An Unexpected MP

by Jerry Hayes

  I had a beautiful and brilliant junior called Grace Ong, who kept an almost word-perfect note of what was being said on her laptop. At one stage I suggested to the judge that he might care to refer to her note. After staring at the laptop he passed it back with a grunt and gave us both a very odd stare. Over lunch we had a look at the notes. Earlier, we had noticed that some old silk had been taking an unusual interest in the laptop.

  ‘Just admiring the software, old boy,’ he grinned.

  What he didn’t tell us is that he had just altered the default settings. So every time Grace typed in ‘judge’, it defaulted to ‘boring old fart’, and ‘prosecution’ became ‘twat’.

  Then I got a fascinating case which was dubbed the ‘great postal ballot fraud’. I was parachuted into Birmingham for the first Election Commission in 100 years. I was representing two Labour councillors found in a factory unit surrounded by postal ballot papers, pens and Tipp-Ex. The commissioner was Richard Maury QC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge. And jolly good news he was too. A great sense of humour and impeccably fair. The hearing, which lasted for about a month, was held in a theatre. This was odd in itself as members of the public would walk in, eat their lunch and then saunter out. It was like care in the community. The petition was issued by John Hemming, now a Liberal Democrat MP. Sadly, I had to rough him up a bit in the witness box for a couple of days.

  This case became notorious as it showed widespread abuse of the totally inadequate postal voting rules, leading Maury to comment that our electoral system was like that of a ‘banana republic’. The abuses were horrendous and the administration of the election dire. Bags of uncounted postal votes were found in council offices and one official was accused by Maury of ‘throwing away the election rule book’. We went crashing down.

  A week later I received a phone call from John Hemming, then a parliamentary candidate. I thought he was going to have a moan about my treatment of him in the witness box. Far from it. The starting gun for the 2005 election had been fired. Would I represent him in the High Court to try to halt the election until the postal ballot rules were made compatible with European law? Of course.

  This was going to be a high-profile case in the administrative court, not somewhere that I was particularly familiar with, so I persuaded Simon Baker, a very able barrister in chambers with a brain the size of a melon (albeit a small one), to be my junior. He would do all the heavy lifting, while I would do the jazz hands. Neither of us would be paid, but the publicity would be enormous.

  You may remember a few chapters back the story of my long refreshing lunch with the News of the World and a dash to the Oxford Union for a debate on Europe with Bill Cash? Well, Simon reminded me that he was the teller on the vote and that he had had to break me out of the gents’ lavatory as I had somehow locked myself in. His skills would be particularly useful, then.

  The court was packed with journalists, this being the middle of an election campaign. Presiding was Mr Justice Collins, a formidable intellectual presence, who certainly wasn’t going to take any nonsense from me.

  I did my best to persuade him that politicians could not be trusted to amend the law and that the only protection the public could have against unfair elections was judicial interference. After all, politicians are well known for breaking their promises.

  ‘But you were a politician, weren’t you, Mr Hayes?’

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘How many promises did you break?’

  ‘My Lord, the highways and byways are littered with them like used Yorkie wrappers. That is why the public need your protection.’

  Well, it didn’t wash. One red judge wasn’t going to stop a general election. But for a parliamentary candidate like John Hemming, leading the national news that night was very pleasing indeed. So we went to celebrate in El Vino. A couple of weeks later John romped home with a very respectable majority. He is still in the House and is rather good news.

  Next were the Birmingham riots. I was co-defending with a very old friend, Steven Hadley (Hadders). He is one of the great characters at the Bar, with a delightfully risqué past. He is also a seriously good brief. His last incarnation was as a vicar in the Church of Wales, where he was a delightfully naughty cleric who had a bit of a brush with the News of the World.

  The Birmingham riots were very scary. I remember the jury being shown CCTV footage of a gang of black men rushing to the only Asian family in the road. The suggestion was that they were going to kill the poor woman and her children. They were cowering in fear. We saw CCTV of Asian taxi drivers being pulled from their cars and murdered with machetes. This was a very stressful trial.

