Where next for Chris and Vicky?

Malcolm last passed this way on 29th January.

That was prompted by all the smoke signals of a cover-up (mixed metaphor there?).

Since then we have had the confession and the two court cases. To add to the general hilarity and mirth, there may well be another trail on the way.

We are told that Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce will be available for further onward despatch, suitcases at hand, via Southwark Crown Court, 2pm on Monday. All the media reports assume gaol sentences are on the cards.  A paparazzi goat-fuck has been disorganised for English Grounds, SE1: assemble at the Horniman pub, near Hays Galleria, in good time — if not good order.

Which leaves one question hanging (and the likes of Guido Fawkes and his band of window-lickers would happily interpose “Hanging’s too good”).

The question is: why?

Apart from gratuitous thoughts of vengeance, what public good will come of incarcerating Mrs Pryce? Has she not been put upon enough?

Even the deluded and despicable Huhne has been efficiently disgraced and eliminated from public life. He will, it is hoped, next be pursued for the cost of that pointless legal action he took last September — say £100,000 or so — but he is a wealthy man, and should be able to ride it. Doubtless, like other political miscreants before him — Profumo, Aitken, Archer — he will go away and do good works.

All this is far, far beyond Malcolm’s comprehension and ulcer-rating. Instead Malcolm returns to an occasion of similar public disgrace, over a century ago:

I know not whether Laws be right,
   Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
   Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
   A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law
   That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took His brother’s life,
   And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
   With a most evil fan.

This too I know — and wise it were
   If each could know the same —
That every prison that men build
   Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
   How men their brothers maim.

Three degrees of falsehood, and ten degrees of the Eighth Circle

Last summer, from the web-site of the University of York’s Department of Mathematics (of all unlikely places to find any lit.crit), there was an exhaustive history of who and how the cliché originated about “lies, damn lies and statistics”. The conclusion, if somewhat fuzzy, declared the begetter was Sir Charles Dilke, but deriving it from many earlier variants.

Somewhat conveniently, if only for regional pride, was:

A query in Notes and Queries (7th Ser. xii) (1891 Oct. 10), p. 288, reads as follows:

DEGREES OF FALSEHOOD. – Who was it who said, “There are three degrees of falsehood: the first is a fib, the second is a lie, and then come statistics”?      ST. SWITHIN

According to Folklore 41 (3) (1930), 301 and 63 (1) (1952), 4–5, “St. Swithin” was a pseudonym used by Mrs Eliza Gutch (1840–1931), of Holgate Lodge, York.

They’re still at it!

The most blackened liar is the politician who twists a statistic to support a point. Here, from the letters page of this week’s Ham&High in front of Malcolm, we have a prime specimen:

Stephen Greenhalgh, London’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, writes:

Crime has fallen, but we want to boost public confidence and make London safer. [etc., etc.]

A Google search suggests Greenhalgh issues, and re-issues press releases on this line, regurgitates similar statements on public occasions, quite indefatigably. There’ll probably be another one along in the morning. That’s why the grateful citizens of London pay him something around £100,000 a year, plus expenses and pension rights.

Let him who is without sin …

Meanwhile, Greenhalgh is himself not above suspicion, and Dave Hill has him in his sights:

As the police watchdog considers whether to investigate Boris Johnson’s policing deputy Stephen Greenhalgh over alleged illegal conduct by public officers of Hammersmith and Fulham council when he was its leader, it is instructive to consider the passion with which Greenhalgh supported the ambitious redevelopment scheme at the heart of the affair – the Earls Court project.

And then, lest we forget, there was the City Hall groping:

Boris Johnson‘s deputy mayor for policing has apologised “unreservedly” following an allegation that he molested a female member of staff in a city hall lift.

Stephen Greenhalgh, the former Tory leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, who now holds day-to-day responsibility in the mayor’s office for policing and crime, allegedly patted a female member of staff on the bottom while in a lift last month.

Last seen above Lenin’s tomb

Put Greenhalgh into an ill-cut Soviet era suit, and one instantly lines him up alongside the Bulganins,  Malenkovs and Berias for a Red Square May Day parade:

So, for the occasion, let’s adapt a Stalinite apothegm:

It’s not the crimes that count, it’s how, and by whom they are counted.

In the exact case of crime statistics, the Guardian‘s Datablog, Facts are sacred, ran the slide-rule over the official numbers a while ago. It noted all kinds of jiggery-pokery:

• A concurrent but separate ONS publication shows that the rate of police recorded crime has fallen more quickly than the rate of reported crime found in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).
• It’s important to bear in mind that today’s release focuses on police recorded crimes. These are provided to the Home Office by police authorities and forces, not all of whom collect data with the same precision according to a 2007 audit. This is problematic because it means that a higher number in a given area may indicate an improvement in reporting by police rather than a rise in criminality.
• … crimes recorded by police are unlikely to represent the total number of crimes that take place. To understand this better, it’s useful to also consider the CSEW which asks people face-to-face about their experiences of, attitudes about and perceptions of a range of crimes.
• The gap between police-recorded and survey-reported crime has always been significant, but the distance between the two has widened. In 2004/05, there was an effective recording rate of 52.8%, while in the latest statistical release, this figure has dropped to 42.4%

And even this:

• Another of the more interesting figures is that of the perception of crime. The CSEW asks people whether they think crime is getting worse where they live and nationally. So, people think crime is getting worse – but not where they live. It’s the gap between what we know is going on and what we think is going on.

That last one, where Malcolm is sitting, means that the propaganda of stooges like Greenhalgh may be working.

Put the whole shebang together, and the only reasonable conclusion is:

Crime figures aren’t worth the ink used to print them.

Conjugation: I’m usually a law-abiding citizen, you’re a bit dodgy: that bloke ought to go down for a long stretch.

Meanwhile the really big crimes — Harry-the-Horse and  the multinationals who don’t pay taxes, the fraudsters who exploit concessions for charity to rip us all off — are officially not crimes at all.

Then there’s the little stuff:

It’s illegal to ride a motorcycle or drive using hand-held phones or similar devices.

The rules are the same if you’re stopped at traffic lights or queuing in traffic.

It’s also illegal to use a hand-held phone or similar device when supervising a learner driver or rider.

Malcolm would give fair odds that at least the second of those requirements is not known to the average driver. Yet — note — all are “illegal”, which means “against the law”. And Malcolm, waiting for a few minutes at bus-stops in north London, counts five, six or more drivers quite blatantly disregarding the law, frequently in full view of that CCTV camera that collect fines if you pause for thirty seconds to allow a passenger to get out (£50 free and for nothing to the local authority).

Here’s a writ that goes unenforced on a daily basis:

Bernard Hogan-Howe [the Met's Commissioner] indicated that he believed the current punishment of three penalty points and a £60 fine was not a strong enough deterrent for drivers.

