Pride of our alley?

Let Malcolm start with two confessions:

1. Yesterday’s Sunday papers got short shrift, mainly because of that long liquid lunch at Ye Olde Cherry Tree, a decent meal well lubricated with St Austell’s Proper Job.
2. He is distinctly ambivalent about the Bercows. Obviously, since John Bercow as Speaker gets up the noses of so many Tories, he cannot be entirely a bad thing. He seems to do the business; but doesn’t cut it along with the recent great Speakers of recent memory: say, Bernard Weatherill (recently the star of James Graham’s This House at the Cottesloe) and Betty Boothroyd (a great hoofer, never out-shone by anyone). As for wife Sally, well, she does seem a trifle OTT.

And it is of Sally Bercow of whom we now speak.

The story so far:

Back in the darkening days of last autumn a frisson ran through the British political establishment. Some well-rehearsed ‘revelations’ from decades gone by, about paedophile rings in high places, bubbled to the surface of the settlement pit. One particular name involved was McAlpine. Unfortunately two McAlpine cousins, “Jimmie” and Lord Alastair, were confused by the media, including the BBC (who later paid McAlpine £185,000 for the mistake).

In the course of which Sally Bercow tweeted:

Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*

The noble Lord McAlpine (believed to be down to his last ten million) then set about cleaning up. He issued writs for libel against all and sundry, collecting large sums of moolah in the process:  the Guardian columnist George Monbiot coughed; and comedian Alan Davies is supposed to be down for £200,000. McAlpine then generously desisted from cleaning out the bank-accounts of lesser beings, making a special, public and explicit exception of Sally Bercow’s seven words and ornamental punctuation.

Sally, blessed her little convoluted heart, stood up to the bullying. Yesterday’s Sunday Times reminded us how things went from there:

The libel case is centred on whether Bercow’s tweet was defamatory. A key issue will be the level of innuendo implied by the use of asterisks in her comment. Such punctuation represents the mimicking of a physical action by the user.

Hold on!  There is a precedent for this, which — at first, even second sight — seems to contradict the old maxim de minimis non curat lex. When English law wants to, it could — as with Roger Casement, hang a man on a comma.

Back to the Sunday Times:

At a High Court hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for McAlpine, 70, will ask for permission for the case to be split into two parts: one to determine the meaning of the tweet, and a second, if required, to award damages. The peer is seeking up to £50,000.

If the case goes against her, Bercow fears a two-part trial will drag proceedings on for months, with legal costs likely to overtake damages. This is why she is thought to want a full trial to be heard in one go.

Bercow has instructed solicitors at Carter-Ruck on a no-win, no-fee basis and is believed to have taken out insurance to cover costs of up to £100,000 should she lose.

She will be represented in court by William McCormick, QC, a defamation and privacy expert whose previous clients have included Sir Elton John.

McAlpine’s barrister is Sir Edward Garnier, a Tory MP and former solicitor-general.

Andrew Reid, of the RPMI firm of solicitors, who is also representing the peer, said, “It is very disappointing that Mrs Bercow still wants her day in court. But there is a huge public interest in this. The sooner the meaning of what she said is settled, the greater the benefit to the public at large.”

Focus, if you will, on that last quoted paragraph.

What does it mean?

• One plain insinuation is that plutocrats, who can afford the bill for the thrill of the chase, might mulct lesser creatures through just a threat of action. But the lesser being is not supposed to use the proper legal remedy of “a day in court”. Of course, with verbose senior barristers involved, the chances of this being settled in a “day” are precisely zilch. Scattering writs like confetti was patented by such low-lifes as Robert Maxwell, to the great profit of his tame lawyers, who have refined the operation ever since.
• Second, McAlpine’s lawyers would clearly prefer not to have all that embarrassing “huge public interest”. Not in front of the serviles …
• Partisan politics, and a bully’s need to humiliate, seems a major contributory factor.
• As for “benefit to the public at large”, any sensitive and sensible mind boggles. We have here another of the myriad attempts by those with power to throttle and constrain each and every twitch, tweet and twaddle of the social media. Underlings’ sympathy for La Bercow derives from the good British principle of nil carborundum.
• The moral superiority of Lord McAlpine fades when we recall he was on the take, albeit on behalf of Thatcher’s Tory Party, from the likes of Asil Nadir. His love-of-country amounts to being a non-dom. His family firm, the construction giant McAlpine, made vast sums from Tory policies, and also operated the notorious black-list: since McAlpine started his career with the firm as a clock-watcher and pay-clerk on the South Bank site, his distance from victimizations cannot have been too great.

