http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/sep/05/michael-mansfield-interview
His career has shadowed recent history from striking miners and the
Diana crash to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. So at 67, is
the barrister Michael Mansfield still fighting the establishment?
Aida Edemariam
5 September 2009
The last time he was considering a retreat from the bar, about 12
years ago, Michael Mansfield wrote a novel. Shamelessly inspired by
John Grisham, it was about a plane crash over London and a reluctant
lawyer hired by the victims' relatives to take on the establishment
(the secret services, the Thatcher government) and find out exactly
what happened. It was never published an indissoluble difference of
opinion with Random House, says the QC; "I wanted it to be
fundamentally a political novel" and he went back to full-time
lawyering, and eventually non-fiction.
This time he's written a memoir, a "collage of recollections and
reminiscences" where almost every case (chosen, he writes, to
highlight a particular legal issue), seems to follow a similar arc:
crime, miscarriage of justice/cover-up/whitewash, then Mansfield
taking on the establishment, generally in the form of the police, but
also forensic scientists, intelligence officers. Lockerbie gets only
one brief mention in the book he was an observer at the first
appeal, rather than a participant before being subsumed into an
anecdote about varicose veins and vanity; but when we meet at Tooks,
the chambers he established in 1984, there is no disguising his
interest in the transfer to Libya of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. So keen
is he to draw his particular line in the sand, in fact, that I begin
to suspect he might be angling for a job.
"Why didn't somebody like the justice minister and I'm not against
release on compassionate grounds, if it's genuine why didn't
someone say to the Scottish court of appeal, and if they did, why
haven't we been told, 'There's a second appeal here. Why don't you
expedite the appeal, to see whether you uphold the conviction, or you
don't.' Now if they'd done that and they upheld the conviction, then
the next stage, if he is seriously ill, which wouldn't have caused so
much fuss, is you say OK, I'll transfer him as a convicted prisoner
to serve his remaining days in Libya. Now, what's the problem with
this? Have I missed something?" Suddenly you get a whiff of what
Mansfield might be like in court bullying and supercilious
according to some; incisive and un-cowable according to others, a
force to be reckoned with, if not always easily quoted his
sentences, outside court at least, loop and fragment and accommodate
all manner of baggage before arriving at a full stop.
A week later, and he has done his homework. "The Scottish Criminal
Cases Review Commission referred a report of 800 pages to the
Scottish court of appeal in August 2007. Now the big question is, why
hasn't the appeal been heard? If it's 800 pages long, there's got to
be serious questions about the conviction. Everybody has assumed that
it is a safe conviction, but I believe it is far from being a solid
or safe conviction." It turns out, he says, that the only witness was
shown a picture of Megrahi before having to identify him formally.
And "the identity parade didn't take place for 10 years! There isn't
any other direct evidence linking Megrahi to the bombing."
Furthermore, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission "uncovered
a lot more contact between the witness, a Maltese shopkeeper, and the
prosecuting authorities the American and British police than had
previously been known. He was even paid sums of money by the
authorities." It's still far from obvious how an unaccompanied bag
containing a bomb got on the plane … and so on and so on. "Anyone
following this case must have recognised that if there was a second
appeal it may not have sustained a conviction, and that would have
placed everyone in a very difficult position. This material requires
a public judicial inquiry."
Mansfield is a big man, and, at 67, beginning, like a mountain that
has suffered a recent landslide, or a balloon half-filled with sand,
to succumb to gravity. A large square ring on his ring finger matches
his cufflinks; a chunky silver link chain is visible under an
open-necked shirt (he attaches a collar and tie for the photograph).
Often called a champagne socialist, he was roundly mocked for
fighting Mohamed Al Fayed's corner in the Princess Diana inquest;
look at the great left-wing crusader went the line, shilling for cash
(not that there wasn't plenty of that, at £575 an hour). Perhaps, but
apart from the implicit racism of some of the coverage, which would
have denied Al Fayed a fair hearing (and the fact that Mansfield
really does believe that the car crash was not an accident), this was
to misunderstand the nature of Mansfield's politics, which, he
readily admits, never involved bringing a pre-existing belief system
to bear on the world. "Some people think that I've got this Marxism
running through the body, a propagandist, or whatever they think I am
in fact, it couldn't be further from the truth."