By increasing the punishment to six points, drivers would be banned from the road if they were caught twice for the offence within three years.

Writing on the Met’s website, the commissioner said this would make drivers take the law on driving while on the phone more seriously and improve road safety.

That interprets as we don’t bother to enforce the law. We expect you, the potential offenders to understand and obey the law. But if we’re forced to apply the law, we expect it to have teeth. If only because it makes us look as though we’re doing our job. And, if the offence was significantly up-graded, we’d have more motivation, and look even better. Oh, and by the way, if you’re phoning and driving, don’t mow down that child, because — if you do — we have to check your phone records, which is a real fag.

That makes all the more remarkable the coincidence, nay the the assiduity of the Met Police, in catching (and so banning) Chris Huhne for driving the Old Kent Road while phoning. And that, by coincidence, within weeks of him avoiding a ban for speeding by having his wife take the points.

Where does this place the Office of National Statistics, Deputy Mayor Greenhalge, and others? —

Destination: Malebolge

The sky is falling! (selectively)

Murdoch’s Times not only went tabloid, it has acquired some down-market degeneracies with it.

A couple of posts back, Malcolm was whining about the comic’s fullest fluffy Murdochian populism. He now bemoans a parallel ghoulish, blood-chilling, thrill-seeking sensationalism.

The Melanie Phillips memorial meme

What provoked this was the third Comment article in yesterday’s fish-n-chip wrapper. After Finkelstein (a contract artist, so comes with the fixtures and fittings) on the holocaust, and the German Foreign Minister soft-soaping the chasm between Cameron and Merkel, comes Maajid Nawaz:

Muslim patrols are s sign of things to come

We should worry that battle-hardened fanatics could impose their dogma on Britain’s streets

Then — yawn! — his opening tries to draw straight-lines across a very uneven surface:

On the streets of Greece supporters of the far-Right Golden Dawn party patrol neighbourhoods, attacking anyone who looks like an immigrant. In Denmark a group calling itself Call to Islam has declared parts of the country to be “sharia-controlled zones” and its “morality police” confront drinkers and partygoers. In France right-wing vigilantes ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp. In Spain nine Islamist extremists recently kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery under sharia and attempted to execute her before she managed to escape. And here English Defence League thugs march in towns and cities “reclaiming” the streets from Muslims.

Something very worrying is spreading across Europe. Fascist and and Islamist extremists alike are copying what Hitler’s Brownshirts excelled at — enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods, And the moderate middle is left gawping.

Well, well: if that had appeared in any inter chat chat-room, Mike Godwin would be invoked:

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand – in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer…

I developed Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Then there’s the other matter: proportion. The European Union embraces a population of nigh on half-a-billion. Let’s be generous to Maajid Nawaz: he has identified, at most, a few hundred ne’er-do-wells. His nine Spanish Islamists amount to 0.00000019% of the people of Spain. Similarly, there’s a Grand Canyon of difference between the hysterical:

The complete Islamification of Tower Hamlets continues, as anyone who dares to “look like a fag” or drink alcohol in their declared republic now risks harassment walking in the street.

and the factual:

A small group of individuals were recently seen harassing members of the public in East London, and the council is proactively working with partners in the community and police to monitor for further incidents and take appropriate action.

And the marauding Muslim hordes of E1 amounted to precisely —

A fifth person has been detained after a video of a ‘vigilante Muslim gang’ tormenting members of the public in east London was released on YouTube.

The 17-year-old boy was questioned at a police station in Walthamstow in relation to incidents that were posted on the video sharing website on January 12 and 13.

The pillars of bourgeois society have not even been vibrated. The events Maajid Nawaz wants to daisy-chain are, taken one by one, not insignificant — but on a continental scale do not register on the Richter Scale of earth-shakers.

Another small country about which we know nothing

Curiously, though, Maajid Nawaz omitted one obvious civil disruption.

We have had some eight weeks of continuing street riots in East Belfast, orchestrated by the local UVF. Arson-attempts, especially on Roman Catholic targets, are regular events. The Police Service have reported dozen of officers injured, truing to contain the almost-nightly excursions. Numerous arrests have been made. The cost is now running towards eight figures. And the machinators are known to all:

A small number of senior UVF men are directing the riots in east Belfast that have brought shame on Northern Ireland.

Two senior henchmen of the UVF chief in east Belfast have ignored warnings from the organisation’s leadership to bring an end to the violence which has left dozens of PSNI officers injured and cost millions of pounds.

And while the UVF’s leader in the east of the city — as the ‘Beast from the East’ — could end the rioting immediately, he has failed to bring his men under control.

Even Andrew Gillian, at the [London] Daily Telegraph knows where to go calling:

What East Belfast, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey do have in common, however, are maverick factions of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

“We’ve got no doubt whatever that this is coming from the UVF,” says Terry Spence, leader of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland.

The East Belfast leader of the UVF – the so-called “Beast from the East” – was not at home to callers when The Telegraph dropped in to his small terraced house in a quiet side street.

His white reinforced front door doesn’t have a knocker or a bell, but there are five CCTV cameras just in case anyone tries to murder him again.

Two of his lieutenants have been spotted in the background helping direct the main East Belfast riots.

Security sources say they are acting with the Beast’s consent, if not the UVF leadership’s active involvement, and he could end the trouble in the area whenever he wanted.

Ugly Doris

If you go to those-in-the-know, you’ll hear a lot about this reclusive figure. Here’s an Analysis from the Irish Times, eighteen months ago:

THE SO-CALLED “Beast from the East” took over the Ulster Volunteer Force in east Belfast about six years ago and has strengthened his power base since then, according to well-placed loyalist sources. He and some of his senior lieutenants are chiefly responsible for the violence in east Belfast over recent days, they say.

He makes his money mainly from “gangster-on-gangster or bad-on-bad crime”, which is chiefly about drug dealing and extorting other criminals – while also managing to maintain some distance from these activities to keep him, so far, out of prison. How to clip his wings is the challenge for the police and also for other members of the UVF…

… what is happening in Short Strand and on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast these past dangerous nights is not about the dissidents. It is about the UVF, which is fomenting the disturbances. And it is primarily about the UVF leader in east Belfast nicknamed the Beast from the East or “Ugly Doris”. The first nom de guerre relates to his east Belfast bailiwick and the second refers to the late Jim Gray, the UDA east Belfast leader or “brigadier” murdered by his own people. He was called Doris Day because of his blond hair and his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, pink jumpers and gold jewellery. The UVF leader is said to resemble Gray only in his strands of blond hair – hence Ugly Doris.