One last thought …

This Sunday Times piece was illustrated by yet another from a photo-shoot of Lord McAlpine cruising (make of that word what you will) around Venice.

The chequered suit and a gaudy tie, guaranteed to bar any on-course bookie from frightening the horses, tells us all we need to know. This present image, arms propped on true-blue umbrella, Rialto Bridge and moon-faced cheesy half-grin to the fore, mushy-peas Grand Canal beyond, is the latest, and even least appealing of the sequence.  Even Sally Bercow, in her more flirtatious and ill-advised moments didn’t sink that low.

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.

The rustle of spring (and twelve notes)

Confession time.

The only time Malcolm had his licence endorsed (it was long before penalty points) it was the fault of Spring.

The first warm day of mid-March, and heading between the Lee Valley reservoirs towards Forest Road to work. A 250cc two-stoke thumper, made in what was still the GDR (decent bike, appalling original tyres, gear train made of solid butter — but all easily changed). A lorry plodding along, blocking the way. A clear road ahead. Flick right, twist the throttle, and go for it. Straight into a radar trap.

They reckoned it was 47 mph in a 30 mph zone. Malcolm was disappointed — he reckoned it was way, way over 50. Pled guilt by post and paid twelve quid.

Spring it on me

And now, some good news:

Experts within the Met Office have revealed that a change in global weather systems, with the power to affect human and even animal behaviour, will soon have the entire British Isles in its grip. An early spring warning has been issued.

It gets better:

The Department of Energy and Climate Change believes that global weather patterns are deepening the effect of spring as the planet gets warmer. On its website, it is warning that 2013 could see one of the most extreme springs for several decades.

The problem with this particular natural crisis, say the experts, is that it tends to take people by surprise. With previous weather alarms, there were measures which could be taken – hosepipe bans, road gritters or sandbags. The slower, more insidious menace of spring-related weather tends to be much more difficult to combat.

What exactly are the dangers? According to the Met Office spokesman, spring can often have a major mood-changing effect on the vulnerable. “Anything can set it off,” he says. “It can be daffodils, or the sight of a swallow, maybe even rabbits climbing on top of each other. Suddenly, people are no longer quite the way they were. They talk to strangers, make unprovoked eye contact, sing in the street, lie down on damp grass. All sorts of inappropriate touching can sometimes take place. One of the problems with spring behaviour is that there’s no logical pattern to it.”

Seems a far better, far more convincing defence than “marital coercion” (though Malcolm can tell a tale or two …).

“Your Honour: I plead extenuating circumstances. It was the daffodils made me do it!”

You’re either in front of Guido or …

One that got away?

Malcolm Redfellow says:

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

February 4, 2013 at 11:04 am

**** More to come!! ***

What the guilty plea means is that the “other issue” of Constance (née Clare) Briscoe remains under those deep legal wraps.

Fawkes knows (and can’t say).

Iain Dale knows (and won’t say).

It falls to lesser breeds without the law to make helpful suggestions.

It should have appeared round about comments number 102 and 103.

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.

That old Chinese curse

Be careful for what you wish: you may get it.

There was a cartoon, probably from as far back as the 1970s, when it was considered ‘cool’ to shoulder a Brixton briefcase (a.k.a. jam box, ghetto blaster, boom box — other offences to be taken into consideration).

