|
|
 |
| |
Michael Mansfield: he’ll take questions on the Princess Diana inquest later. . . |
When his mum got a parking ticket
That’s what propelled the young Michael Mansfield into a career as a top civil rights lawyer, Catherine Etoe hears
HE is the poster boy for the legal profession and it was the kind of answer usually reserved for Miss World pageants.
Yet when Michael Mansfield QC confessed to an intimate audience in Regent’s Park on Thursday that he chose law so he could “help” people, few doubted his sincerity.
Sure, the civil liberties advocate currently courts the headlines as the silk to the super rich Mohammed Al Fayed in the much-maligned and costly Diana Inquest.
And yes, the charismatic 66-year-old’s shoot-from-the hip chat during his “Audience with” is slick, theatrical and peppered with knowing anecdotes.
But Mansfield’s reputation in 40 years at the Bar speaks for itself: he has championed legal aid and neighbourhood advice centres, challenged wrongful convictions and given a voice to miners, grieving families, dissidents and alleged killers.
“Why law? To help other people make a difference so they can articulate their worries, fears and inquiries,” he explains.
That urge – best achieved acting for the families of Stephen Lawrence and the Marchioness boat disaster victims – is driven by his own mother’s sense of injustice.
“She got summoned for a parking offence she didn’t commit,” he says. “She took the case on and won it.”
Quite a feat for a “respectable, God-fearing” woman in the patriarchal 1950s and one that prompted Mrs Mansfield to ask: “If they do that to me, your mother, what are they doing to other people?”
It is a question Mansfield has asked throughout his career, although what his Tory-voting mother would have thought of his acting for the miners in the 1980s he can only guess.
“My mother died in the 1970s, so she never really got a taste of all that but she knew that I was pretty rebellious after university,” he tells me. “We had this extraordinary relationship, we had humdingers of arguments, we were coming from different perspectives, but at the end of the day, I think she quite respected and was proud of the fact that I was making headway, even though she didn’t agree with any of it.”
There’s plenty Mansfield doesn’t agree with right now, judging by the bees that flew out of his bonnet in his two-hour chatter at Regent’s Park College on Thursday.
Take legal aid, which makes up 95 per cent of his caseload. “I’m very happy to have done that because that is the area of need,” he says. “But what I’m looking at now is a very different situation.”
The government’s “one case, one fee” approach – “They call it OCOF, I call it something else,” he smirks – and the knock-on financial effects on dwindling numbers of neighbourhood advice centres particularly irk Mansfield.
“We should have a legal welfare state,” he says. “It’s what a Labour government after the war wanted to do for the national health and for legal welfare. As it is, it’s very difficult to find lawyers who want to go into publicly funded work. They just say what’s the point, we’re not going to survive.”
Gordon Brown, Mansfield merrily decides with a little inspiration from his wife Yvette in the front row, is merely “Blair without the bling”, while increasing police powers mean we are living “very close, if not in, a police state”.
But it is the massively increased Ministerial say in public inquiries brought about by the Inquiry Act 2005 that bugs Mansfield most of all.
“I’m somebody who feels very, very strongly that the jury system and the inquiry system are a fundamental part of our democracy,” he says. “If there was one law I could change it would be that. That’s the one where the public are going to suffer by the inability to have proper inquiries into the sorts of things I’ve been talking about tonight.”
None of which, incidentally, included the one inquiry on everyone’s lips – Diana.
“Do I need to, it’s been in the press enough,” he cries. “I’ll have to come back to answer those questions.”
We can’t wait. |
|
|
|
|
|
