Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones Page B

obsessiveness
of his preparation, insisting on seeing every piece of paperwork rather than relying on someone
else’s selection of what was important. I wonder if he hadn’t been scarred by an early case,
caught out when he hadn’t been quite so meticulousand getting a nasty
surprise in court. In any case the combination of flair and attention to detail amounts to a
formidable armoury for a courtroom lawyer.
    It’s conventional to blame the case for the
deterioration in Fleming’s condition, though his health problems were of long standing. Only Ann
Fleming, Ian’s wife, seemed to feel that the trial had a beneficial effect on his physical
well-being. ‘Goodness I miss the Old Bailey,’ she wrote in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in December
1963, though in fact the case was heard in the Royal Courts of Justice, ‘the case did Ian a
power of good, no smoking in court and one hour for a simple lunch.’
    Of course anyone writing to Waugh did well to
keep the entertainment level high and to point up any possible irony, but perhaps she really did
feel that the Chancery Division of the High Court stood in for a health club of a particularly
exclusive kind, a judicial Champneys whose mortificatory element (sitting on hard wooden benches
hour after hour to hear yourself characterized as profiteer and cad) was only an aspect of its
efficacy and its prestige.
    I don’t know why Dad felt the need to dress up
his involvement in the
Thunderball
case with the fairy story about his inbuilt lie
detector. It’s obvious that Kevin McClory didn’t come to Dad direct, and that Peter Carter-Ruck
took McClory on as a client not because success was guaranteed but because payment was assured
either way. Dad was the right man for the job, with a methodical approach that ran no risk of
being dry, thanks to the whiff of danger he gave off in court. Why be embarrassed about that?
But perhaps he disliked any idea of being a hired gun, and cried up the moral standing of his
line of work accordingly. The traditional costume of the barrister – wig, gown and bands – is
designed to produce the same effect, lending to a mercenary some of the dignity of apriest. Stylized battledress and a bandolier, even one made of horsehair,
would attract the wrong sort of client.
    Dad didn’t have anything as coherent as a
philosophy of the law, and his personal principles could be strongly polarized without adding up
to a standard opinion-poll profile. He was against capital punishment, for instance, and
strongly opposed to pornography. These are common attitudes individually but the combination is
mildly anomalous. Displayed as a Venn diagram, the two relevant circles would show little
overlap. Admittedly the overlap between those in favour of capital punishment and those opposed
to censorship would be smaller still, but Dad still has to count as something of a free-thinker.
    This was very much the point made by Geoffrey
Robertson in
The Justice Game
: that when the first ABC trial (the nickname came from
the surnames of the defendants, two journalists and their source being prosecuted under the
Official Secrets Act) was abandoned due to the ill-health of the judge, and Mr Justice
Mars-Jones was named to preside over a new one, Robertson – representing the three – did not
have high hopes of his fair-mindedness in court. Knowing that Mars-Jones J (this is how judges
are styled in law reports) was a great upholder of law and order, and moreover that juries ‘ate
out of his hand’, he told his clients they could expect to spend their Christmas in prison.
    Instead Mars-Jones J dismissed the charges,
saying that the Official Secrets Act had never been intended to be used in such a way. When told
that the Attorney General had authorized the prosecution, he said (I must go to slow-motion
here, it’s such a wonderful moment, a Clint Eastwood moment), ‘Then he can un-authorize it.’ Is
that a cheroot clenched between Dad’s teeth, or possibly a toothpick? He