His politics is, rather, reactive and incidental, shaped piecemeal by
each successive case he has taken on. "People have said to me, you
know, where are you in all this. And from time to time I've made some
rather glib comments like, 'Well, I don't know where I am, because
actually I'm more interested in where you are.' And then you
identify, or not, with that position, and then articulate or express
it or represent it or whatever and then when the next one is added
and added, and they're all locked into that situation." Which would
easily cast him as a kind of political mercenary the job of a
barrister, after all, is to take on each case and fight it,
regardless but he is unusual in that he has made more of it than
that, and I believe him when he writes in his book of his faith in
the possibility, for nearly everyone, of regret and rehabilitation;
that he is mortally offended by the aridity of the prison system and
outraged by abuses of authority, and while the anger he says fuels
him can have a rather practiced quality, that doesn't mean it's not there.
He began as a true-blue Tory, in Finchley, north London his mother
canvassed for their MP, Margaret Thatcher, and cajoled him into the
Young Conservatives so he could meet the right type of girl. His
father, who had lost a leg in the war, was a Great Eastern railway
controller at King's Cross station who, determined that his son
should acquire the confidence to go to Oxbridge, worked three shifts
a day to pay public school fees and died of throat cancer days before
Mansfield failed to get into any university at all. Outraged,
Mansfield travelled to Keele University and bearded the admissions
tutor at lunch; he was given an interview, and a place, there and
then. Despite having no connections which he insists were necessary
at the time he decided to read for the bar, and scraped through on
his third attempt.
His break, and the case that shaped a career that can read,
grippingly, like an alternate history of the late 20th century, came
in 1972, when, because he had read philosophy at Keele, he was asked
to defend the Angry Brigade. It earned him a reputation as a
subversive when, as he writes, "nothing could have been further from
the truth." The first Irish case he defended, the next year, was
different: listening to the Price sisters, who were eventually
convicted of helping plant four bombs in London (one of which went
off outside the Old Bailey, destroying Mansfield's car), politicised
him despite accusations of treachery, he came to believe that "in
the English system you're innocent until proved Irish." He would go
on to defend Judith Ward, the Birmingham Six (it took 17 years, and
established his reputation as a decimator of scientific evidence),
and to represent families in the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which he has
just heard is to report, finally, by the end of this year.
Another theme developed through what he calls, slightly
uncomfortably, the "black cases": the Deptford Fire, and then the
murder of Stephen Lawrence. He always knew it was a great risk to
bring a private prosecution, even though his experience was as a
defence lawyer rather than a prosecutor, but he insists he feels no
guilt about its collapse. "I feel entirely justified. It was a desire
of the Lawrences: they were really very upset and hadn't had the
attention they felt they needed. And we did get it past committal and
to the Old Bailey." It failed partly because, even though Mansfield
argued about the psychological impact of trauma on memory, the judge
ruled Duwayne Brooks's evidence unreliable. Brooks has always felt
aggrieved that he was not supported as a witness and that he was
given almost no notice before he was called to give evidence. "He may
say that," retorts Mansfield now. "But as a prosecutor I'm not
allowed to talk to witnesses, because there's a risk that I might
hint at what they need to say." Although the collapse was, he writes,
"one of the most emotionally searing moments of my entire career"
(another was the conviction of Angela Cannings (now overturned) for
the cot deaths of three of her children, and the (also now
overturned) conviction of Barry George in the killing of Jill Dando)
he is proud that the Macpherson inquiry eventually came to its famous
decision that the police were guilty of "institutional racism".
The police do not tend to come out of their encounters with Mansfield
looking particularly impressive, or particularly able to learn from
past mistakes. Although, he says, he was taught at university that
history does not repeat itself, he has been disappointed to discover
that it does: he remembers "kettling", for example, happening as far
back as the Orgreave miners' strike (when he represented miners
beaten up by police), "and probably before". He is scheduled to give
a speech to a meeting of police superintendents this month. He plans
to call it "institutional denial", and to use as examples not just
the Lawrence case, but the Jean Charles de Menezes case (where he
represented the family), and the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20
protests this year, when their "first reaction was, 'Oh! Nothing to
do with us, we didn't do anything.' Second reaction: 'Um, yes, um, I
think we did touch him, yeah. We might have pushed him out of the
way, for his own safety.' Explanation number three: apparently the
family were told at one point by the police that they thought they
weren't genuine police officers, they were protestors dressed up as
police officers."