The cartoon showed a couple passing an electronics shop window. Written across the window-pane are the shrieking come ons:

• 18 wave-bands!
• 2 cassettes!
• 4 loud-speakers!
• 34 transistors!
• 37 diodes!

He is obviously taken by this modern marvel.

She caustically enumerates: ‘I reckon that’s 95 things to go wrong’.

Similarly …

Cynics, such as Malcolm, hugged themselves with delighted anticipation when the incoming ConDem government rattled off all the ‘improvements’, ‘reforms’, ‘changes’ and old-fashioned messing-about they intended to inflict on the political system. It was instantly obvious that a fair proportion would go madly, sadly, badly wrong.

Here, courtesy of Nigel Morris at the Independent, comes such another:

MPs dismayed by ‘total chaos’ of £42m lost in translation

A drive to save money on court interpreters degenerated into “total chaos” yet the firm responsible for the shambles was only fined a “risible” £2,200, a withering report by MPs has found.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is facing deep embarrassment after the Public Accounts Committee accused it of presiding over an “object lesson in how not to contract out a public service”. Its chairman, Margaret Hodge, said: “Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

The farce began when the ministry decided to set up a centralised system for supplying interpreters for trials instead of allowing courts to hire them on ad-hoc basis.

It awarded the £42m contract to a small new company, ALS, despite warnings that it could only handle business on a fraction of that scale.

There is, of course, a silver lining in any cloud:

Dragons’ warning

Gavin Wheeldon appeared on the BBC2 entrepreneur show Dragons’ Den to appeal for financial support for his translation business ALS five years ago. The dragons predicted success for him – but told him his valuation of his company was wrong. Whitehall, however, had no such qualms in handing a £42m contract to the firm.

Last year, Mr Wheeldon earned £7.5m when he sold up to Capita, with more to come if ALS achieves certain financial targets.

Ah! Crapita! What can possibly go wrong now?

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.

Daily bread

Yesterday morning, Malcolm sat musing on the day ahead, munching toast and marmalade.

The bread wrapper caught his eye. It boasts:

“This loaf is made to the same recipe my father created 40 years ago. With 100% wholemeal flour, it’s not only full of goodness, it tastes great too.”

Jonathan Warburton. 

Isn’t tradition a wonderful thing!

Except forty years takes us back to the 1970s, to Wonderloaf and Mother’s Pride, hardly the acme of British bread-making.

When Malcolm mentioned just that to the Lady in his Life, she capped it with a thought of her own, all the way from a Portadown playground:

If you eat Jim Davison’s bread
It sticks to your belly like lead
So it’s not a bit of wonder
That you fart like thunder
When you eat Jim Davison’s bread.

That’s pushing tradition back even further. The Davison Brothers had a bakery on the corner of Obins Street and Park Road, and were delivering locally with horse-drawn vans down to the 1930s. By then the big Belfast bakers were muscling in with advertising and mass-production (and, just possibly, a bit of black propaganda through skipping games).

The present big name in Portadown baking is Irwin’s, which started as a small craft bakery behind the grocery shop in Woodhouse Street. It has now expanded and taken over the old William Clow Mill, with its products a regular feature in supermarkets across Britain.

What Malcolm cannot get through his local supermarket is a decent potato farl, by Irwin’s or anyone else. Such an item may not appear on a healthy English breakfast table. For, as Malcolm’s good-living, jogging, cycling son-in-law described an Ulster fry breakfast: death by cholesterol.

Farls?

Time, once more, to educate the ignorant Saxons.

It’s a Scottish word, it seems, a survival of Old English: féorða dǽl, which as eny fule kno [© Nigel Molesworth] is a “fourth part”. Quartered logs provided Hamlet with his soliloquised image:

When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life …

At this stage in the post, you may well appreciate how the automatic spellcheck messes with Malcolm’s erudition.

Nookes, yards and mutchkins

Still, sticking with fardels, they were also a land measure.

Back around 1624, Charles I’s Attorney General, William Noye told us, in his Complete Lawyer (that such a wonder should exist!):

 Two Fardells of Land make a Nooke of Land, and two Nookes make halfe a Yard of Land.