According to senior loyalist sources, the new man, who is in his 40s, has “lost the run of himself” and is becoming increasingly dangerous and, some fear, almost unstable. “He is creating a little empire for himself in east Belfast and is now flexing his muscles,” said one loyalist insider. “He is also partial to cocaine and likes to party . . . He believes he is untouchable.”

The Belfast Telegraph identified the East Belfast UVF as:

… the most powerful paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland.

With a fiefdom stretching from the Lagan’s edge on the Newtownards Road to Millisle, Donaghadee and beyond, it struts a swathe of territory no other loyalist element can match.

It has dwarfed the UDA in east Belfast and the Ards Peninsula to the point where seasoned paramilitaries declare a ‘no contest’ between the two loyalist terror groups.

Note that didn’t say most powerful Loyalist paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland. Nor are we considering a handful of self-advertisers in Brick Lane, or even a tight little gang of perverts in Malaga. This is something far bigger, far nearer to the dystopia with which Maajid Nawaz would wish to chill us.

What you don’t find in those columns, usually, is a given name for the Beast a.k.a. Ugly Doris. He is (pace Susanne Breen) A former prisoner from a well-known loyalist family. His code-title is “S” [the UVF just lurve these Ian Flemingesque touches]. Look a bit further and you’ll find the name of Stephen Matthews.

Now there’s a candidate for Maajid Nawaz’s little black book.

Heres and theres with Chris and Vicky

Any time now — well, actually next week — the celebrated trial of Regina v Christopher Huhne and Vasiliki Pryce finally makes it into a full Court. The darkest stage-curtains of the law have been drawn around these proceedings of late, where one of those all-powerful Super-Injunctions applies.

To try and make any sense, it’s worth recapitulating the story so far (and it has ramifications).

The LSE-Brussels express

On 12th March 2003 Chris Huhne was the re-elected LibDem MEP for the South-East of England. He had spent the day as productively as such things can be in Brussels. To be fair, he was an effective MEP, and is to be congratulated for introducing “time-expired” clauses into Euro-legislation.

That evening, he arrived back at Stansted and — as far as the ‘official” record then stood — was collected by his loving wife, Vicky Pryce, and driven back to London. Alas! The Audi was caught by a camera speeding along the M11; and a fine and penalty points were duly awarded. Mrs Pryce (she was born Vasiliki Courmouzis, but has retained her nom-de-guerre from a first marriage in 1972) accepted the points on her own licence, and the fine was paid.

What later became significant is that Mrs Pryce had spent the evening addressing a conference at London’s LSE, and had later taken a full dinner with a double handful of academics. To have collected Huhne at Stansted, she must have driven the 49 miles from Aldwych to Stansted in around 25 minutes.

The issue was that Huhne had a record of offending against the rules of the road — had he been the guilty speeder, he would have incurred a three-month driving ban under the totting-up system. Sadly, our hero managed precisely that in December 2003, having been caught driving along the Old Kent Road, using a mobile phone at the wheel — Vicky became his chauffeuse of necessity.

The parliamentary whizz-kid

Meanwhile, Huhne was selected to be the LibDem candidate for the Eastleigh constituency. This was a plum one: the seat had been held by the LibDem David Chidgely since the by-election following the bizarre death of Tory Stephen Milligan. Know-alls will recollect that self-bondage, autoerotic asphyxia and an orange were involved in that attempt at an Ig Noble award. By a mere whisker (majority 568) Christopher Murray Paul-Huhne was duly elected the member for Eastleigh on 5 May 2005.

The LibDem parliamentary party (suddenly all of 62 MPs) Huhne now joined were not a band of happy bunnies — a few too many over-inflated egos, and an alcoholic leader against whom the rest were plotting. Charles Kennedy promptly appointed Huhne as second-string Treasury spokesman.

When Kennedy fell in January 2006 (he had been making a spectacle of doing so, allegedly), Huhne — never one to undervalue his abilities —had himself proposed for the leadership. He ran comfortably ahead of Simon Hughes, but well behind Menzies Campbell. Ming than annointed Huhne to be DEFRA main man.

Ming was felt to be “too old” and out-of-touch with the thrusting image the LibDems wanted for themselves. When Vince Cable went public in October 2007, the old boy went gracefully; and a second round of the LibDem enstoolment contest was under way. Once again it was Huhne to the fore — only to be pipped by just over 2% of the party vote and by his old MEP mate, Nick Clegg (who, quite possibly, was on that Stansted flight — see above — and, some say, in the car driven by the faster-than-a-speeding-Pryce). Clegg accused Huhne of being underhand in his campaign — there was a mysterious document, Calamity Clegg, in circulation, which reached the BBC from Huhne’s office, but — as he maintained — not with his complicity.

Ahem! Let us pass swiftly on.

Anyway, Huhne was now clearly the second string in the LibDem parliamentary party, and the Home Affairs spokesman.

In bed with the Tories and Ms Trimingham

With the arrival of the ConDem coalition, Huhne became Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change — about as prominent a grandstanding job as any LibDem could wish.

Huhne’s 2010 election materials had featured his loving relations with wife Vicky — ‘Family matters to me so much – where would we be without them?’ — their three children, and his two step-daughters from her first marriage. When Huhne went to the Energy Department, Vicky Pryce properly resigned her very senior post in the Government Economic Service to avoid any conflict of interest.

A month later Huhne was paparazzi’d as he left his constituency flat with his former press officer: he was yet another victim of the News of the World’s Derek Webb (by no coincidence, Huhne had been vocal about NotW’s phone-hackings). To the delight of the scurrilous UK tabloids, Carina Trimingham had been since 2007 in a civil partnership with a Julie Bennett.

Vicky was doorstepped at home, a £1.5 million townhouse in Clapham — see also below — with the glad tidings. At which point Huhne announced he had left his wife, and set up with Trimingham. The Huhne-Pryce divorce came through in January 2011.

The roof fell in soon after.

Fall-out

Soon after the divorce, rumours spread that Mrs Pryce was “on manoeuvres”: both the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail were lapping up any hints going (the only reason the ST — which had most of the story — isn’t cited here is that pay-wall).  On 8th May 2011 the Mail on Sunday went for the jugular:

Outspoken Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne was at the centre of an extraordinary controversy last night over alleged motoring offences.

The Liberal Democrat vehemently denies the claims. His denial came as his former wife Vicky Pryce was asked to comment on rumours that Mr Huhne had asked ‘someone close to him’ to take penalty points on his behalf for a speeding offence.

Miss Pryce told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I am aware that he pressurised people to take his driving licence penalty points.’ …

Rumours suggesting Mr Huhne asked someone else to take responsibility for a speeding offence have been circulating in Westminster for months. The millionaire former banker has repeatedly denied the allegations. Friends say the claims are part of a smear campaign designed to ruin his political career.