Such strategies do far-reaching damage, he believes, to public
confidence, and to the police themselves. "The institution itself
internally suffers, because the myth is that if we put up a bold
front, defend all [our people] in the end that doesn't help. What
it does is it deludes the people on the ground that they can do
whatever they like they've got a licence and they're out there.
Because our seniors will support us to the end. It's good that they
feel they have support but they shouldn't feel it's blanket support
such that they abrogate their own responsibility. The damage is both
external and internal, and it is serious."
How much should we trust the police? "Well, I have a fair trust of
the uniformed officer, on the street. I think they are endeavouring
to do a really good job, but they're up against it. I think where my
faith breaks down, I'm afraid, is with the higher echelons. I've now
seen so many of them, over the years, that basically I have a feeling
that they just shut their eyes that they're consumed with a
different kind of power structure, just like the politicians. And it
becomes a uniformed issue … like De Menezes it was top-heavy. You
had loads of these senior people wandering around. You had too many
chiefs and not enough Indians. They haven't got the transparency and
they haven't got the accountability." Having said which, he doesn't
feel that political control of the police, such as that claim by
Boris Johnson's deputy Kit Malthouse this week he has taken of the
Met, is the answer either. "I want to see them accountable to a body
of ordinary people, not politicians."
He feels the same way about intelligence. He has encountered his fair
share of redacted documents, and when the redaction was lifted
wondered, again and again, what on earth the fuss was about; more
worryingly, and more recently, he has been involved in terrorism
cases where, as in the ricin trial, what turned out to be extremely
flimsy evidence was used to fan public fear. "I think the ultimate
sanction should be the knowledge that it can all be subject to public
scrutiny, if there's a public demand for an inquiry."
Mansfield is particularly concerned that over the last 20 years the
hallowed idea that someone is innocent until proven guilty has been
increasingly eroded. "The Tories were bad enough, but New Labour"
who he says have created 3,600 new crimes "have switched the
emphasis. It's not quite as bad as you've got to prove your
innocence, but they have shifted the burden of proof on a number of
things over to the defence." He gives as an example the new law that
makes taking a photograph of a police officer a criminal offence. "If
you're going to defend yourself, you can't just say 'I'm not
intending to give it to a terrorist'. That's not enough. It's over to
you to prove it. That is a very dangerous precedent."
He once claimed, about the process of police investigation, but I
suspect more generally, "that revolution is the only solution". Does
he still feel that? The answer takes in voting methods, the economic
situation, corruption, moat-cleaning, KitKats, and the upcoming
election, but boils down to yes: "This is an opportunity for the
public to say as they did in Eastern Europe and it doesn't have
to be quite as dramatic as that to come out en bloc and say
together, we've had enough." How likely is that, really? "Well, how
likely was it that the iron curtain was going to come down? Everybody
thought it never would. So I want to say to people, if you want to
change things, you can do it."
--
Michael Mansfield's Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer is published by Bloomsbury
--
Mansfield on the cases that made his career
The Angry Brigade trial, 1972
(A group who planted 25 bombs in protest against the industrial relations bill)
"I hadn't met any so-called 'terrorists' before, but Angela struck me
as a very unlikely one."
Price sisters trial, 1973
(The sisters were part of an IRA group which planted four bombs)
"It was impossible not to be attracted to these two passionate and
committed people."
Orgreave trial 1985
(The case against miners arrested during the 1984 strike collapsed)
"It appeared to the jury from this simple exposé that officers who
claimed to identify and pursue rioters were talking out of the back
of their helmets."
Birmingham Six appeal, 1987
(Six men convicted of bombing two pubs in 1974; all were eventually
acquitted) "Being a convicted Irish bomber in that period was almost
synonymous with the stigma attached to leprosy."
Stephen Lawrence prosecution, 1993
(Lawrence was murdered by five racists) "One of the most emotionally
searing moments of my entire career [was] when I returned to court to
tell the judge that I did not feel it would be right or proper to continue."
Barry George trial 2001
(George had his conviction for Jill Dando's murder quashed in 2007)
"The distance from the Old Bailey to home at that time was roughly
seven miles, so off I went, pounding the pavements, going over and
over what might have gone wrong and what I had misjudged."
Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed inquest, 2008
"I have always believed that whatever had caused the crash, it was
not an accident."
.
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