Noye was a Cornishman, made good, and this fardel/farl usage seems to have persisted mainly in the remoter fastnesses of Britain, well beyond where the M25 girdles decent society, sophistication, and civilisation.

We might, in passing, acknowledge Robert Wodrow, in The history of the sufferings of the Church of Scotland, from the Restauration to the Revolution, reporting William Sutherland buying himself:

… a Farthel of Bread and a Mutckin of Ale.

Mutchkin? Another word that deserves revival: “a measure equal to an English pint” say some. The OED is magisterial:

A measure of capacity for liquids and for dry substances of a powdery or granular nature, such as salt, equal to a quarter of a Scottish pint or roughly three quarters of an imperial pint (0.43 litres); a vessel containing this amount. Occas.: an imperial pint, esp. as a measure for spirits.

More to the point, in days when beer most usually came in quarts, and a three-bottle-man was not unduly remarkable, the term implies “a small amount”.

Literary farls

The common farl makes a couple of appearances in the canon. Malcolm checks them off:

• Robert Burns has this in The Holy Fair:

Here farmers gash, in ridin graith,
Gaed hoddin by their cotters;
There swankies young, in braw braid-claith,
Are springing owre the gutters.
The lasses, skelpin barefit, thrang,
In silks an’ scarlets glitter;
Wi’ sweet-milk cheese, in mony a whang,
An’ farls, bak’d wi’ butter,
Fu’ crump that day.

Don’t expect a full exegesis if that now: suffice it to say that Burns is in full-on irony mode. His sub-title was Hypocrisy-a-la-mode, and he contrasts the holy-day gathering, with its parade of eminent preachers, and folk out on a Bacchanalian, anything-goes, over-the-top, indulgent holiday outing. Somewhat closer to William Hogarth than Billy Graham. The vocabulary, and much of the imagery, precludes the ballad from a school-text book.

• Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and its contemporary popularity was the basis for Donizetti’s now-better known opera. It was one of two Scott novels published together in 1819 as the third instalment of Tales of My Landlord. This other episode is the story of a love triangle, set in Montrose’s campaign against the Covenanters and Civil War period, A Legend of Montrose. Sadly, Scott is out of fashion; but — should one wish — there, at the end of Chapter III we find our farl:

“Do so, Captain,” said Lord Menteith; “you will have the night to think of it, for we are now near the house, where I hope to ensure you a hospitable reception.”

“And that is what will be very welcome,” said the Captain, “for I have tasted no food since daybreak but a farl of oatcake, which I divided with my horse. So I have been fain to draw my sword-belt three bores tighter for very extenuation, lest hunger and heavy iron should make the gird slip.”

When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done …

… A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.

— William Schwenck Gilbert for The Pirates of Penzance.

• The picture (right) is the baritone Walter Passmore of the original production.
• The song was a favourite among London coppers, at least down to the mid-twentieth century. Malcolm heard it from his own (ex-PC) father’s lips.

Now that the dust settles on the dismal Plebgate business, now that Andrew Mitchell, a former UN peacemaker,  can polish his bike in peace, there’s still the odd bit of gristle to be chewed.

As we saw in yesterday’s Sindy, John Rentoul has come over all fair-minded:

I thought Cameron made a mistake in not insisting that Mitchell step down straight away. Which is not the same as saying that I thought Mitchell deserved to resign. Indeed, I thought he was more sinned against than sinning. Being told that it is “policy” to wheel your bicycle through the pedestrian gate is monstrous anti-cyclist discrimination (and jobsworthism of the highest order). Losing your temper and swearing at a police officer is a sin, obviously, but it may not be a crime. The Court of Appeal quashed a conviction last year, ruling that police officers are used to hearing the f-word, which is “rather commonplace”, and that it was unlikely to cause them “harassment, alarm or distress”. It was the police who, in breach of their rules, gave the story to The Sun.

