I QUITE took to Hull East’s Labour MP Karl Turner, the rebel lawyer confronting Keir Starmer and David Lammy over their plans to abolish many jury trials.
We sat together at a dinner on the House of Lords terrace some years ago and he was good company, despite being both a Labour MP and a lawyer (either can bring me out in hives, generally speaking).
I’d just cracked open the terrace doors because some of the old boys at neighbouring tables were wilting in the summer heat. A relieving breeze wafted in.
As I went back to my chair, some pompous Westminster stuffed-shirt admonished, sotto voce, ‘A gentleman would have asked permission to do that!’ It was meant to humiliate. It did.
I bent over him and replied, equally sotto voce: ‘It’s a good job I am a gentleman, pal, otherwise you’d be through those *flipping* doors and in the river.’
He went quiet and pale. I was a furious red and as I retook my seat Karl Turner was creased up laughing. He kept raising his head to stare down the room.
‘What are you looking for?’ I asked, still embarrassed and flustered.
‘The Serjeant at Arms,’ he said. Apparently I’d just threatened to throw Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons (Deputy Speaker at the time) into the Thames.
Turner has threatened to resign his Kingston upon Hull seat and force a by-election (which Reform would romp) unless Starmer and Lammy reconsider their jury trial abominations.
He points out the various red flags around the policy, from the unrealistic financial implications to the probable ineffectiveness, and most crucially the betrayal of a basic tenet of British justice.
As much as ex-barrister Turner speaks from court experience – and personal experience, when he was almost a victim of a gross miscarriage of justice – I’d like to add a journalist’s two penn’orth.
I speak as an editor and publisher who has survived occasional contempt of court summonses; successfully challenged multiple Section 39 orders; oh, and escaped bloodied but intact from a million-pound libel case brought by disgraced ex-Labour MP Shahid Malik which, if left to the judge, would have ruined me. I was saved by a jury of my peers who were left bemused by Mr Justice Eady’s legal gymnastics.
After closing statements the jury were back in court within an hour with a long list of questions for Eady. Red-faced, he couldn’t answer – because he’d arbitrarily ruled out so much of our defence evidence before the trial began (judges consider themselves only a half-rung below the gods of Olympus).
The jury went out, came back. Hung jury. I’ll take an 11-1 verdict, said Eady. Nope. 10-2? Not even a highly questionable 9-3 . . .
We were £90,000 out of pocket but we survived.
Sir David Eady, now retired, was the senior libel judge at the Royal Courts of Justice.
Fourteen years later I sat through another hugely expensive but even higher profile libel trial at the RCJ, this time before the equally monarchical Sir Matthew Nicklin, judge in charge of the ‘media and communications list’.
This time I wasn’t a journalist but a ‘McKenzie Friend’, a civilian authorised to assist a defendant, on this occasion the bankrupt Tommy Robinson. It was the libel case brought by Islamist agitators using the convenient ‘cause’ of Huddersfield schoolboy Jamal Hijazi, who had been involved in a playground spat with a white kid.
I’ll be as brief as possible. The media exulted over the opening day’s prosecution case, despite there being only one supporting witness, Hijazi’s dad Jihad – yes, really, Jihad Hijazi.
When Tommy rose to make his opening statement, the Hon Mr Justice Nicklin sat him down. ‘The press will be present to hear your side tomorrow,’ he said. You can guess the rest. Not a single reporter returned except the statutory Press Association staffer.
Tommy’s defence, featuring the crucial and overwhelming evidence produced, went unreported.
The five brave young witnesses who came to testify to Hijazi’s behaviour towards girls and women? Speaking into a void. The multitude of statements and video recordings from teachers, social workers, parents? Zilch.
School records that showed him with more than 90 ‘negatives’ in a single year? Echoes in a judicial silence.
No contemporaneous reporting, but still we were jubilant at the trial’s close. It was a walkover!
It took Nicklin three months to produce a 52-page judgment condemning Tommy Robinson to his inevitable fate.
Every defence witness lied, on every single issue, he declared. They put themselves through the terrifying ordeal of a Royal Courts of Justice trial just for the fun of it. The star pupil – by then a law student – who testified about an angry Hijazi hitting her over the head with a hockey stick? She lied.
Minor inconsistencies from the youngsters over events some three or four years earlier gave Nicklin his own hockey stick to use on the children, especially the girl.
And his justification? She lied. I quote Nicklin’s para 116, where he admits to being clueless why the girl would lie about an incident another young witness saw and testified to.
Indeed, in the witness box when accused of lying by the Claimant’s barrister, Nicklin interjected forcefully – why would a grade A student with a unblemished record, studying law, come to the High Court and lie?
Those three months gave him time to consider why. His decision?
Nicklin: ‘People can lie for reasons that make no sense; sometimes for no reason at all.’
Everyone lied except sulky, taciturn young Hijazi – who, by the way, never returned to court to face his accusers after giving evidence on day one. Bizarre.
Those young people and their parents were coming to London for the verdict, but it was cancelled at the last minute by Nicklin, allegedly over a ‘positive covid test’. He gave us his summary verdict over the phone, without having to show his face in front of those innocents.
I would have paid good money to look Matthew Nicklin in the eye that day. To see if he could hold the gaze of the only experienced journalist to sit through every minute of that farce.
Tommy Robinson was willing to go to prison by publishing his documentary, Silenced, which Nicklin had placed under injunction. It was seen by more than 160million viewers thanks to Elon Musk. Not many people would pay that price. I know I wouldn’t.
But that, my friends, is why the right to a jury trial has to be fought for by good men like Karl Turner and every one of us who might also one day fall foul of a politicised judiciary.
I’m sure most of you trust judges. I wish I could share some other stories I have personal experience of . . .
