Going for bust
Peter Paterson
A SLIGHT CASE OF LIBEL: MEACHER v TRELFORD AND OTHERS by Alan Watkins
Duckworth, f14.95, pp. 241
orensically, Alan Watkins and I go back a long way. I remember listening to his evidence in the celebrated case of Waugh vs The Spectator in 1971, when my own hopes of following him into the witness box were frustrated by a quarrel, quite separate from Mr Waugh's, I had been conducting with the then proprietor of this magazine, which, perfectly proper- ly, in the eyes of the plaintiff's advisers, made it inadvisable that I should add my, as it transpired, happily extraneous, penn'orth. Soon afterwards, Mr Watkins kindly volunteered to appear as a character wit- ness on my behalf before a stipendiary at Bow Street Magistrates Court when, in a not quite so celebrated case, I faced a charge of insulting behaviour for consum- ing a packet of sandwiches and a piece of bread pudding while occupying, after clos- ing time, the tables and chairs outside a public house off Fetter Lane. Trespass might have been a safer charge. Not only did the good Watkins help secure my acquittal, he also subsequently wrote to the Lord Chancellor in an attempt to reverse the injustice of my having been refused costs on account of my allegedly insolent demeanour in the witness box. Friendship can surely go no further. I recall, however, that on my day in court Mr Watkins's evidence, welcome though it was to an embattled defendant in a criminal case, appeared to carry less weight with the magistrate than the similar- ly glowing testimonial to my virtues offered by the late George Hutchinson. While Mr F, Watkins was then the political correspon- dent of the New Statesman, a journal the magistrate was clearly unfamiliar with, Mr Hutchinson had the advantages of a CBE and a column in the Times.
Mr Watkins found himself in court because Labour MP Michael Meacher thought he had been libelled, amongst other things, by a suggestion that he liked it to be thought that his father was a farm worker. There is no doubt that, together with the wretched plaintiff, Watkins, for many years now the columnist one looks for first in the Observer (though apparently Meacher did not see the article which so grievously offended him until 'some few days later') was the cynosure of Meacher vs Trelford and Others. His testimony was never, according to his own account, for a moment undervalued by the judge, the late Sir John Hazan. Perhaps it was a different story with his own counsel, Richard Hart- ley, QC, whom I happened to meet at dinner during the trial and who was apparently as put out by Watkins's de- meanour in the witness box as the magis- trate had been by mine.
And although he has yet to appear in the Honours List, I believe Watkins is fully deserving of some kind of special recogni- tion for having halted, if not reversed, a series of 36 or 40 (no one is quite certain of the precise number) libel actions in which newspapers had been taken to the prover- bial cleaners in a veritable golden age for gold diggers (a term Mr Meacher aston- ishingly claimed during the trial never to have heard of). Were it not for the Fleet Street diaspora, perhaps a bust alongside that erected to Edgar Wallace on Ludgate Circus, naturally paid for by the News- paper Publishers' Association, might have been just the thing.
Quite apart from such corporate or collective services to our industry, Alan Watkins has rewarded the reader by pro- ducing a quite astonishingly vivid account of a tense and dramatic trial. It was, after all, well-covered by the newspapers at the time, libel being so close to their hearts, or pockets, but not nearly so well as it is here. A Slight Case of Libel gave me a stab of nostalgia, making me realise quite sudden- ly how much I miss good court reporting: even the kind of reconstruction associated with the excellent Edgar Lustgarten, and the once-popular 'Courts Day By Day' features have disappeared. Perhaps it has to do with the abolition of the death penalty, the inability of today's reporters to write shorthand, or society's unshock- able attitude towards offenders. Whatever it is, only libel actions, with their element of high-risk gambling, of personal con- frontation — even, with their astronomic costs, of personal ruin — now merit the coverage which was once the everyday staple of our morning, evening and Sunday newspapers. To add to his achievements, Alan Watkins may have contributed to the revival of a lost art. I certainly hope so.
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