In recent days Mr Huhne has been accused by party critics of plotting to undermine his leader, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

Mr Clegg’s defeat in the referendum on changing the voting system for General Elections, combined with his abysmal ratings, have brought reports that Mr Huhne could mount a leadership challenge – although he has pledged his ¬loyalty to Mr Clegg.

Allies of Mr Huhne say they have been expecting an unfounded attack on his reputation for some time by unnamed ‘political enemies’.

When The Mail on Sunday approached Mr Huhne last year about the motoring claims, a spokesman said: ‘These allegations are completely untrue. In 2003 Chris Huhne received a driving ban for maximum points and this is a matter of public record.

The Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, righteously batted the matter off to the Essex Constabulary — by this time it was known that the three penalty points for the speeding offence had been collected by Vicky Pryce. Huhne was duly interviewed, and stood by his rights to remain silent. By June 2011 the Essex Police had referred the thing to the Criminal Prosecution Service.

Not quite an open-and-shut case

Vicky Pryce had been having email exchanges with the Sunday Times. The CPS went to the Crown Court to get access to this apparently-damning evidence. The ST then went to judicial review to prevent disclosure of its sources. That delayed any prosecution of Huhne and Pryce until the end of 2011. By then other papers had discovered that the Essex Constabulary had recommended the CPS should prosecute (24 December 2011). The ST withdrew its application for judicial review (20 January 2012). The Director of Public Prosecutions announced there was sufficient evidence to bring charges (3 February 2012). Huhne was thus distinguished as the first member of the British Cabinet ever to face criminal charges (though over the years many, many others had close-run escapes) — and Huhne had accordingly resigned (also 3 February 2012).

Now things start to unravel.

On 16 February 2012 Huhne and Pryce faced Westminster Magistrates’ Court, were formally charged, and granted unconditional bail. The case was sent for trial at Southwark Crown Court: an initial hearing on 2 March 2012, and the full trial for a fortnight, starting on 2nd October. Huhne made no plea and asked that the case be quashed (i.e. that it had really been his wife driving) — which involved a further hearing on 27th July. Pryce pleaded not guilty on grounds of “marital coercion”.

The day before that substantive trial was due to begin, 1st October, the presiding judge imposed an all-purpose super-injunction — and the trail was further delayed for “legal reasons”. We might — just might — get to the real meat on 4th February.

More happy families

Let’s back-track to that sudden legal delay at the start of October 2012; and do a bit of extrapolation.

On 9th October 2012 there came a cryptic announcement from the Office for Judicial Complaints:

The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor have suspended Constance Briscoe from the judiciary pending the outcome of the police investigation into the allegations against her. It would be inappropriate to comment further whilst the investigation is active.

Up hill, Down Dale

Now consider:

One or two of the follow-up tweets made the Huhne/Pryce connection, in no great depth. If Dale reckons it’s “a massive story”, and keeps quiet about it — we can believe him. If Dale has a grasp of the essentials, so have the likes of Guido Fawkes/Paul Staines (who hasn’t let the topic drop). And so has every political gossiper of any status.

On 16th December 2012, the Mail on Sunday had a story that Laurence Brass, who sits on asylum cases and is a five times LibDem candidate (and ten years a  LibDem local councillor) had encountered Huhne and tweeted afterwards:

Breaking news. Met ex-Energy Sec Chris Huhne in Commons, who confirmed that prosecution against him will be dropped next month.

That put the “usual channels” into hysteria mode. Within an hour the tweet had been deleted. Mike Smithson’s Political Betting site had spotted that odds on Huhne replacing Clegg (there is even more animus there) were down to 12/1. The Mail on Sunday‘s story had disappeared from the web-site by next day.

The Crown Prosecution Service made sure the Telegraph next day had it clear: the case would proceed.

The enigmatic Constance Briscoe

It seems that Constance (apparently as a child she was merely “Clare”) Briscoe, a barrister with 9-12 Bell Yard and a Recorder, presiding over Mental Health Tribunals (and, in another non-coincidence, a fellow resident of Clapham), had been Vicky Pryce’s friend, confidante and advisor. There are suggestions that Ms Briscoe was behind drip-feeding Pryce’s revelations to the Sunday Times. She was arrested at Clapham on 6th October, and police investigations are continuing — but we have been given no idea of what charges, if any, will be laid.

Inevitably, Ms Briscoe’s private life — in its own way as remarkable as that of Ms Trimingham — was a cause of prurient delight.

Let us not deny ourselves the chance to review Ms Briscoe’s quite eventful love-life. She was left by her long-term partner of a dozen years, Anthony Arlidge QC, in favour of a younger, blonder model:

The 55 year-old accused leading QC Anthony Arlidge, 75, of being “bonkers” and “mad” after he abandoned her for an aspiring barrister almost a third of his age.

She also claimed Mr Arlidge, a former crown court recorder who has worked on some of Britain’s most high profile cases, jilted her as they celebrated her daughter’s birthday.

The Cambridge-educated barrister has moved out of their marital home in Clapham, south London.

He is now sharing his central London apartment and Kent country house with the 27 year-old, understood to called Heather.

That would be: aspiring barrister Heather Lockwood, 27, who is actually a para-legal assistant at Watmore’s Solicitors in Chancery Lane.

A Malcolmian aside

If all these convoluted relationships seem strange, it can get even weirder:

Mr Arlidge remains married to wife Enid, the mother of his four children.

Their 48th wedding anniversary is next week but they separated nearly three decades ago. He then lived for 16 years with QC Tracy Ayling.

His son John, a freelance journalist who has written for the Sunday Times and Condé Nast, lives with Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics correspondent.

Before the briefs, the Briscoe griefs

All of the pain of her childhood went into two books of autobiographical misery: Ugly and Beyond Ugly. Cue Simon Hattenstone interviewing her for the Guardian:

One of the most powerful moments in Ugly comes when Briscoe describes trying to get herself taken into care and is told to go home. She decides to kill herself by overdosing on bleach. She says she diluted the bleach, blistered her throat and made herself sick, but failed in her ultimate mission. Briscoe had planned out her future in purgatory. “I had to work out where I was going to stay, because I wasn’t going to heaven because I’d taken my own life. I was going to spend my time on the stairs in my mother’s house in Sutherland Square, because when you come in through the front door you have to go up the stairs to get to the bedrooms and the kitchen, and if I sat on that step my mother would have to go past me every day, so I was going to attack her, you know, trip her up, punch her in the head, push her head in the wall, when she went past me,” she says with relish.

Ugly is an angry book, I say. She looks surprised, almost hurt. “I don’t think it’s angry at all. I think it’s a very calm book, a very positive book. I think it’s a book that looks forward, not back. What do you mean by anger?” Well, wanting to spend your time in purgatory mashing your mother’s head is pretty angry, I say. “No, that’s just deserts. I think anger would be cutting up my mother’s clothes.”

