DIARY
JOHN MORTIMER
It's only a couple of years since I left the law, and the moment my back is turned there they go again, picking away at trial by jury. I would commend to Mr Douglas Hurd, who has clearly been instructed to trot out that old vote-getter Dame Laura Norder as a final election hope, a passage by Sir William Blackstone:
The liberties of England cannot but subsist so long as this palladium (the jury) remains sacred and inviolate not only from all open attacks (which none will be so hardy as to make) but also from all secret machinations Which may sap and undermine it . . . let it again be remembered that delays and incon- veniences in the forms of justice are the price Which all free nations must pay for their liberty.
If Mr Hurd is uninterested in 18th-century Judges he need go no further than Lord ' Devlin, perhaps our most sensible living Law Lord, who said, 'Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice . . . it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives. For no tyrant could afford to leave a subject's freedom in the hands of twelve of his co.untrymen.' It's useless to say that jury tnal is inappropriate in minor cases. A man's entire future may depend on a totally trivial charge, as witness the recent case of a Recorder and QC involved in a Charge of kerb crawling, a matter which I would have thought should only be decided bY.a jury. A great deal of nonsense is also written about the remaining three jury challenges; a diminished right of the de- Which helps to ensure that a citizen is l,11. ed by a group that may at least look like 'us peers. No one ever mentions the fact that the prosecution has an infinite number ef challenges for which no reason has to be ren. In any event the business of chal- ging juries is far trickier than you might siuPP°se. The young tearaway in the black bea.ther jacket may well be in favour of "Pug back the thumbscrew and the stiff collared Daily Telegraph reader a member of the Howard League for Penal Reform. I as. once instructed not to challenge, against my better judgment, and was later told that the obvious bank manager in the ldarY box had winked at the boys in the vvc)i ek: Three weeks into the trial he was still nklug. He had a nervous tick.
'1 remember meeting Sam Spiegl.' Mr v_e,atli, unusually crowned with a small e.tvet skull cap, stood in front of a golden gr Ile through which some magical singing nad faded; he was giving an oration at the gr.' _eat film producer's memorial service in a '-undon „ synagogue. 'And I said to him, 0 what do you do? I mean, what's your ccupation?" And Spiegl said, "I'm a film Pr°ducer." So I said, "Would I have heard of any of your films?" Well, he mentioned some, Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, The African Queen, On the Waterfront, and I said "Never heard of them. The last film I saw was George Arliss in Disraeli and a very fine film it was." "But that was in 1931," said Spiegl. "You're quite wrong," I told him. "It was 1932!" 'I sat, wearing a more rudimentary skull cap made of black crepe paper, and thought of those two great sea creatures, Ted Heath and Sam Spiegl, swimming up to each other and parting, immersed in their quite separate oceans.
Being aboard Sam Spiegl's yacht was like being hijacked on some floating annexe of the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo and not being allowed back to shore until you'd written 50 pages. My own favourite Spiegl story, no doubt apoc- ryphal, is concerned with the making of Lawrence of Arabia, when he managed to enter an Arab kingdom having assured the authorities that he was a member of the Church of England. Once there he had dinner with the King who, it being the time of Ramadan, ate little. 'What is this Rama- dan?' the Great Producer asked. 'It's a time when we fast, pray, deny ourselves small pleasures . . .' the King explained, and Sam Spiegl nodded with grave under- standing. 'I know,' he said, 'it's just like our English Lent.' He was a great diplo- mat, an enchanting and generous host and, so far as I was concerned, almost impossi- ble to work for. The beautiful music behind the golden grille of the synagogue did him no less than justice. passed my lips but the recent activities of the anti-smoking lobby have almost driven me to light up another fag. Not content with the incessant bullying of the be- leaguered smokers, not stopping short of trying to forbid solitary smoking in motor cars (apparently the driver is liable to set himself on fire with the matches) they have now discovered a reprehensible activity called 'passive smoking' which consists of being married, or living with, one who smokes. I am quite prepared to concede that smoking is a highly dangerous occupa- tion but I wonder how many marriages are preserved, or husbands and wives saved from painful nervous diseases, by the quiet resort to a cork tip. What is obvious is the counter-productive effect of all this prop- aganda — more young people than ever seem inseparable from their packets of King Sized and I'm convinced that the large audiences for such works as Brides- head and Jewel in the Crown are partly drawn to them by the pleasure of watching the leading characters puff away without guilt or inhibition. I'm also sure that the anti-smokers are mistaken in going on about the dangers of the situation. Born into a world which can be reduced to a frozen and depopulated waste land at the touch of a button, how can the puzzled teenager be made to worry about the occasional ciggy? Besides which, such talk makes smoking appear as enticing as downhill skiing, racing Hondas up the M1 or fighting Millwall. Smoking, those who wish to abolish it should point out, is a rather messy, unsexy (but entirely harm- less) occupation, largely indulged in by middle-aged members of the SDP whilst watching bowls.
Ihave great sympathy for those, like Sam Spiegl and Edward Heath, whose work is an overriding obsession, blotting out most other interests. Such a one is my Oxford tailor whom I have visited ever since I was an undergraduate. 'I can't stand that Robin Day show,' he told me when I visited him this week. 'I think it's a disgrace to television.' I protested that I found Question Time often entertaining and sometimes informative and that Sir Robin himself had a good deal of old world charm. 'It's a terrible show,' was the unforgiving reply. 'I don't know who cuts his jackets but everytime he points at the audience his sleeve rides right up his arm!' And the actor Michael Denison once told me that the most savage notice he'd ever got was in The Tailor and Cutter. 'Mr Denison,' wrote their critic, 'appears in the first act wearing a tweed suit with a grossly inadequate central vent.'
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