hedgeman.com




	Home The Times September 2010 - 1 The Times September 2010 - 2 Chris Mullin Daily Mail Article Boris Johnson interview 1998 The Jones Family Michael Chronology Hedgeman - The Book The Berlin Wall Into the Roaring Nineties 1991 Stanton Turns Really Nasty Annus Horribilis The End Of The Annus But Not The Horribilis The Judgement The Hand Of Peace Fame The Big One No Carte Blanche Come On Stanton Pay Up April Fool Niniteen Ninety Seven A Little Help From The Lord	The Hand of Peace "Access to Justice" was John Major's attempt at tort reform, though unlike in the US it never became party policy. Lord Justice Woolf, Master of the Rolls, was appointed by the government to sound out opinion and report, and he held seminars in regional centres, including one at Birmingham University. I told the local media I would be attending, reminding them of the legal mess they had already reported on. They got it wrong. A journalist can't find you at home if you're out at the event that is supposed to be the news. To them I was the story, not the Master of the Rolls. Civil justice reform doesn't excite viewers and readers, but neighbour disputes do, and a Lord Justice on top is even better. A young reporter was sent to the University, and a cameraman went to my house, found me gone, photographed the hedge instead, and then tracked me down for interviews. That marked me out. If the media found the seminar dull without me, the legal establishment treated it like jubilee day. All the leading city-centre firms were there, and some knew that one of them had taken a high-profile case that had gone badly wrong. They'd be jealous, because it would have meant a lot of money even if it made them look ridiculous. The room was full of brilliant young men in new suits. If I were forced to sell my home, none of them would mourn. They'd happily have got their hands on a lifetime's equity themselves. Would they have backed me if I'd stood up and asked for reform of laws, procedures and professional etiquette, so that silly disputes had to be resolved before reaching court? Of course not. The profession once had an obligation to try that before starting divorce proceedings, and I know it used to. My question would have made the assembled sages squirm. At least they would all know a lot more about Stanton v Jones from then on, without me spouting forth. I met Patrick Dalton, a law lecturer at the Legal Representation Unit at the University of Central England, surrounded by an attentive group of students and staff. He was pleased to see me. He had been keeping up with my case, but since I had engaged a solicitor and counsel he couldn't discuss it with me. Woolf himself was impressive. When he spoke you could hear a pin drop. He had integrity, cold logic and humility, and the room treated him like God. He was the sort of man you'd want as PM. He would soon become Lord Chief Justice, and he went on to perform a remarkable public service for another ten years. The young men queued up to speak, and there were no women, despite all the studious young women in the Law Library in term time. They impressed the Master of the Rolls, and their senior partners, twice their age, watched approvingly and a little nostalgically. All of them were heading for the earning stratosphere of the civil justice system, and I had already paid my own modest contribution into their coffers. Litigants in person ("lips") had been invited to speak. I had been one the year before, but I was now paying for a legal team, so I couldn't truthfully claim to be one. Nobody in the room admitted to being a lip, so no clodhopping amateur spoiled the erudite flow. Nobody suggested a "pub lawyer" alternative either. Everyone knows the two great failings of the civil and criminal justice systems are delay and expense. Justice delayed is justice denied. And since lawyers charge market rates, only the very rich can afford the best. My own case was a classic delay. It was suspended a year ago, with no date set for the appeal. It was two and a half years since Stanton took me to court, and I was still waiting for the injunction to be lifted. The Lords Justices of Appeal will get out of bed at night to stop a child being taken abroad, but nobody at the Royal Courts of Justice was bothered about a hedge for a couple of years. Lawyers procrastinate until it suits them, and then they move like lightning. Stanton's solicitor, my "Abe Lincoln," rushed me into court when there was no need, apparently to make a quick bob or two. Meanwhile the trees were growing, and had recovered far beyond whatever damage Stanton had gone to court over. I had won the judgment, unless the appeal reversed it. Then there was expense. Nobody suggested drastically reducing fees, let alone controlling them. Everyone