In November 2008 the mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, sued for libel — and the High Court found the books were not libellous. The rest of the Briscoe family seem to differ from the account in the books (again from Hattenstone):

… her sister Patsy came to the defence of her mother in an article in the Mail on Sunday. She labelled Ugly a pack of lies, the fictional work of a self-hater. Patsy claimed that Eastman was a gentle giant, that Constance was not beaten or sexually abused, as Constance claimed had happened on one occasion, and that the suicide attempt was fabricated. “What she’s done is devious and dangerous,” she said. “Mum’s taken it very badly. She intends to go all the way with her legal action.”

At the same time, another sister, Pauline, provided a statement in which she took issue with a couple of details in Ugly, but said her mother was a woman who had set her whole family against each other.

Briscoe says she is keen for me to talk to the family and passes on the numbers of various siblings and her mother. Her sister, Christine, also a lawyer, tells me she’d rather not get involved and the others don’t return my calls.

Perhaps more to the point, the dates and details Briscoe provides in her books do not accurately tally with provable facts. That’s a curious trait in a senior lawyer. We might also note the BBC report of the libel trial:

… a woman suing her barrister daughter for libel over allegations made in a memoir of her childhood has accused her of being a “wicked thief and a liar”.

Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, 74, told the High Court that Constance Briscoe – who is also a part-time judge – had forged documents for use in her defence …

Andrew Caldecott QC, representing Ms Briscoe, told Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell that she was making “very serious” allegations of forgery.

She told the court: “I have to stand up for myself when you are trying to get me to admit to lies.

“I will never admit to lies.”

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell also told jurors that when her daughter visited London during her days at Newcastle University, she would “just run around doing shoplifting”.

 It crosses Malcolm’s mind there’s a possible half-chance that we have here a basis for the arrest of Ms Briscoe — and why her evidence at the Huhne-Pryce trial might be in doubt (her non-appearance as a prosecution witness would be telling). And why the legal system has gone into Delphic silence mode.

Succession planning

There now follows a Malcolmian gripe.

The BBC website has this:

The number of young police officers in England and Wales has fallen by nearly 50% in two years.

There were 9,088 officers aged under 26 in 2009-10 but only 4,758 in 2011-12, figures obtained by the BBC show.

In Cleveland, North Wales and Staffordshire the fall in the number of officers aged under 26 was more than 70% over the period.

Overall police numbers hit a nine-year low in 2012, due to tighter budget constraints slowing recruitment.

But this data, obtained in a Freedom of Information request by BBC Radio 4′s The World This Weekend, shows how much of that fall has been among younger officers.

That is disturbing for any number of reasons, including:

• the tighter budget constraints, which may or may not be a “good idea” when pressures in society are reaching new levels of tension;
• the growing imbalance in the police service, limiting recruitment and promotion;
• that it required yet another of those FoI requests to extract information from officialdom: if the Home Office have the figures — and clearly they did and do — they should be up front, available and in the public domain. How else can equal opportunities be assured?

Malcolm makes two reliable predictions:

• Sooner or later an intelligent sociologist (such creatures do exist) will unearth the information that the heralded drop in crime is only a drop in reported crime. If police stations are closed, if there are fewer boots on the ground, if contacting the police involves being bounced around from call-centre to clerical officer and — with luck — eventually to a real, live copper in the same county, then there will be fewer reported crimes. Surely it cannot be true that, on some nights, the whole county of Norfolk , all two thousand square miles, is “policed” by just four or five cars?
• In the not too distant future officialdom will suddenly wake up to a yawning age-gap in the personnel of the police service. This is not a trivial matter.

When Malcolm became a teacher in the mid-’60s, he entered a staff-room where the generational divide was all too obvious. There were the post-war entrants to the profession, highly experienced, excellent teachers, military-brusque, but many already reaching and anticipating retirement. Thanks to the poor pay for entrants (it was about the same as the lowest professional grades of the Post Office, and far less than the Hong Kong or Rhodesian police), recruitment under the 13 years of Tory rule (1951-1964) had been slow and unreliable. To that we may lay ome — by no means all — the washy-washiness of state education in the 1970s.

Somewhere in there the teaching profession became, for better or worse, the exclusive province of female teachers in primary schools, and an obvious and attractive social advance for ethnic groups in all levels  — and thereby unrepresentative of the wider society.

Further down that BBC report we find:

Olly Martins, the PCC for Bedfordshire, which saw a 58% fall, said the implications of this trend were very worrying.

“To secure policing by consent, and thereby be as effective as possible, forces need to look like the communities they serve.

“This is particularly true when it comes to the need to engage with younger people, who are disproportionately represented both as victims of crime and among its perpetrators.”

In the side bar, Martin Rosenbaum, “Freedom of information specialist”, repeats that:

It raises questions about how representative the police force is, especially given the issues about relations between the police and young people in some areas. And it also can’t help with the concerns about the level of physical fitness among the police.

Society will be paying for this extended recession — and by no means just in monetary terms, and far, far beyond the politics of policing — well into the next generation.

“Popular”? With whom?

The Buckeye Firearms Foundation (as in Ohio, “the Buckeye State”) followed up the Sandy Hook child massacre with:

a program to provide firearm training to teachers free of charge…

“The long-term goal is to develop a standard Armed Teacher curriculum and make the training available to any teacher or school official,” said [Ken] Hanson ["BFA's Legal Chair"]. “To begin, we will use funds from our educational foundation and solicit donations from corporations to pay for the program. Going forward, we will seek funding from a variety of sources to expand the training.”

 No comments, please, on the possibility of an “illegal chair”. Or that the acronym “BFA” is ripe for umpteen alternative expansions, many of which are coarse or scabrous. Or, that in July 2011, the BFA organised its (somewhat ambiguously-named) 1st Annual Buckeye Firearms Foundation Youth Shoot, “north of Zanesville”.

Educationalists and parents will be delighted by the success of the BFA’s initiative:

So far, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from all parts of Ohio and several from other states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia. More teachers inquire about the program every day.

“We knew this would be popular, but the response has exceeded our expectations,” said Jim Irvine, Chairman of the non-profit Buckeye Firearms Foundation.