OK … yawn … let’s move on …

Well, perhaps not. Put aside the “rather commonplace” adverbial reinforcer, and what are we still left with?

So, let’s play it again:

“You guys are supposed to [ … ] help us.”

Consider who are “you” and who are “us”

“You” are, most immediately, the security at the Downing Street gates. In Mitchell’s mind they are there mainly to open the main gates to let him pass through: that is the beginning and end of this little demonstration of why we’re “not all in this together”.

The police officers see their role a trifle differently, indeed from a more elevated level. They are there to keep the peace, to maintain security, and to protect the entire citizenry, who may include elected politicians.

Beyond the immediate police detachment, Mitchell may be claiming ownership and the dedicated aid and assistance of the entire Metropolitan Police, and by further extension of the police service nationally. At which, Malcolm mutters, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.“

We have been here before

Just how far political (i.e. Thatcherite) intervention went in the aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy may be just about arguable. We do know that Thatcher herself was closeted with South Yorkshire police chief a day or so before 164 police statements were re-written to fit the “official” script.

And now:

A Nottinghamshire MP is to call for an inquiry into alleged manipulation of evidence by South Yorkshire Police during the miners’ strike.

John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, said claims made in a BBC Inside Out programme relating to the so-called Battle of Orgreave must be examined.

The claims, that junior officers were told what to write in their statements, were “very convincing”, said Mr Mann.

South Yorkshire Police said it would consider whether a review was needed.

What we know is that the cases against arrested miners were built on false evidence, as after Hillsborough:

… a barrister specialising in criminal trials, Mark George QC, analysed 40 police officers’ Orgreave statements, and found that many contained identical descriptions of alleged disorder by the miners. To prove the offence of riot, the prosecution has to establish a scene of general disorder within which a defendant committed a particular act, for example throwing a stone, which would otherwise carry a much lesser charge.

George found that 34 officers’ statements, supposed to have been compiled separately, used the identical phrase: “Periodically there was missile throwing from the back of the pickets.”

One paragraph, of four full sentences, was identical word for word in 22 separate statements. It described an alleged charge by miners, including the phrase: “There was however a continual barrage of missiles.”

Michael Mansfield QC, who defended three of the acquitted miners, described South Yorkshire police’s evidence then as “the biggest frame-up ever”.

One case, against Bryan Moreland, spectacularly collapsed when a Home Office graphologist went on oath to declare the police officer’s signature was a fabrication. Moreover:

[Chief Constable] Wright did not accept any fault at all in the Orgreave operation and prosecutions. But he acknowledged unapologetically that there was a deliberate effort to convict miners of riot and unlawful assembly, which carried potentially long, even life, prison sentences. In a report to the police committee dated 25 September 1985, Wright set out the details of the operation to deal, he said, with escalating violence in picketing at the Orgreave coking plant, which miners have always argued was exaggerated.

“The chief constable decided that the usual charge of disorderly conduct, contrary to the Public Order Act, was inadequate and that, where appropriate, charges of unlawful assembly and riot should be preferred,” Wright wrote in his report.

We’ll be back to continue that in a moment. So far, the bottom line seems to be: in Thatcher’s day, the police — at least those of the South Yorkshire force — were  supposed to [ … ] help us. We have that on the authority of the Baroness herself:

There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it. They are failing because of two things.

First, because of the magnificent police force well trained for carrying out their duties bravely and impartially (loud cheers).

And secondly, because the overwhelming majority of people in this country are honourable, decent and law abiding and want the law to be upheld and will not be intimidated, and I pay tribute to the courage of those who have gone into work through these picket lines, to the courage of those at Ravenscraig and Scunthorpe for not going to be intimidated out of their jobs and out of their future. Ladies and Gentlemen we need the support of everyone in this battle which goes to the very heart of our society. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.

Which should all be read with implicit and emphatic first-person pronouns: My impartiality. My police. My intimidation. My law. My rules. To get her cheering audience, Thatcher had to make that speech at Banbury Cattle Market, in one of the safest Tory seats in the country.

