Preface

‘I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can for failure: try to please everybody all the time,’ incisively quipped renowned journalist Herbert Bayard Swope.

And so it is in crime. If judges, prosecutors, policemen and convicted clients were the gatekeepers of our admission to heaven you’d have to search long and hard to find any defence lawyers there.

From the general public standpoint, defence lawyers are not top of the pops. A visit to their offices is rarely an elevating or comforting experience. Speaking for myself, I would rather sit in a dentist’s chair having root canal treatment.

Many many years ago, when I was virtually a beginner, my boss instructed a barrister I personally loathed. If I had been shipwrecked on a desert island and he swam ashore, I would gladly have thrown myself into shark infested waters rather than suffering his company. He was an arrogant Mr Know-All, dismissive of anyone else’s view (which he never asked for) and mean to boot. But, in court, he was dynamite. He has long passed on – southwards!

No lawyers are angels; they are paid to fight your corner right or wrong. A client is looking for an acquittal, not a lecture on morality. If his counsel happens to be a nasty bit of goods, so be it. After all, the client is playing for high stakes – his freedom. Such high stakes are not conducive to self-reflection. Frankly, in the cut and thrust of criminal litigation, there isn’t normally time. It is simply not a luxury afforded to those of us instructed to defend in serious crime. So, after forty years playing the game, I’ve allowed myself a wider look at the world I have worked in.

This book is no intellectual treatise, Far from it. So if that’s what you’re looking for, may I politely suggest you seek refuge elsewhere. I have tried to make my story conversational, packed with what I hope you will find to be intriguing anecdotes spanning the career of a London criminal defence lawyer. I have concentrated on human nature, as opposed to a turgid recital of facts, precedents and an anxious parade of name dropping, which seem to be all too common a feature of legal autobiographies. My aim has been to home in on the eloquence of top defence barristers, the frailty of judges, the enigma of juries and, most importantly, the infinite variety of clients who never cease to amaze me.

Somerset Maugham put it best when he said,

I would not cross the road to meet a president or a king … but I have journeyed a hundred leagues to see a missionary of whom I have heard a strange story and I have spent a fortnight in a vile hotel in order to improve my acquaintance with a billiard marker.

A client’s infamy does not, of itself, guarantee an intriguing read, any more than his being a complete unknown disqualifies him from fascinating me when we meet. I am neither judge nor jury, but simply a curious observer from a privileged vantage point.

So, here it is, hardly a self-confessed guilty man in sight – nor a truly innocent one. They all mingle in a vast shadowy expanse, reigned over by ever darkening grey skies stretching between righteousness and downright amorality. It is a country I have always thought of as being called Criminalia.'

No Lawyers in Heaven - Extracts

From 'Don't Be So Humble - You're Not That Great!'

'Rows of long communal tables and de-wigged barristers, some with tales of glory and others with tales of woe and many with no tales at all – forever waiting for their trial to get started. Welcome to the world of the Bar mess, high up on the fifth floor of the Bailey, at any given weekday lunchtime.

If you were casually to walk around earwigging, you would hear chapter and verse of how Mr White should have retired years ago, how Mr Black lost his case by calling his client, and how Miss Green blew it by not calling her’s. How Mr Blue has definitely lost the plot since he’s taken silk, and how Miss Brown may have been a great prosecutor but can’t defend for toffee. Each one a veritable expert on every case – except their own!

There are plenty of winners in the room, but not a self-confessed loser in sight. Now, one might be forgiven for thinking that, as a matter of logic, where there are winners there must also be losers. Not so in the Bar mess. ‘My client was pathetic in the box – otherwise I would have got him off’; or ‘The judge allowed in this piece of hearsay, it finished us – not my fault’; or ‘My client insisted I called his imbecile of a wife and she was a walking disaster – what could I do?’; or ‘The verdict was completely perverse – no one could have done the case better, if I say so myself.’ All resonant of the proverbial sour-faced football manager at the press conference after his team has been comprehensively thrashed – we were robbed! And, of course, for the truly great, it’s not enough for their client to be acquitted. No, the ultimate schadenfreude is for their client to be the only one acquitted.

In short, the Bar mess is a legal gossip shop for overgrown school kids who, in the words of Somerset Maugham, ‘continue to look upon life from the standpoint of the sixth form’.'

From Author's collection of photographs