That press release is a truly enlightening document. Malcolm savoured much thereof, and here adds some choice quotations:

• While Ohio generally prohibits firearms at schools, the law includes a provision that allows teachers and staff to carry firearms if the school board approves it. The Armed Teacher Training Program seeks to help teachers get permission to carry concealed firearms on the job and provide advanced training that goes above and beyond the typical requirements of concealed carry.
• Irvine says the program is entirely voluntary. “No one will be forced to be armed if they choose not to. The strategy is the same as ordinary concealed carry. No one will ever know who is or is not armed. Those who would seek to do harm in schools should be met with armed resistance even before law enforcement shows up. Over time, schools will no longer be considered easy, risk-free targets.”
• Irvine says the idea isn’t new. “For 25 years, citizens in the U.S. have been legally carrying concealed firearms. A total of 49 states now allow concealed carry, some with no licensing or training of any kind. The concept has worked remarkably well. Most of those who were initially skeptical now admit that citizens can be trusted to act lawfully and responsibly. Millions of ordinary people carry firearms in malls, on buses and city streets, and in restaurants and office buildings. It works for average citizens even in highly populated locations, so why would anyone assume armed teachers in schools would be any different?”
• A few people have questioned the idea of arming teachers who have no firearm experience or may be uncomfortable with guns. “That’s a misunderstanding of what we’re doing,” said Rieck. “Applicants for the program are not firearm novices. More than half already have a Concealed Handgun License. About 40 percent of our applicants say they have previous self-defense training. Over 60 percent say they have moderate to extensive firearm experience. And over 80 percent have experience with handguns.”

Cue Tom Paxton (or failing him, Pete Seeger):

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes,
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

That’s what I learned in school today,
That’s what I learned in school.

Or, here’s the nearest thing Malcolm can find from Paxton himself:

Hat-tip to Mother Jones.

Not quite bollocks?

John Ward’s blog is frequently more than a bore, but he does hit targets — in the same mode as a broken watch has to be right twice a day.

He has, this morning, come up with just a one:

Banned journalist and Haut la Garenne investigator Leah McGrath Goodman continues to encounter Government foot-dragging after her visa rights in Britain were abruptly removed three months ago.

Leah submitted her visa request on 30th November 2012. There’s been no response, and this is the third application to re-enter the UK since being banned in September 2011. 90% of UK visa applications are cleared within 21 days, so clearly some heavy-hitters in the small orifice admiration protectorate (SOAP) do not want the application to go through.

Ward implies that obstructing Ms Goodman, who is sniffing at the dubious doings at , is all part of a great cover-up of the élite’s grubby secret. Yes, indeed, Ward is one of the few keyboard-artists to have discovered alt+e = é.

Ms Goodman is, as far as one can see, a decent and worthy journalist. She was the subject of an early-day motion by LibDem MP, John Hemming, last September:

That this House notes that an American journalist and author, Leah McGrath Goodman, has been banned from the UK Common Travel Area and refused a visa to visit Jersey; further notes that her objective was to investigate allegations of a cover-up following well-founded charges of decades-long child abuseat Jersey care home Haut de la Garenne; further notes that she had a clean immigration and travel record as a former Tier-1 visa holder and resident of the UK; further notes that there were no problems with the immigration service until she told them what she was intending to write about; and further notes that a Jersey-elected politician, Trevor Pitman, has tabled an electronic petition on Change.org calling for her to be granted a visa by the UK Border Agency so thatshe might continue her research in Jersey and write about matters in the Crown Dependency.

Which says it all.

Perhaps, not quite.

Malcolm had this from his MP, the equally LibDem MP (and minor minister), Lynne Featherstone:

Thank you for your email regarding Leah McGrath Goodman. I do appreciate your concerns over this issue. The UKBA have stated that “Ms Goodman was refused entry to the UK because we were not satisfied she was genuinely seeking entry as a visitor for the limited period she claimed. Further enquires showed that she attempted to mislead the Border Force officer about her travel plans and the reason she required entry to the UK.”

However, I am more than happy to represent your concerns to my colleagues in Government and as such I have written to Mark Harper, the Minister for Immigration, outlining your concerns and asking for him to address them. I shall get back to you as soon as I receive his response.

That takes us to the Guardian of 28th June last year, which has that UKBA statement in full, followed by:

Goodman disputes this. She said: “To date, the UK Border Force can do little more than accuse me of intending to possibly commit a future transgression, as it has been forced to admit there has been none. This has been a bit like the film Minority Report, in that I am being pursued for something that hasn’t actually taken place. As a former Tier-1 visa holder with a spotless record, I was surprised to be locked up, denied legal representation and banned from a country for which I’ve always held the highest respect. I have never misled the UK Border Force, nor have I ever intended to. I do realise it is a delicate situation, but I hope I might finish my work.”

Without any smidgeon of doubt, there has been astounding obfuscation about those very strange doings in the State of Jersey, which included a kangaroo-court sacking of the senior police officer (refer to that Guardian report) and subsequent serial “light-touch” court action and investigation. As Malcolm said elsewhere, Indeed, fishier than Grimsby dockside.

In the present snowstorm of allegations about child-abuse at high levels, this one cannot and should not be “vanished”

A passing thought

This one was meant to go up on New Year’s Day, however …

It’s too early after a heavy night for a pondered, even ponderous, piece.

Even so, as Malcolm stirred in the late morning light, his eye passed over the guilt pile of books read and — hence the guilt — part-read or even unread.

For a start, he has to admit that December has been poor month for reading. It wasn’t so much one of those chronic reading blocks, but there was so much else happening — two major expeditions occupying three weeks of the month. Even so, there’s shame that Ian Rankin’s latest was carted to New Jersey and back, and barely opened, so is still squatting on recent life and conscience like Larkin’s Toad.

Too heavy, already

No: that’s becoming far more intense than New Year’s Day deserves. And the household rubbish needs to be decanted for the imminent arrival of the dust-cart on Wednesday morning.

Instead, prompted by that glance at the bedside books, overhung Malcolm settles for a reflection on recent gains and losses.

On the down-side he would list two disappointments:

• Lindsey Davis’s Master and God.

Now Davis’s Falco series has been a long-term delight: light, bright and witty. Somehow when she turns elsewhere the magic fades. Yes, this fictionalising — and humanising — of the appalling Domitian is well-researched and well-plotted, even well-written. It somehow seems soul-less, even predictable: a trite love-story wrapped around with shenanigans and machinations.

The book reads well, but — for Malcolm — lacks any lingering of warmed satisfaction. Malcolm found himself wondering on that: why? what does one expect from a piece of disposable reading? in there is the difference between ‘writing’ and ‘literature’?

Perhaps it is that reaching the end of a book is, in itself, an achievement — both for the author and for the reader. When the ending is so predictable — one is well ahead of Gaius Vinius Clodianus, the central character with his anachronistic PTSD (Davis’s own usage), long before the denouement — that terminal satisfaction is denied. Something is missing, and so some satisfaction is lacking.

• Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise.

Here’s another one, to which much of that previous comment might equally apply.