Any blame for all this politicising of the police goes right (far right) to the top. The poor bloody constabulary were told, even ordered to submit their notebooks for editing by Chekisty and commissars. That is no obscene exaggeration: it was the way things were done in South Yorkshire under Chief Constable Wright (and so we continue from that earlier quotation):

He set up a dedicated unit to target the miners: “A chief superintendent well experienced in CID work was appointed and directed by the chief constable to organise the collection and collation of evidence, and the preparation of prosecution files whenever the scale and nature of events at Orgreave so required.”

On 18 June 1984, the day of the most notorious confrontation, when police were filmed attacking miners then claimed they were attacked first, Wright recorded: “The evidence-gathering team comprised one detective inspector, one detective sergeant, and four detective constables.” It has never been revealed who these officers or the more senior commanding officers were, nor if any were then involved in what has been labelled the black propaganda unit which conducted the campaign to falsely blame the Liverpool supporters for the Hillsborough disaster.

For the record, at that time young Andrew Mitchell was girding his loins and polishing his bicycle clips to become a devoutly Thatcherite Tory MP for the Gedling constituency of Greater Nottingham, not a million miles from the core territory of the strike-breakers.

And now for “us”

If  ’You guys are supposed to [ … ] help us’, let us consider the precise definition of us in this context.

At first sight it might be the us of the government. Yet that doesn’t quite comprehend Mitchell’s position. After all, the Chief Whip  is the one senior occupant of Downing Street who is there primarily as the Gauleiter of the majority parliamentary party. Cue wikipedia:

In British politics, the Chief Whip of the governing party in the House of Commons is usually appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury so that the incumbent, who represents the whips in general, has a seat and a voice in the Cabinet. By virtue of holding the office of Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the Government Chief Whip has an official residence at 12 Downing Street. However, the Chief Whip’s office is currently located at 9 Downing Street.

To be clear, we do not have a ‘governing party’ in this parliament. We are saddled with a coalition. There are two Deputy Chief Whips, of whom one is Alistair Carmichael of the LibDems, who does not have bicycling access to Downing Street. When the Chief Whip speaks in the Commons (and, by tradition, such occasions are few and far between), it is specifically in a party-political context.

So Chief Whip Mitchell (as was) was a Conservative Party official demanding obedience from his subservient lesser-beings. Whether the term he used was “plebs” or “plods”, he was claiming l’état, c’est moi.

That is far, far more damaging than any fucking adverb.

Corduroy

A while back Malcolm took time out to extol the writing of Ronald Blythe. Even further back a Blythe essay, The Salutary Tale of Jix, got a mention. Both came to mind because of yet another of those synchronicities.

First, Ferdinand Mount (who provoked that thought of Blythe last February) was at it again: this time in last week’s Spectator:

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield — his 1969 bestseller about a fictional Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966 — exposed quite how back-breakingly grim country life was for most farmworkers, like his own father, a Gallipoli veteran.

The essay on former Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks came to mind when Theresa May went political over the non-extradition of young Master McKinnon:

Speaking in Parliament this afternoon, Home Secretary Theresa May confirmed that she would halt Mr McKinnon’s extradition because it would be “incompatible with his human rights”. The 46-year-old suffers from Aspergers Syndrome and depression and his supporters have warned that he would be at risk of suicide if he was held overseas. After seeking medical and legal advice, the Mrs May has concluded that Mr McKinnon would not be fit to stand trial in the United States. Instead it will be up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide whether a trial should be conducted in the UK.

Mrs May’s decision is controversial because only two weeks earlier the government approved the extradition of Talha Ahsan, a south Londoner accused of running a jihadi website who also suffered Aspergers. Mr Ahsan’s family believe the decision on Mr McKinnon was deliberately delayed until after Talha had been extradited.

