as a person’.) In Melbourne, the arresting officers invited him to telephone his wife and children, who had for the past five weeks genuinely believed him to be dead. They secretly recorded the call, in which his astonished wife Barbara was told, ‘I decided I would be like thunder and lightning and just drop out of my old identity. It was some sort of brainstorm . . . now, how have you been?’ As she listened to him announcing his intention to settle permanently in Australia, two airline tickets to Melbourne were thrust through her front door by a News of the World reporter. Barbara told him of this, and asked, ‘Do you want me to come?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied imperiously. ‘Do come immediately. And bring Sheila Buckley with you.’
Thus began the media circus, which over the next two years carried this over-maligned man inexorably to his doom. By the time I joined as his counsel, on his extradited return to Britain in July of 1975, he had become the most derided person in the country. This was only partly the fault of the British press, which had thrown his right to a fair trial to the winds in their lubricious delight over the ‘love triangle’ with wife Barbara and secretary Sheila, which they spiced with false allegations that he had been a paid agent of the Czech secret police. Although the charges were comparatively minor (two false passports; theft of £29,000 of his own company’s money, and an ‘attempt’ to leave £125,000 in insurance policies payable to his family), these were treated as if they amounted to the fraud of the century. But John was in some ways the author of his own media misfortune: he played up to press prejudices by ranting against Britain, by blaming everyone but himself for his business problems, and by instantly writing a book, Death of an Idealist, declaring his innocence. His dubious argument boiled down to every good boy deserving a favour: he had been such a devoted public servant for twenty-five years that he was entitled to have a breakdown and start a new life. Worst of all, from the public’s point of view, was his insistence on remaining an MP for the bewildered constituents of Walsall North, even when he was in Melbourne declaring his wish to live the rest of his life 12,000 miles away from them.
Acquiring an ex-cabinet minister as a client made a welcome change from the minor drug dealers and porn merchants with whom I had spent my first year in practice. By the time he agreed to come home rather than contest extradition proceedings, John had convinced himself that he was the victim of a political prosecution, and was reassured by the fact that I had defended Oz and Peter Hain. The first thing he said to me when we met in Brixton Prison was that he wanted bail so that he could get back to the House of Commons. He did have a right to bail, together with ample sureties: there was no prospect that he would interfere with witnesses or flee the country again. ‘This is the face that has launched a thousand headlines!’ I exclaimed in exasperation when the sour-faced chief magistrate at Bow Street predicted that John would abscond.
The court was crammed with a hundred reporters, who had no intention of letting John Stonehouse out of their sight if he gained his liberty. But until Parliament recessed, the Bow Street magistrate was determined that this honourable member should not disgrace it with his presence. So the Stonehouse bail show played every Monday to the press, much to the delight of the court’s regular customers arrested in Covent Garden on Saturday nights for ‘drunk and disorderly behaviour’. On ‘Stonehouse days’, these vagrants and prostitutes were sober and disorderly, as they played to the packed press gallery, competing with each other to draw the loudest laughs (and the heaviest fine) by abusing the beak. After repeated rejections of my increasingly florid bail applications, I decided one week not to bother: that was when, to everyone’s amazement, the magistrate announced he was granting bail, whether we asked f
or it or not. It was 3 August 1975, and it was finally safe to apply the law correctly: Parliament had just risen for its summer recess.
It was a summer I spent preparing for the committal proceedings, which took place in October at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court. The prosecution had been entrusted to Dai Tudor-Price, a deceptively low-key (and for that reason, highly effective) treasury counsel. Before he stood up to open the case, he showed me the instruction he had written to himself, ten times over, on the first page of his notebook: ‘Say nothing to provoke Mr Stonehouse’. John for his part threw himself into the task of establishing his innocence. He would rise at 5 a.m. and prepare a list of several hundred questions for me to ask the day’s witnesses. At 9 a.m. I would meet him at court and go through them (they would be neatly written by hand in green ink on House of Commons notepaper) to explain why many were irrelevant. At lunchtime we would retire to our room to feast on the contents of a picnic basket provided each day by the much-forgiving Barbara, replete with silver cutlery and silk napkins. In court, I would occasionally manage to elicit a favourable answer from a prosecution witness – like the kindly manager of a Lloyds Bank branch who had accepted John’s personal guarantee for an overdraft, and still believed it to be of value ‘because I think Mr Stonehouse has a good life ahead of him, and is a potential force for good’. When the afternoon session concluded, the potential force for good would march ministerially out of the courtroom and along the embankment to the House of Commons.
John returned to his parliamentary duties as if nothing had happened, although he took a new interest in issues which touched on criminal justice. My main concern in this period was to persuade him to resign his seat. This was a vital step, I believed, towards obtaining a fair trial at the Old Bailey the following year. By strutting and fretting on the Commons stage, flourishing his MP’s privileges while facing serious criminal charges, he was simply inviting the media to stoke up the prejudice against him. John was prepared to resign, but only after making a ‘personal explanation’ to the House. I sat in the parliamentary gallery and watched while he nervously tried to explain his mental breakdown in an anodyne text which had been pre-censored by the Speaker. It was a dignified performance on a somewhat melancholy occasion: Private Eye’s next cover showed him brandishing a newspaper: ‘TOTALLY INNOCENT MP WRONGLY ACCUSED!’ This was funny only to those who presumed that Stonehouse was totally guilty. Everyone in London, the geographic pool from which his jurors would be drawn, seemed to find it uproarious.
