My goodness, my lord
I SHALL not, after all, be in contempt of Mr Justice Denis Henry's court at South- wark if I tell you that, when I last heard, the chippies were still in there. It had needed alterations since Kenneth Grob and Ian Posgate were acquitted there, last year, on charges connected to the affairs of Lloyd's of London. Now come the charges connected to the affairs of Guinness — and the court was not big enough to take both the dock and the documents. I can pass this on because the judge, rejecting an applica- tion by the former Guinness chairman Ernest Saunders, is allowing the first of the two Guinness trials to be reported as it goes along. Until now we have not even been able to say in print that there will be two trials, one after the other. In the Lloyd's case, I should have been in trouble if I had tried to report much of it while it was going on. The over-complex charges had been so framed and presented as to make it difficult for the trial to be at once fairly conducted and openly reported. That threatened to be happening again in the Guinness case. Now the judge has ruled that fair reporting of courts sitting in public is the best safeguard of the rule of law and of public confidence in the courts. They, too, are on trial.
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