THE SOLE INSTANCE the Attorney-General gave to support his wild
charges was that in relating Mr. Melford Stevenson's opposition, at the start of the Eastbourne proceedings, to a request by Mr. Lawrence to make an application, in camera, the Spectator had 'falsely and deliberately' misled its readers into supposing that this opposition was to the hearing of evidence, rather than of the appli- cation, in camera. It had done this (according to the Attorney-General) by substituting three dots for the following sentence by Mr. Stevenson : 'At, this moment I am addressing myself to the ques- tion whether you should hear the application which the defence wish to make in closed court.' Although the overwhelming importance of the distinction is difficult to appreciate, I did in fact make it crystal clear to any less determined reader than the Attorney-General that at that point Mr. Stevenson was referring to the application. Before quoting what he said, I wrote : 'At the outset, Mr. Lawrence, QC, said that he had an application to make and that he wanted to make it in private.' After the quotation, 1 said : 'The magistrates then decided that Mr. Lawrence should make his appli- cation in public.' Having made it perfectly clear both before and after the quotation what Mr. Stevenson was talking about, it obviously was not necessary to make it clear in the middle as well. The Attorney-General has had such a thin time lately that one cannot help feeling sorry for him, but he really ought to see that what he says bears a rather closer resemblance to the truth. At the moment his utterances seem to be just about as reliable as the prosecution's evidence against Dr. Adams proved to be.
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