  Hadders and I were involved in what is described in the trade as a ‘cut-throat’. This meant that both our clients were attacking each other. Soon the time came for our speeches. I was first on the indictment and therefore had first crack, so I had to give Hadders a bit of a kicking.

  ‘Members of the jury, my learned friend is a serial philanderer [pause just to make him go pale] … of juries. First will be the flirtation, then the walk upstairs. The last thing that you will remember will be the click of the bedroom door locking, the creak of the bed springs and the terrible guilt in the morning. This man would tap dance naked on the jury box with a rose between his teeth to get an acquittal. Turn around, take a good look into the eyes of his client and what do you see? Three words: guilty, guilty, guilty.’

  In response Hadders laid into my client, and of course me, with a skilful and witty speech. We were both convicted, although it pains me to say that Hadders got a slightly better result than I did.

  Although we worked very hard during that trial we also had a great deal of fun. My abiding memory of that time was cheering Hadders while singing ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo’ on stage at a tranny bar.

  The convention at the criminal Bar is that after a long trial and after the jury has been sent out to deliberate, all of us take the judge out for dinner and let our hair down. Our judge was the delightful Trevor Faber, now retired. All of us, apart from Trevor, had hoovered up an awful lot of hooch. But Trevor suffered from low blood pressure and was beginning to sway. I yelled to the prosecuting silk to catch him, but sadly the poor chap could hardly walk nor talk. This called for immediate action, so I dived in to rescue our judge. Sadly, I mistimed it, knocked him to the floor and out cold. Killing a judge is not a particularly good thing to have on one’s record. The ambulance arrived, Trevor revived and he was sped to hospital. My parting words to him as he was stretchered aboard were, ‘For God’s sake don’t die on us; we don’t want to do this bloody trial again.’

  The next day he sent us a lovely letter thanking us for a great evening out, the medical check-up and the free ride home. A good man.

  Then, after the war in Iraq, I was instructed to lead the team in the defence of a delightful young soldier, accused with others of drowning a fifteen-year-old Iraqi boy while on manoeuvres. He was just nineteen and had seen his friends blown apart and maimed during the war. I won’t bore you with the details save to say that he was rightly acquitted.

  There was obviously a lot of press attention with this case and my old mate Mirror legend Don Mackay was in permanent residence. We had some cracking dinners. One day he came up to me and said how much he’d enjoyed my closing speech.

  ‘But, Don, I haven’t made it yet!’

  ‘Well, son, this is what I am going to write in the paper.’

  And bloody good it was too. Needless to say I nicked his best one-liners. Although, strangely, the Mirror didn’t print this bit about a very dodgy witness:

  ‘Members of the board, this man is so dishonest and so corrupt I am amazed that he was not greeted personally on the steps of this court by Tony Blair, shaken warmly by the hand, given a peerage and shoved into the Cabinet.’ After the defence cuts, they rather liked that.

  A few years ago I was doing a fraud in Bradford. A juror became ill and we had a day off, so I rang up my old mate Paul Routledge of the
Mirror, who lived in a remote farmhouse. ‘Come for lunch, Comrade.’

  I arrived at about midday and his lovely wife Lynne had put some food in the oven for us. We cracked open the gin, then a few bottles of red, and then out came the slivovitz. When Routers has had a few he tends to revert to speaking in pidgin Russian. Which is quite entertaining although mostly incomprehensible.