One person determined that the media circus should pass well outside his court was the magistrate. Mr Harrington SM, impervious to the public loathing of my client (or, perhaps, only too aware of it), bent over backwards to be fair, actually dismissing the most serious charges (the insurance frauds) which pivoted upon the allegation that Stonehouse, having taken out the policies, had attempted to defraud the insurers by faking his death. There were two problems of a technical nature with these charges. In the first place, the power of English courts to punish crime depends on where that crime is committed, and Stonehouse’s ‘attempt’ was made outside the jurisdiction, in Miami. In the second place, to be found guilty of ‘attempt’ to commit crime you must have had a real go at pulling it off: the legal test is whether the act charged as an attempt (the disappearing act in Miami) was ‘sufficiently proximate’ to the notional completed crime (the eventual payment of the insurance moneys to Barbara in England). Since Stonehouse, in order to achieve this objective, would have to remain hidden for years, and in Melbourne (then one of the world’s dullest cities), my argument was that what he had done by faking his death was not close enough to the anticipated insurance claim to be punished as an ‘attempt’. Mr Harrington agreed, and threw out the insurance charges.
The unsought consequence of the magistrate’s fair-mindedness was to kindle a belief in John that he could beat all raps. With this new-found confidence he decided that he would not resign from Parliament after his ‘personal explanation’ speech. He was shunned by the Labour Party, but that did not disturb him one whit: he had reached that stage, familiar to many socialist MPs, of disbelief in socialism – a condition provided for, a few years later, by the foundation of the SDP. But John had become a social democrat before there was a social democrat party, so he cast around for an alternative and ended up joining the ‘English National Party’. They were a collection of fairly harmless odd-balls, who dressed up in Robin Hood costumes and held tea-parties before jousting on the green sward – not much in evidence amongst the tower-blocks of Walsall North, whose electors were now represented by the one MP who stood for Merrie England.
While John jousted in Parliament, I had the problem of preparing his defence. Now that he was no longer resigned to losing, he thought it sensible to enhance his chances by retaining a leading counsel. His first choice, F Lee Bailey, was not admitted to practise at the English Bar, so he called Lord Hailsham, the once and future Tory Lord Chancellor. Hailsham graciously declined the proffered brief, explaining the convention that out-of-office Lord Chancellors should not return to the Bar, but wishing him the best of luck – a politeness from which John took great heart. He decided he would shop around for his silk, leaving to me the task of shortlisting the best candidates and asking them if they would mind undergoing an audition for the role, to take place over tea with their prospective client. London’s top criminal silks submitted themselves with good humour to this novel beauty contest: much Temple tea was consumed until the winner was declared, on BBC news, to be Richard du Cann QC. Stonehouse much admired his elder brother Edward, whose ability to make large amounts of money as a director of Lonhro while representing constituents as an MP had served as a role-model for his own, rather less successful, business ventures.
Dick du Cann was an advocate’s advocate, a saturnine and sardonic prosecutor now turned defender, who threw himself into the case with a commitment his client was never able to recognise. John later complained that Dick never, over many months of conferences, gave the slightest hint that he thought him innocent. Given the evidence this was not entirely surprising, but in any event Dick firmly belonged to that school of advocacy which suspends moral judgment and leaves guilt and innocence to the jury. He never descended to first-name terms with a client, and insisted upon a personal distance which gave a false impression of disdain: his early death from cancer was attributable to the cartons of cigarettes he burned in an all-consuming anxiety to concentrate on cases like John’s. He was the epitome of professional conduct, and it took me aback when he proposed that we should interview Barbara Stonehouse. ‘But she’s a potential witness,’ I objected, directing him to the paragraph in Boulton on Ethics which laid down the rule that barristers should never interview witnesses of fact. ‘I think my back is broad enough to bear any criticism,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s essential to our conduct of this case to decide whether the wife was party to an insurance swindle.’ Dick’s judgment after we subjected her to a searching inquisition was that she knew absolutely nothing about John’s intention to disappear. Barbara’s conduct, from the moment she flew to his side, taking Sheila with her, was magnificent. She stood by her husband throughout two years of abject humiliation, protested forcefully at his over-severe sentence, and then quietly and quickly divorced him.
It was left to me, and to his doggedly devoted solicitor, Michael O’Dell, to find some sympathetic explanation for John’s treatment of the lioness who loved him. If it were madness, there was too much method in it ever to convince the jury. Yet there was something unhinged about the grandiosity of his conduct which could not be explained merely by a desire to avoid business reversals or to live with a younger lover. We had evidence from Dr Maurice Miller, a GP and MP whom he consulted from time to time, that in the year before his disappearance John changed in character and frequently sank into deep anxiety states, and none of the independent experts in psychology or psychiatry we consulted had any doubt but that he had been clinically depressed. The private
self lost faith in the public man: he seriously contemplated suicide, but designed instead a psychiatric equivalent: he would kill off John Stonehouse, MP, and return as Mr Markham or Mr Muldoon – anonymous and unambitious men whose ordinary joys he would savour. It was the middle-aged, Moon and Sixpence dream-world of pleasure free from pressure, which he pursued in his five weeks of invisibility in Melbourne by joining the Victorian Chess Club and the Victorian Jazz Club. There was, on one level, nothing crazy about this dream at all: the king who disappears to become a beggar is a fable which charms because it involves a sacrifice of power. Had Harold Wilson ‘done a Stonehouse’ while Prime Minister, he would be remembered with more affection and certainly more interest. John’s problem was precisely that his breakdown had involved no sacrifice at all. He was out of power, out of luck, and out of money, and his desire to play chess and listen to jazz in Melbourne while living modestly with Sheila Buckley made all-too-perfect sense.
The Justice Game Page 9