would have giggled if a clod like me had. Instead the search for economies turned to expert witnesses, who are very expensive, and Woolf suggested that one expert could serve both sides. That struck me as naive. My own experience proved the opposite. I would have lost on the testimony of my opponent's so-called expert, who was regarded as incontestable in local courts. The best free advice I got was to find an expert outside the West Midlands. John Wetherell had charged me a couple of thousand pounds so far, and he was genuinely independent. Stanton's expert had barely made his point in court and had yet to be cross-examined. My man's view differed from his, so there were some pertinent questions to answer. The new rules put experts under a professional duty to give dispassionate evidence, and the idea seems to be that if both sides accept a single expert, the court will too. But in the end he who pays the piper calls the tune. Anyone could submit written views to the enquiry. I did so later that year and was acknowledged among hundreds of others in the final report. Woolf's team processed all the seminars and submissions, and they rang me back to save me the call costs. We had several long conversations. By then Stanton v Jones was national news, and the team was keen to know if it was relevant. What mattered most to me was my passionate view that solicitors should be bound by ethics beyond regulation and law: a professional code, or simply a gut instinct for right and wrong. Stanton v Jones cost more than £100,000, and I said repeatedly on TV that the money should have gone to Oxfam, not lawyers. Much of the public regards litigation like this as a self-indulgence of the profession. After the final judgment, Dr Lynne Jones MP expressed similar views in a letter to the Law Society. It went unanswered, as the Society was busy with one of its sordid internal brawls, this time about groping. In normal times someone would have replied, but the reply would have been meaningless. I couldn't have raised my point at the seminar, though it was the ideal place. My case was only half-finished and would have been ruled sub judice. My lawyers would also have had to withdraw if I had interfered. After the appeal, though, I put it confidentially to the Master of the Rolls' team like this: Every attempt at compromise, even mid-proceedings, was turned down. Stanton had told his solicitor, "there is to be no compromise with that man." This was a matter for the still small voice of conscience of any solicitor, let alone one from the inner-city law establishment. At the very start, a knock on my door and a request to see his client's trees from my property might have settled it. It was the ruthless pursuit of money that stopped him. The young men in new suits would have done the same, and so would the Master of the Rolls. They are all concerned with property. Paul Terry Stanton had once knocked me to the floor of my own garage. The criminal court took a year to convict him. He has never believed he did it, though perhaps a little voice from his mother tells him otherwise. He was ordered to pay me £150 compensation and £180 prosecution costs, plus the expensive legal team he hired for the day in a failed attempt to discredit me in the witness box. The law values actual bodily harm to a person very cheaply. Philip Kremen urged me again and again to sue in the civil court, where there was far more money to be made. But that was never my point. I wasn't out to punish Stanton, and I've never hated him. It doesn't worry me that he loathes me, and I rather like it. What I shriek to high heaven about is the attitude of the state and the justice system: Michael Jones, the person, was worth £150 and no costs, while Stanton's property was worth £32,000 and astronomical costs. The Master of the Rolls took eighteen months to produce an interim report, two volumes each over half an inch thick, and the full report followed a year later. I saw my name in the acknowledgements, but I never studied it. The volumes gathered dust for ten years before I recycled them, and the content is all online now. Was it the great upheaval it was billed as? There was meant to be simplification. "Plaintiff," a word I'll always associate with Stanton, became "Claimant." I was pig ignorant of the law until he took me to court. There is now a "Quick Claims Track," where both parties sit at a table with a judge without paying for lawyers. I don't know how it has worked, but I've advised people to get the leaflets from the County Court Office. On experts, we have since seen the most highly qualified medical and academic witnesses struck off after giving testimony they believed true, but which was not, and which put an innocent person in prison for three years. One of them was a