Ludo and the Power of the Book: Ludovic Kennedy's Campaigns for Justice by Richard Ingrams

Author:Richard Ingrams [Ingrams, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9781472109095
Google: Y0A9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-02-23T20:27:58.819295+00:00

Denning was reviled for speaking in this way but he was perhaps doing no more than articulating opinions which – while probably not, as he foolishly thought, held by ‘every sensible person in the land’ – were nevertheless held by a great many judges. It was preferable to imprison half a dozen possibly innocent men than jeopardise the prestige of the police and courts by exposing a litany of corruption, perjury and even torture. In the Luton case, Lord Widgery and his colleagues may well have resented having been told what to do by the Home Secretary – to cross-examine Mathews in particular – but they must also have thought of the consequences if they upheld the appeal. Such a judgement would mean acknowledging that three men had been wrongly sentenced to life imprisonment as a result of a conspiracy orchestrated by a corrupt policeman and a hardened criminal; that evidence had been fabricated and suppressed; and that Drury and Mathews had shared between them a large sum of money provided by the State as a reward. Here was another ‘appalling vista’ that simply could not be contemplated, even if it meant that two innocent men – albeit two known criminals, the judges may have reassured themselves – should remain in prison for the duration. They did not appear to worry too much about the possible eventual exposure of a cover-up that would compound the damage done to the reputation of the courts.

Following the failure of the appeal, Tom Sargant and Bryan Magee both appeared on an hour-long BBC Panorama programme. But Magee, who had also written an article for The Times on the extraordinary verdict, was already coming to the conclusion that a media campaign would have little effect or might even prove counter-productive. Senior judges famously resented press interference, and several had expressed dismay that the insurance fraudster Emil Savundra had been subjected to ‘trial by television’ during his sensational interview with David Frost in 1967. Aside from his political contacts, Magee had a powerful friend and ally in the shape of the retired judge Lord Devlin, whom he had met some years previously when conducting a series of interviews with judges for ITV. Born into a Catholic family in 1905, Devlin had joined the Dominican Order as a novice in his teens but later embarked on a career at the Bar, eventually becoming a highly respected judge in the Court of Appeal and the author of several books on the law and especially its relation to morality. One of his books, Easing the Passing, was an account of the famous trial, over which he presided, of an Eastbourne GP, John Bodkin Adams, accused but acquitted of murdering one of his patients, a rich old lady, in order to profit from her will. A brilliantly clever man, he told Magee that he had once been in the middle of a summing up when he realised he had reached the wrong decision, but he was able to change tack and come to a directly opposite conclusion to his original one without anyone noticing.

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