THE LCJ SAYS A FEW WORDS
But, for this particular audience, they were the wrong ones, Nicholas Farrell reports IT WAS the 48th annual dinner on Friday, 4 July of the organisation which represents London's criminal lawyers — the London Criminal Courts Solicitors' Association. Criminal lawyers make their money from defending criminals rather than from pros- ecuting them. There is much more money in defence than prosecution, which is the province of the impoverished lawyers of the Crown Prosecution Service. In both cases the taxpayer foots the bill, but defending criminals is the 'right-on' thing to do and as it is the right-on who control the legal purse strings it is much more lucrative.
To be invited to this dinner is a great honour. It is known as the 'Tarts' Ball' because the hosts are solicitors and their guests are banisters. The latter rely on the former for the size of their briefs. Alterna- tively, it is the 'Beaks' Benefit' because the hosts feel duty-bound to also invite paid stipendiary magistrates, 'those sad people, failed solicitors or barristers, on £60,000 a year', as one guest put it. The 1,000 defence solicitors and their guests had just finished dinner in the faded grandeur of the banqueting suite — the largest in London — at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, which is about to `Do I call maternity or paediatrics?' be bought, so it is rumoured, by Qatari Arabs. The food was passable but dull. The wines were all right, but not a patch on those in the wine cellars, once wartime bomb shelters, of the guests themselves in their homes in north London Blairland. But the mood was good. Salade d'ete had followed gratin de champignons and supreme de volaille Immouzer, and pommes de terre nou- velles had followed both. Then came crème brill& aux poires and finally café filtre Ascot and petits fours. 'The food was ghastly except for the creme brillee,' said one guest. No matter. Here were 71 tables of lawyers — each table costing £500 a time — under one roof, basking in each other's reflected glory.
The names of the guests on the presi- dent's table gave a clue to the collective psyche of the event. No doubt the females present had been consulted beforehand on how their names should appear. Should they be styled 'Ms' or 'Miss'? They includ- ed Dame Barbara Mills QC, the Eton- cropped Director of Public Prosecutions; `Miss' Helena Kennedy QC, champion of left-wing causes celebres, as the menu for dinner would have put it; 'Miss' Elizabeth Roscoe, stipendiary magistrate and the sis- ter of the association's president; 'Ms' Anne Owers, director of the far-out organi- sation, Justice.
Outside the Grosvenor House, as always in Park Lane and its environs, the streets were choked with the symbols of the ideo- logical enemy — Qatari-registered Porsches and Ferraris. The presence of the cars had something to do, no doubt, with the rumoured sale of yet another piece of Britain to Jonathan Aitken's friends. But inside it was a different story. The guests had made their fortunes defending the likes of the 'Crays and the Richardsons, as well as the Guildford Four. They know Salman Rushdie. This was their moment for thanking their lucky stars.
The president, Mr Roscoe, got up to pro- pose a toast to Her Majesty the Queen, which the guests, being who they were, acknowledged only with reluctance some even refused to stand. Then the guest of honour, Lord Bingham, rose to his feet. According to the time-honoured tra- dition at this gathering, the speaker starts with a tame joke or two and then moves briskly on to the business of making a seri- ous point — an announcement of some sort, perhaps. Lord Hailsham, one past speaker, made no jokes and after a while his audience started chattering out of boredom. Was it this reaction that the Lord Chief Justice was determined to avoid, or did he have some other purpose?
He began in the usual fashion, as one of those present recalled, with a joke about a judge, Claude Duveen, sitting at Amer- sham County Court: 'A barrister got to his feet and told Judge Duveen, "This is a case of proprietary estoppel, your honour", to which the judge replied, "Not in the Amer- sham County Court it isn't."' So far so good. Poking fun at legal jar- gon and fuddy-duddy judges in front of such an audience presents no problems. But then Lord Bingham told a second joke about Judge Duveen which concerned a traffic case involving a female plaintiff and a male defendant. 'Both sides impress me as reliable, honest people,' said Judge Duveen, 'but my usual practice in such cases is to decide in favour of the one whose advocate is wearing the pin-striped trousers.' This sort of thing would cause a hearty cheer in the Frog and Bucket in the Old Kent Road or at a Conservative Lawyers' Association dinner, but all it caused in the Grosvenor House last Friday were raised eyebrows. 'People began to wonder when the jokes would stop and the serious point would be made, particularly as the guest speaker was, of all people, the Lord Chief Justice himself,' my mole told me. It got worse — there was no stopping Lord Bing- ham now.
Many criminal lawyers think he is quite the wrong man for the job of being in charge of the criminal justice system, as he spent his career working in commercial law. Perhaps his speech was some sort of an attempt at revenge for all the whisper- ings. Whatever the truth, he moved on no one is quite sure how —from tales of the sexist judge in the Amersham County Court all the way through time and space to wartime Cairo.
He decided to tell his audience about a little ditty which was popular with British soldiers. 'King Farouk, King Farouk, hang his bollocks from a hook,' sang the Lord Chief Justice. Perhaps such songs are pop- ular with feminists of the castrationist ten- dency, of whom there were several examples in the audience, but to the majority of those present, who were decid- edly champagne socialists of Blairite vin- tage, such talk of bollocks and the like was far too vulgar.
Lord Bingham, far from having finished his jokes, was only just getting into his stride. He now performed the extraordi- nary feat of leaving Cairo and the war behind and travelling in his mind to Cam- bridge and to Mr Justice Melford Steven- son — the bete noire of all right-on lawyers. `Judge Melford Stevenson was once asked', Lord Bingham told the audience, 'what he would give a Cambridge undergraduate who raped a girl in a punt. Stevenson replied, "A half-blue, I should think."' This was a joke too far. The audience could take no more of it. 'The left-wing, lesbian and black ladies — especially those who were all three — in the audience began to hiss and boo,' recalled my mole. `One doesn't expect that kind of thing com- ing from the Lord Chief Justice of all peo- ple. One has to be very careful these days. I saw one woman guest in tears — though that might have been the effect of the heat on her power make-up.'
`It was very inappropriate,' said another eye-witness. 'It wasn't even a joke, was it? If it was it wasn't funny.' But he added, `There's nothing new about it, this often happens at the dinner. What you have got is all these down-to-earth solicitors and barristers with the odd stipendiary magis- trate or judge who are out of touch and not wacky.'
The jokes over at last, Lord Bingham of Comhill, having made no serious or boring points whatsoever, sat down to what can best be described as modest applause from his down-to-earth audience. The message for future speakers is clear — no jokes about race or sex, only wacky ones.
Incidently, I am being not adversely critical of him, or praising him, for that matter; my report on this judge is not at all judgmental.
It's one of Diana's old outfits.'
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