solicitor. Those who were at the Birmingham seminar will remember me, aged sixty-six, bald and fat, but described as a most handsome man. I had never heard that one before. What mattered was the quality of the people who said I had a brilliant brain. The timing mattered too, because it marked the start of an eight-year spell in the media. I made little money from it. Granada gave me two ex gratia payments of £100 and £80, and Maureen and I were put up in four or five modest hotels, but otherwise we lived on daily expense sheets. The media used me, and I was glad to use them in return. I told producers many times: "It is a quid pro quo. I will give you myself if you help me change the law." That worked 98% of the time, which was enough. Now and then a nasty little tabloid populist gained my confidence and then twisted a remark against me. I learned to sniff them out, though some were so sly that my guard still slipped now and then. Esther and Scargill Esther Rantzen, Queen of TV campaigners, had finished her long run of "That's Life" and now had a new show simply named "Esther", plus a weekly column in the Daily Express. Here was a chance to entice the "Queen" into heading a campaign for law change, since our neighbour dispute involved a judge. I wrote to the programme summarising what had happened between Stanton and Jones. Their legal department quizzed me rigorously, and the lawyers concluded that, as there was no jury, the single judge was beyond influence. With safeguards, particularly a balance of both sides, the programme could go ahead. The Stantons, not knowing I had instigated it, could not resist the invitation, and that saved the programme. It was that nagging tiny voice that implored Paul Terry, "Go take your old father, show everyone what Jones has done to him. Esther knows about bad people; she exposes them to the world." We were phoned daily by the team, as were the Stantons. My opponents gave the security staff their standard family fantasy about me: that I had raped and murdered Freda Stanton, was a burglar, and had mutilated their trees. I just sent the production team a copy of Paul Terry's libellous letter, a record of his conviction and photographic evidence of the tree nuisance. Forgive a digression, but the following coincidence must be recorded. We reached New Street Station far too early, and a train cancellation left us ages to kill. Maureen went gazing in the shopping centre, and I returned to the concourse to find a little crowd around a celebrity. As he detached himself, I beamed recognition and held out my hand at the same moment he did. It was Arthur Scargill, and it was as though we had been lifelong friends. He was still a terrific public relations man, ten years after the miners' strike. People asked me, "You know this man, don't you?" Others said, "That man was absolutely right." Our BBC ticket was third class. Arthur, still leader of the NUM, could have travelled first like most union leaders, but he sat facing the incoming passengers. I asked, "Mind if we join you?" and we chatted for a couple of hours. Maureen's father came from Blaenavon, and Arthur said, "I've learnt something I didn't know about the South Wales pits." Everyone knows Arthur's great mistake: he did not call a ballot. The rules did not demand one, but had he called it he would have won massively, and the devastation of the mining communities might never have happened. When the people on the platform said he was right, they meant his warning about Thatcher's pit closures. I did not raise the ballot with him. He always said he was right, because he always knew he was right, and that was one reason Maureen didn't like him. But I did ask what I'd always wondered: "Do you regret supporting Soviet tanks putting down the Nagy government?" (Hungary) He did not blink. "Not at all, they stopped the hanging of trade unionists from lampposts." He was self-centred and arrogant, but he had been on the knife edge of bringing down the Thatcher government, and he was absolutely straight and incorruptible. Perhaps I was subconsciously learning that a touch of those faults was a good thing. As we left he asked when the show would be broadcast, and gave his address: "N U M Barnsley." At the studio, reception took us to a large room full of the studio audience, regulars chosen for their telegenic qualities and gender and ethnic balance, practised at making appropriate noises at appropriate times. There was no appearance fee; you did it for the privilege of going on telly with a top presenter. Then we saw a sight for sore eyes: old man Stanton, eighty-five, bent nearly double over his stick, obviously in great pain and distress, guided by a younger man. Yet those who saw him daily walking his dog knew better. What you saw now was a double