  But it was getting late and I needed to get back to Bradford. So I asked Routers to call a cab. Off he staggered to the phone. He didn’t return after about half an hour, so I thought it would be a good idea to go and find him. He had fallen asleep on the stairs. He gurgled where I could find the number for a taxi. I rang and got hold of a chap who spoke very little English, who asked where I was. By this time all I could I remember was that I was in a farmhouse somewhere in the wilds of Wharf Dale. I asked Routers the address, but all he was capable of was burbling, ‘Tell him we are at home.’ Which wasn’t much use. So I decided to walk about a mile to a pub and ring from there. It was dark and beginning to snow. In the gloom behind me I could hear panting and then a crash. It was Routers, who had followed me out and fallen in a ditch. He was in his vest. So I escorted him back. And set off again. Only to have the same pantomime repeated another couple of times. I eventually locked him in and hoped Lynne would be home soon. Routers, apart from being a great columnist, is a seriously good guy.

  Being a criminal barrister would probably be the best job in the world, were it not for knuckleheads like our present Lord Chancellor, Chris Grayling. Well, he was at the time of writing. Lord Chancellor that is. Sadly, knuckleheadism is incurable. Hopefully, by the time this book is published Cameron will have given him the heave-ho.

  I can forgive politicians for a number of faults. But being dim, playing to the right-wing gallery and possessing no political judgement is a toxic combination. Sadly, Grayling has them all. And he wants to be leader of the Conservative Party. Spare us all from mad hysterical laughter.

  The awful truth is that he has been sucked into the civil service plan to destroy the publicly funded Bar. Over the years our fees have been cut by over 40 per cent. And he wants more. Worse is his grand design to allow the likes of Serco, G4S and the Co-op (say it with Flowers) to take over our services. All of whom are under investigation. Cheap, inexperienced lawyers will take over the criminal justice system. The independent Bar will wither and die. And most high street solicitors will go to the wall. Justice for the most vulnerable would be non-existent and, the most pernicious proposal of all, lawyers will be given a financial incentive to persuade their clients to plead guilty.

  It is a tragedy to see the profession I love so much being traduced, prostituted and destroyed by some dreadful little political chancer. The President of the Supreme Court, the Lord Chief Justice, and the judiciary are united with both solicitors and barristers to fight this threat to justice.

  The criminal Bar is a remarkably friendly, convivial place to work. If I won the lottery tomorrow I would still roll up to court. Chambers, and in particular mine, Argent, are like families. We all look after each other. The friends I have made at the Bar, with solicitors and the judiciary, are lifelong. They are like my brothers and sisters. All of us feel blessed. And the shit quotient is fairly low.

  To see this efficient, cost-effective, impartial, impeccably fair and internationally admired system of justice being broken up and handed on a plate to commercial bloodsuckers is a travesty as much as it is a tragedy.

  CHAPTER 23

  FROM THE WILDERNESS

  The Labour win of 1997 was a pretty depressing time for middle-of-the-road Conservatives. I was delighted that William Hague won the leadership, as it was ludicrous to believe that the straitjacket wing of the party could possibly support someone as nationally popular as Ken Clarke. They would always vote for political purity as opposed to supporting someone who could actually win an election. The ideal scenario would have been a Ken win, severely rattling Blair and Brown and preparing the way for a Hague victory an election later.

  Despite a harsh press, Hague was a good party leader. Effective and witty in the chamber and a miracle-maker in keeping a fractious and deranged mob reasonably together. He would have made a great Prime Minister. He was unlucky being in the right place at the wrong time.

  And then came Iain Duncan Smith. Oh dear.

  Personally charming, but a true representative of the Amish wing. The poor fellow lurched from crisis to crisis and was booted out before he had the chance to lead us into oblivion. I did not have a great deal of sympathy, as he was one of the Euro guerrillas doing his very best to undermine the Major government. So his desperate pleas for loyalty made it difficult for some of us to suppress a malicious snigger. To be fair to him, his time in the wilderness has made him an effective and caring Secretary of State at the DWP. He has changed the political weather over the public’s attitude towards benefit reforms. Although whether he can pull off his reforms, with all the IT problems that will haunt them, remains to be seen.

  And then there was Michael Howard. A delightful and talented man who never quite got over Ann Widdecombe’s ‘something of the night’ jibe. It struck a chord, not helped by Rory Bremner’s brilliant skit of him as a quasi-Dracula figure chillingly asking us to believe, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you…’ After a perfectly respectable defeat he sensibly fell on his sword to spend more time with his directorships.