While all pale-pink liberals might feel that McKinnon deserved this amount of absolution, Mrs May is not out of the woods yet. Indeed she has made political what ought to have been purely-and-simply a judicial matter. She shot; she scored:

Betfair has slashed the odds of the Home Secretary becoming the next Conservative leader from 23/1 to 14/1.

In the bad old days, Tory Home Secretaries sent men to the gallows in search of applause from the Tory back-benches. Now, in these softer times, it merely involves cocking snooks at the US system of true “separation of powers”. Oh, and kicking at Europe does no harm either (except to UK citizens who might find themselves in a Bulgarian prison cell, or worse, with no hope of extradition).

However, back to more pleasant topics.

There was yet another reason why Malcolm felt affinity with Ferdy Mount’s enthusiasm for Blythe. It was the Suffolk connection, and a direct link from Blythe’s cottage to its former occupant.

Let’s start in the Fulham Road

Last Friday morning, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm had taken a dander down to Chelsea, to view Thomas Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row. The Carlyle’s moved here in 1834, and it became a focal point of the literary and cultural scene.

It is quite extraordinary to walk into the parlour and see it authentically reproducing Robert Tait’s painting from 1857:

From there we climb up this modest home, through domestic intimacies, all the way to Carlyle’s remarkable study in the attic (complete with Victorian sliding roof-light). Two hours well-spent, not excluding the basement kitchen and walled-garden.

Then to lunch.

A few days back a columnist responded to the question of what long-married couples still find to talk about on holiday. The answer was “Where shall we lunch?” followed by “Where shall we have dinner?”. Malcolm sadly acknowledges a germ of truth in that.

Friday’s lunch was in the Fulham Road, very pleasantly but virtually in solitary state.

That, however, wasn’t the point to which Malcolm is driving. It is that the restaurant was only a few doors away from the branch of Daunt Books. And, finally, we have reached Malcolm’s point. The Lady took away a worthy novel in hardback. Malcolm’s single purchase was more modest: a delicious reprint of Adrian Bell’s Corduroy from 1930.

Once upon a long-gone time Malcolm had the trilogy: Corduroy, Silver Ley (1931), and  The Cherry Tree (1932) — moreover, they were Faber hardbacks (though not, sadly, first edition). One or more may still be lurking in the attic of Redfellow Hovel — however, when Malcolm re-shelved his books some years back the ‘non-fiction’ (i.e. everything that wasn’t a novel) went on the end-wall. History was the middle five shelves. Poetry below that. Drama the next two. Guide-books et al. on the bottom. Sorted alphabetically, and reaching high above this lot, was everything else. So Bell, Adrian would be right at the top: in the very apex of the attic, sixteen shelves high. It seemed a good idea at the time.

The guilt-pile by-passed

At midnight last night, after relishing and digesting every paragraph, Malcolm reached page 287, and last. That chimed well with Bell ensconced in his ‘Silverly Farm’, acquired — as is traditional for these exchanges — at Michaelmas, just the day before:

I walked with a lantern to my small farm across the fields. Darky and Dewdrop [his two recently-acquired horses] peered at me over the wall of the yard. The night air refreshed me, and I felt far from sleep. I lit my lamp and opened my new account-book at the first page.

A grounding in Suffolk

The story (really a simple, but beautifully-linked chain of reminiscence) involves the author’s year of apprenticeship at ‘Farley Hall, Benfield St George’, Mr Colville’s farm in Suffolk. This is the faintest fictionalising of Mr Savage of Bradfield St George, just outside Bury St Edmunds (which Bell renders as ‘Stambury’).

In the course of the year, the young Bell experiences the whole cycle of the farming year, growing physically, mentally and constitutionally away from the sophistication and “elegance” of his family home in Battersea and into the boots and corduroy (a subtle motif throughout) of rural Suffolk. At Christmas (Bell went to Suffolk only in October) he is already conscious of the distance he has travelled:

I returned home to London, to a world of narrow sky and no darkness, to find the old life half strange already. My brown Sunday boots, in which I motorcycled home, once again seemed uncouth there, and I was asked to change them, as they would ruin the carpets. These ‘gentleman’s’ boots!