act, the tortured old man bullied by that evil devil Jones, and the noble knight in shining armour come to rescue his dad. They kept it up for the next couple of hours. The producer explained the format and told me, for the first time, that the Stantons had refused to share the platform with me. They were refusing to sup with the devil. I was to sit alone, with Maureen a couple of rows back, so that I would take the abuse of the shocked audience as they saw the old man and the nasty photographs of what I had done to his trees. Paul Terry really believed all of this. I was wired up, warned not to move, and tested. Esther offered a limp, soggy handshake. The audience arrived, and seeing Maureen led to her seat relaxed me. The Stanton double act came last, then the warm-up man. As the theme tune died, Esther arrived to forced, rapturous applause, and introduced the old man and me over a few photographs that made me wince. She explained that Mr Stanton senior was deaf and that his son would speak for him, and put a question to Paul Terry that launched his long-practised diatribe. I let it run for thirty seconds. Then I stood up, wiring pulling me back, pointed at him and said, "He hit me." "What, this young man hit you?" "Yes, and he was convicted and fined." That was the outstanding weakness in his position, and everything he was about to say was undermined. Esther knew because I had sent in the conviction certificate, and her use of "young" was brilliant: he wasn't, and it emphasised his willingness to hit an older man. Confused and flustered, he reverted to his fall-back mode, digging his hole deeper, and attacked Esther, the worst thing he could do. The audience turned on him. "You have reneged on the conditions on which we agreed to come on this show. Now stop and start the recording again." The audience hooted, and Esther said, "I shall have to be careful or you'll hit me." She knew how to play it. A walk-out would be an anti-climax, and she knew the cameras had close-ups on the Stantons' grim faces. When he referred to my "unprovoked attack" on his father's trees, Maureen stood up and Esther introduced her. She was best in show, clear, precise and articulate, and with a trace of emotion she said, "You invited me to your house and I pleaded with you to cut those trees and you solemnly promised, but it was years before you did anything, and then only a bit off the top, because you had a solicitor's letter." The audience went silent. "How long has this dispute been going on?" "Since 1979." A wince from the audience. "Fifteen years." Howls of derision. "How much has it cost?" "Fifty thousand pounds." I was wildly under, as it happened. There were sharp intakes of breath and protest at the waste and futility, directed at both parties. Esther took her microphone to the Stantons: "What would it take just to say finish it now?" The audience howled support, and the broadcast showed the surly obduracy, the shaking heads and lips mouthing never. Then she walked to me. "What do you say to shaking hands and ending it now?" I spluttered, "It is too late, the appeal is…" and saw the look of futility in her eyes at such a preposterous question. It was her cue to end the show. I thought, how can I get out of my seat until they release my wiring, with the audience shrieking and my moment of destiny about to be gone for ever? "Sod that," I said to myself, shot up and ran towards the Stantons with my hand outstretched, to roars of approval. I offered it first to the old man, cast in stone, whose lips curled in utter contempt. I showed my empty hand to the crowd and offered it to the son, who just shook his head. I turned with both hands upturned in feigned consternation, because no one knew better than I that it was not a remote possibility. The audience left their seats to mob me, and a huge lady of Caribbean descent enveloped me in her arms, kissed me and said, "I knew you were a man of peace." None of it was recorded. Afterwards Maureen and I hugged, laughed and were offered drinks, a far cry from our cold arrival. At the far end of the room, the Stantons sat with one gentleman. I was told, "They are issuing a writ tomorrow." I have never heard to this day how that panned out. The local papers gave plenty of publicity, and the show was repeated many times on subsidiary channels. Ian saw his Mom and Dad on telly in the early hours, and I had calls from the Irish Republic. We had loads of congratulatory calls and the beginning of public recognition, having lived in the area forty years. I was embraced by a woman just like the one in the studio as I came out of the opticians. At my old school's annual retirees' gathering, the welcome was loving, and literally everyone had seen the show. But all this was nothing compared to what was to come.