  His departure led to an interesting leadership fight. David Davis was the clear favourite. A charmer, a bruiser and on the sentient right. Davis’s problem is that he is not a charismatic speaker. And his conference speech was very 1980s and lacked sparkle. Compared to David Cameron’s, which came across as fresh, exciting and a clear break with the past, it was the beginning of the end for Davis. It is not a state secret that they can’t stand each other. I was having a drink with a senior member of the shadow Cabinet the night Davis called a by-election over Britain becoming a police state. I asked the simple question, ‘Why?’ The response was, ‘I haven’t got a clue.’ Davis may not be a team player but he is a good-hearted guy and a friend. He really ought to be in the Cabinet.

  Backbenchers are like meerkats: they can collectively sniff out potential winners and losers. They realised that Cameron had the hallmarks of a winner. What they didn’t bargain for was that he really wanted to modernise the party. Gay friendly, woman friendly, environment friendly. Which basically means not lederhosen-backbencher nor Colonel-and-Mrs-Mad-from-the-shires friendly. He realised that the Tory brand had become toxic. As Theresa May said, we had become the ‘nasty party’. She got a kicking for it, but she was right. There had to be root-and-branch change or we would be consigned to political purgatory. And we still have a long way to go. It is a waste of time trying to keep 25 per cent of the electorate happy and expect to form a government.

  I am proud to be an unreconstructed Cameroon. I knew him as a boy at Central Office and saw him develop into a highly regarded special adviser. Starting off in a lowly position at Central Office, he impressed his boss Alistair Cooke and became an indispensable firefighter for ministers by devouring the newspapers at 5 a.m. and providing a ‘line to take’ by 8.30 a.m. He is also a genuinely nice guy without a side. Working for Norman Lamont during the terrible economic whirlwind which destroyed the party’s economic credibility for a generation prepared him for crisis management and the relentless onslaught from the press that comes with the job of Prime Minister. He is remarkably unflappable. Within three years of Cameron doing his best for Lamont at the Treasury, his good friend George Osborne was guiding Minister of Agriculture Douglas Hogg through the burning pyres of BSE-infected cattle. Both men spent their formative youths being tempered and fired in the furnace of events and shaped on the anvil of backbench treachery. Things don’t change an awful lot.

  Cameron’s critics say that he is a smooth PR man who doesn’t have a belief in his head. Nothing could be further from the truth. What makes him refreshingly different is that he approaches
problems with an almost legal approach: ‘What is the mischief and how can it be remedied?’ Hardly brain surgery, but it sends the right into paroxysms of deep loathing. Theirs is a simple faith: that the country is crying out for the certainties of Thatcherism. They can’t wait to leave the EU, want tax cuts yesterday, and all this stuff about global warming is just a left-wing fantasy.

  Yet grown-up politics isn’t about faith and certainty, it’s about common sense and pragmatism. And the one certainty that you can have about the way Cameron operates is that he is utterly committed to ‘doing the right thing’, whether it is popular or not.

  Effective government has to be about leadership, and not just running in front of the pitchforked mob. Three examples come to mind: the invasion of Libya, same-sex marriages and his plans for a surgical strike on Syria.

  But Cameron has a number of deep-seated problems. The party is still grieving for Thatcher, is obsessed by UKIP, and many don’t seem to appreciate that they didn’t win the last election. And they despise the ‘yellow bastards’ as the tail wagging the Tory dog.

  It is worth exploding the myth that the reason the Tories didn’t win an outright majority was because our policies weren’t right-wing enough. This flies in the face of polling data, which comes to precisely the opposite conclusion. But, like the American Republicans, they don’t believe it and shout to the rooftops that the only way to win an election is to repeat those policies that exiled them to the wilderness for a generation. But though the Tories may have their share of deranged politicians, there are no Sarah Palins … yet.