The score-plus-one of the Brunetti sequence has to stand as one of the major monuments of crime-fiction. Joyce claimed that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses. Leon might similarly boast that the visitor’s Venice has continuing existence through those novels: Brunetti’s amblings and meanderings across and around  his native city catch the light, the glamour and the squalor, the glories and the underlying filth of La Serenissima. Ahem! Have you ever observed a diver emerge from the cess-pits beneath those well-photographed buildings?

In The Jewels of Paradise Leon attempts to construct a different protagonist in the same environment. When Maureen Corrigan was reviewing the book she hit the buttons:

It may take a few chapters beforeDonna Leon’s avid readers get over their disappointment in her latest mystery. All looks molto bene at first: Venetian setting? Check. Insider descriptions of Italian food and architecture? Check. Corrupt officials and brutal criminal bottom-feeders? Check, check.

Throughout 21 novels, Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti has investigated . . . Holy Cannoli, there’s no Commissario Brunetti in this story! A Donna Leon mystery without Brunetti, at first, feels empty, as though a mischievous god had pulled the plug on the canals.

“The Jewels of Paradise” is Leon’s first stand-alone mystery, and, while it is undeniably strange to be wandering through Venice without the protection of Brunetti’s solid presence …

Unfortunately Corrigan then allowed herself to be taken in by:

the young heroine of this novel … so winning that readers should find themselves forgiving the commissario his absence. Native Venetian Caterina Pellegrini holds a recently minted PhD in music, with a specialization in baroque opera.

Yes, but Ms Pellegrini is so thin, and the plot so trivial, the thing doesn’t quite hang together. The novel ends in a typical Leon wrap-it-up-and go away fashion. Yet, unlike the Brunettis, it seems rushed, anticlimactic … and unsatisfying. Unlike the Brunettis, Leon has allowed her deep knowledge of Italian opera to take over and stifle the plot for the less committed and less musicological. And the later Brunettis all come laden with a convincing social conscience: something missing here.

Perhaps, if Dr Leon allowed Ms Pellegrini another outing or two, we might come to love her more. At the end of The Jewels of Paradise she has been despatched to sub-arctic Russia, and — presumably — fictional oblivion.

On the other hand …

Malcolm would wish, at greater length, to celebrate two discoveries — well, to be more accurate, one discovery and a rediscovery.

The rediscovery is William Boyd.

It has been a long while, some half of Malcolm’s adult reading life, since A Good Man in Africa. Malcolm’s edition — alas! — is not that first edition (as right). To be honest, there are a couple of previous offences to be taken into consideration:

• that Malcolm assumed Boyd was touching, if not taking on the mantle of Evelyn Waugh;

and

• that Malcolm found Ordinary Thunderstorms a trifle tough on the tooth.

And then came the prior publicity for the BBC TV production of an (abbreviated) Restless. Fair enough: half-a-dozen years from publication to adaptation is a decent interval; but it does require a re-reading from days-gone-by. And, in the cold light of a reappraisal it is a very, very good book:  a convoluted plot and an easy-reading (but not sanitised) writing.

And so to Waiting for Sunrise. OK, Mr Boyd: you did for WW2 in one book: now it’s time for WW1, and what a delight! And what an enigmatic ending! Here’s another which would provide a decent production company, with access to early twentieth-century wardrobes, another two-parter. Just wait and watch.

Above, Malcolm suggested one of the satisfactions of a novel is simply reaching the designed end. So read Waiting for Sunrise and define your own end and ending. It’s remarkably tormenting and satisfying.

On which ambiguous note, let us pass on from the guilt pile … (of which, we will doubtless hear more).

And the discovery is …

Christopher Fowler’s delicious, delightful, sparky and seductive Bryant and Webb series. Take it from the horse’s mouth: it takes something for Malcolm to scour the bookshops of North London to complete the sequence. But he did … and felt better for it.

And the pick of a very plump litter, by the narrowest of margins, is Full Dark House.

Say no more: Fowler’s website does it for one and all.

Disclaimer:

This post has done great damage to many worthy and worthwhile reads Malcolm has enjoyed in 2012. And has overlooked here.

Well, Wells: what a reputation!

There was Malcolm, leafing idly through Daniel Defoe’s A Tour in Circuits, Through the Island of Great Britain, published 1724, but apparently a report of a peregrination in 1722 (and, with a bit of effort, available free on-line).

The work is arranged in epistolary form: “letters” about the different parts of the country. Defoe clearly warms to Norfolk:

Add to this, that there is no single county in England, except as above [i.e. the West Riding of Yorkshire], that can boast of three towns so populous, so rich, and so famous for trade and navigation, as in this county: By these three towns, I mean the city of Norwich, the towns of Yarmouth and Lynn; besides, that it has several other sea-ports of very good trade, as Wisbich, Wells, Burnham, Clye, &c.

We shall be this way again in a moment, but — for now — Malcolm noted the description of Norwich:

NORWICH is the capital of all the county, and the center of all the trade and manufactures which I have just mentioned; an antient, large, rich, and populous city: If a stranger was only to ride thro’ or view the city of Norwich for a day, he would have much more reason to think there was a town without inhabitants, than there is really to say so of Ipswich; but on the contrary, if he was to view the city, either on a Sabbath-day, or on any publick occasion, he would wonder where all the people could dwell, the multitude is so great: But the case is this; the inhabitants being all busie at their manufactures, dwell in their garrets at their looms, and in their combing-shops, so they call them, twisting-mills, and other work-houses; almost all the works they are employed in, being done within doors. There are in this city thirty-two parishes besides the cathedral, and a great many meeting-houses of Dissenters of all denominations. The publick edifices are chiefly the castle, antient and decayed, and now for many years past made use of for a jayl. The Duke of Norfolk’s house was formerly kept well, and the gardens preserved for the pleasure and diversion of the citizens, but since feeling too sensibly the sinking circumstances of that once glorious family, who were the first peers and hereditary earl-marshals of England.

The walls of this city are reckoned three miles in circumference, taking in more ground than the city of London; but much of that ground lying open in pasture-fields and gardens; nor does it seem to be, like some antient places, a decayed declining town, and that the walls mark out its antient dimensions; for we do not see room to suppose that it was ever larger or more populous than it is now: But the walls seem to be placed, as if they expected that the city would in time encrease sufficiently to fill them up with buildings.

Fair enough; but the real joy was to get to home turf:

From Cromer, we ride on the strand or open shoar to Weyburn Hope, the shoar so flat that in some places the tide ebbs out near two miles: From Weyburn west lyes Clye, where there are large salt-works, and very good salt made, which is sold all over the county, and some times sent to Holland, and to the Baltick: From Clye, we go to Masham, and to Wells, all towns on the coast, in each whereof there is a very considerable trade cary’d on with Holland for corn, which that part of the county is very full of: I say nothing of the great trade driven here from Holland, back again to England, because I take it to be a trade carryed on with much less honesty than advantage; especially while the clandestine trade, or the art of smuggling was so much in practice; what it is now, is not to my present purpose.

