One Week With John Gulliver - Objection! Day Ernest James was ‘arrested’ in a court

READING an obituary this week on Mr Justice Gerald Butler reminded me of the day my learned judge ordered the arrest of a barrister appearing before him – one Ernest James.
James, then a criminal lawyer as well as a Camden Labour councillor, had upset Mr Butler by challenging him on a point of law at Southwark crown court 10 years ago.

This prompted an exasperated Mr Butler to turn to the jury and snap: “I am going to teach Mr James about the law!”
A man of conviction, James replied: “I would like to see you to try!”
By now apopleptic, Mr Butler launched into a tirade against the battling barrister who then challenged him to look up the point of law in Archibald’s, the lawyers’ bible.

Thumbing through his Archibald’s, Mr Butler slammed it shut, and ordered James once again to sit down.
When he refused, Mr Butler demanded that police officers in the court should arrest him.
After a wily James pointed out that under ancient laws police officers were not allowed to make an arrest in a court, the judge ordered a prison officer to “arrest” James.
Suddenly, James’s arms were twisted around his back until the judge ordered the prison officer to let James go.
Later, a complaint by the judge to the Bar Council was dismissed.

As Brown falls to earth...

I ONLY met Gordon Brown once, just for a few minutes at a wedding at Rosslyn Chapel in Hampstead, and he looked then like a man with a troubled self. He’s certainly troubled now.
A tragic figure? Tragic in the sense that he set out in political life with socialist ideas which over the years became transmuted into notions of fairness, justice and equality for all. The sort of ideas that all politicians boast of.

You’d have to be a fool to find fault with them.
But Gordon, I sensed, must have wanted more than that in his political twenties – presumably, to try and change the structure of society.
Somewhere over the years he gave up and tried to make the best of the system – as it is.
But he either didn’t understand the power of the City or what it could do to society.

In the end, he was broken by the very thing he tried to reform. Down the years another Labour politician, Harold Wilson, broken by the economic system, comes to mind.
Somehow, this week I thought of Prometheus, who was punished by the gods by being chained for eternity while a vulture would eat his liver.  Each day the liver would be renewed so the punishment was endless.
At least, you could say Gordon tried, but trying was never going to be enough.

Parting shot from quiet revolutionary

I NEVER found him a thrusting politician with sharp elbows.
He never yearned for the headlines and a top job.
But Brian Woodrow was his own man.
If he fell into the hands of a double dealer – and the political world abounds with them – he would freeze them out of his life with a sharp rejoinder or a nasty put-down.

Brian reserved his energies for the things he believed in – and as a man who started out in politics as a dedicated conservationist the borough benefited.
Two men riled him while he led the council’s planning committee – one a councillor who had a reputation as a  nasty bruiser, the other a duplicitous civil servant. He told them both to get lost.
Brian can be summed up as a quiet rebel.

He found his passion for politics campaigning in the 1970s with Frank Dobson – who has just retained his seat as the Holborn MP – to save lovely Georgian buildings in Bloomsbury, mainly the terraced rows in Calthorpe Street and Rugby Street, all of them threatened with demolition by developers.
Few families in those streets probably know that the houses they live in wouldn’t be standing if it wasn’t for Brian and his fellow campaigners.
Brian isn’t the type to boast of his war against the commercial philistines. 

Later, Brian, who worked in a design team for a well-known firm of architects, was elected as a Labour councillor in 1990.
An opponent of what he calls the “dodgy world” of developers, he once ran foul of one who wrote a letter to the Town Hall complaining that Brian had shown bias against his proposal.
This had never happened. But down came the fury of senior Labour councillors, backed up by one or two civil servants, and Brian found himself suspended from his position as a chairman and having to face an inquiry by the government watchdog, the English Standards Board. He was cleared, of course.

All of this is still fresh in his mind and probably filtered through it at a recent farewell party at the Town Hall.
Friends among politicians and several council officials crowded into a committee room.
Wearing his Martin Bell-style white suit, Brian cracked jokes – and made, inevitably, some serious points, calling for the council not to rely on people seeing planning documents online and warning that councillors of all political stripes often found out more about the council from the New Journal.

As a democrat, he condemned the cabinet system of local governance, in which an inner cabal of senior councillors boss the play at the Town Hall.
Then he joked: “I’m being released back into the community. People have asked whether I’m ready for that – others have asked whether the community is actually ready for my release.”

Bench tribute for Barry is unveiled

READERS in Camden Town, in particular, please make a note: a bench is being unveiled on Saturday at 2pm in memory of Barry Sullivan, a man who helped so many people, especially the elderly and infirm in the enclave of streets near St Martin’s Gardens. Local heroes should not be forgotten.