I re-entered a world of nervous significance, where the very furniture was a complex language, and a piece placed so had, to some perceptions acute as Bob’s for weather signs, the subtle rightness of a mot juste. This world fearful of mud splashes, that yet breathed grimy air ( remembered the threshing-men grappling muddy iron while they breathed air like well-water); a world of hurtful probing into personality.

I noticed most keenly the brilliance of electric light after oil lamps, and the absence of anything worn, or uneven, or over-grown. Interiors had the illusory quality of flashed scenes of midnight storm. In fact, the whole Christmas sojourn had a flashed effect, flat and unrooted, with people gesturing and smiling as in a charade. I was called with ‘Giles’ or ‘Hodge’ , and treated to enquiries of ‘Ow be thou mangel wurzels?’ Either that or I was a courageous self-emancipator, the wind whistling through my hair.

Said one, ‘How splendid to be free of dress formalities; hats, for instance.’

‘But I always wear a hat,’ I replied.

Malcolm recalls — just barely — north Norfolk before electricity arrived, and with it mains drainage (try the latter without the former to power sewer pumps). Even then, out of the towns, darkness could be absolute: he also recalls a terrifying moment, circa 1961, frost-bitten, near Sutton Bridge in the Fens. The persistent sleeting drizzle had shorted out the electrics of his aged Lambretta. The only glimmers in the entire universe were the faintly-red-glowing fuse-cover on the handlebars, a horizon smudged with the lights of King’s Lynn far away across the tundra, and a car’s headlamps approaching out of the far distance.

Bury St Edmunds? I didn’t know he was dead!

To a younger generation, who have never fully known such dark, such silence, Adrian Bell’s memories — where sweated and frozen human strength and dexterity still mastered the yet-to-be-mechanised land — must be totally alien. Even so, his description of ‘Stambury’, is instantly recognisable:

At the end of the town opposite to that at which the cattle-market was situated were the ruins of a great abbey, a memory of old ecclesiastical significance. Public gardens had been laid out within the walls. They were deserted today. I walked the lawns under bare boughs tranced to the stillness of stone in the frosty air. Shattered arches stood yup lonely from the grass. A door stood open in an enclosure of ruined wall. I looked in, and found a gardener there sweeping up the last leaves. It had been a family burial-place, he said. ‘The mossyleum, they call it.’ He looked around. ‘There ain’t much moss here now, but doubt less there was at one time.’

At the end of the garden a river ran, and a monk’s bridge spanned it. All this was in grave contrast to the bustle of market-day beyond the walls.

The tufted abbey walls flanked one side of a sloping space, called (on account of the inn that stood opposite) Angel Hill. As I passed out of the gardens a traction-engine stood fuming before the gate-tower, with a timber-drug sent to deal with a fallen tree within. here was a dragon which the blunt-nosed saints in the niches confronted with holy calm.

That, in the late 1960s, was Malcolm’s daily walk to his teaching, at the Grammar School, just across that monk’s bridge.

Number One daughter now regularly flies, business class, from New York to Houston, India, Hong Kong and places east and west, in her daily profession. Once, though, she was perambulated, to be christened at St Mary’s, on Honey Hill, which turns left at the end of Angel Hill. She nearly got born in the bar of the Suffolk Hotel (but that’s another story), which stood on the corner of the Buttermarket:

The chief shopping-place of the day was the Old Butter Market. Here beef and pork and poultry were turned by the alchemy of the coin to feminine adornments, tobacco, silks, and scents. here wives and daughters strolled.

So, you see, Malcolm has unfinished business. He needs the other volumes of Adrian Bell’s trilogy. Can he scale those attic heights? Were he to do so, would he find Bell, Adrian?

Only then can he tackle Carlyle and Sartor Resartus  — which for those denied a classical education means, The tailor re-tailored, and might bring us back to Bell’s problems with  ‘gentleman’s’ boots and unfashionable, sturdy, agricultural corduroy.