Masham? Presumably Morston. We also have a contribution to the age-old debate of “Clee, Clay or Clye” — presumably now settled, as Malcolm would expect, in favour of  the last variation.

As for the art of smuggling was so much in practice; what it is now, is not to my present purpose, we may fairly cock an eyebrow of derision. Defoe himself was not averse to a bit of fiddling when he could. He had established himself as an undercover man for William of Orange, but when the French wars bankrupted Defoe (he may have incurred debts of some £17,000 from failed tradings) he turned to the illegal stuff. He recovered his finances in part through Iberian wine imports, not all  of which were wholly declared.

Business as usual

It’s not unusual in North Norfolk for a house refurbishment to reveal a hidden closet. That is the clue to a previous occupant’s nefarious activities..

A few years back there was a small privately-published monograph, The Lawless Coast by Neil Holmes, sub-titled Smuggling, Anarchy and Murder in North Norfolk in the 1780s. Holmes’s starting point is St Mary the Virgin at Old Hunstanton, where one finds the memorial stone to two soldiers:

In memory of William Webb, late of the 15th D’ns, who was shot from his Horse by a party of Smugglers on the 26 of Sepr. 1784 
I am not dead but sleepeth here, 
And when the Trumpet Sound I will appear 
Four balls thro’ me Pearced there way: 
Hard it was. I’d no time to pray 
This stone that here you Do see 
My Comerades Erected for the sake of me. 
Here lie the mangled remains of poor William Green, an Honest Officer of the Government, who in the faithful discharge of his duty was inhumanely murdered by a gang of Smugglers in this Parish, September 27th, 1784.

Despite such fine sentiments, two smugglers captured by officialdom were then acquitted by the local jury, in the face of all the evidence.

At Wells there was the classic 1817 encounter — as dramatic as anything in Moonfleet — when John Dunn, the caporegime of Stiffkey, arranged an illicit landing to coincide with a race meeting on the beach.

In passing, could he be perpetuated in the Norfolk doggerel? —

There was old Dunn, young Dunn,
And young Dunn’s youngest son.
Young Dunn will be a Dunn
When old Dunn is done.

Boom! Boom!

The excisemen (there was a detachment based in Wells) were on hand to meet and greet Dunn’s tubs coming ashore, but they were heavily outnumbered. Major Charles Loftus of the yeomanry was in the crowd and recruited to cobble together reinforcements in a mounted charge. Dunn and his gang, with the support of the mass of local folk,  got away with all but half-a-dozen of the barrels.

At Snettisham, in 1822, eighty tubs were landed and seized by the excisemen. Armed with bludgeons and fowling pieces, a mob of locals liberated the contraband, which was swiftly whisked away down the old Peddars Way.

So what was the business?

Tobacco, Geneva gin and … tea. Anything taxed that was in demand, portable and packable.

You may see the old strake of an old barrel, or a bit of well-corroded metal hoop, emerging from the sand-dunes. Scorn them not: it is possible you are seeing a bit of the evidence.

Only when intelligence — the electric telegraph — beat local initiative was the trade constrained but, as recent high-value hauls, mainly of cigarettes — and by legend of human cargoes — have shown, not eliminated.

Recall, too, that once the quiet town of Wells had a reputation for wrecking, violence and cruelty unmatched along the North Norfolk coast:

Cromer crabs, Runton dabs,
Beeston babies, Sherinum’ ladies,
Weybourne witches, Salt’us ditches.
Blak’ney bulldogs, Morston dodmen,
Binham bulls, Stiffkey trolls,
— Wells bitefingers.

How to distort “news”

The Daily Mail is a low-down, dishonest, corrupting Tory rag — and needs constantly to be exposed for that. Fortunately, the Mail itself does so on a daily basis. Its whole existence is predicated to the Big Lie:

… the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Malcolm deliberately disguises the source of that quotation, lest it fall foul of Godwin’s Law.

Today’s front page is a magnificent example of the Big Lie:

The essence of the Mail piece is:

Prescott loses police commissioner poll in his own back yard of Hull to a TORY

Except the election wasn’t just for Hull: it was for the whole Humberside Constabulary area. Here is the difference:

The political complexion, as of 2010, of the parliamentary constituencies of Humberside looks very skewed:

Ten constituencies, five Tory, five Labour, which might seem an even balance. The County seats all Tory: the Borough seats tending Labour, as one might expect. A closer look at the numbers suggests the Humberside area is safe Tory country: David Davis’s Haltemprice and Howden is regarded as the second safest Tory constituency in Britain, and has never deviated from that loyalty since 1837.

Add up the 2010 results and we have 40.8% Tory, 34.2% Labour and 25% Lib Dem:

Now consider Thursday’s results of the Police and Crime Commissioner election (though Malcolm never did get the hang of how to ‘commission’ crime):

Accepting that Prescott lost on the Second Round (39,933 to 42,164 or a 48.6/51.4% two-party split), on that first count:

• Prescott caned the Tory — it is, in crude terms, a four or five per cent swing (and it has to be accepted that the “county” types turned out far, far better than the urbanites);
• the Tory vote went AWOL, barely squeaking in ahead of the independent — even the egregious Godfrey Bloom (surely one of the more disreputable and bizarre UKIP types, which itself is saying something) splitting off a sixth of the total poll;
• the Tory candidate was only rescued — just — on that second round by rolling up the odds-and-sods vote: those 19,375 who did express a second preference split for the Tory 2:1;
• the Lib Dems were totally creamed: even proportionately, more than a third of their vote evaporated.

For the record, Paul Davison — who ran that close third —  is an ex-Police Superintendent, and probably the best qualified of all the candidates.

The real determinant was tthe total failure of second preference transfers (which, as every aficionado of Irish politics knows, is key to the whole operation). Only 27% of the odds-and-sods ballots bothered to make a second preference. That is either a failure of voter education or a clear statement by a majority to vote “neither of the above”. 51,665 second preferences did not go for either the Labour or the Tory in the final run-off — which amounts to an absolute majority of those who turned out. We should not forget the “alternative vote” was the preferred option in the Great Constitutional Débâcle of 5th May 2011. If we needed concrete evidence that AV is a sham, and no substitute for proper proportional representation, here is the concrete evidence.

Yet the Daily Mail says it was all about Prescott, and the Daily Mail is a dishonourable rag.

And the Daily Mail says it was all about the city of Hull, and nothing to do with the other lands north and south of the estuary, and, for sure, the Daily Mail is a dishonourable lie-sheet.