Paul Foot

Whoever thought up the title for this book must have wished it ill. The notion of a radical lawyer in Victorian England is profoundly distasteful. The word ‘radical’ is used both by revolutionaries and reactionaries to pretend that they are not what they are. Comfortable, distinguished and pompous lawyers are apt to describe themselves as ‘radical’ when they take time off from earning their enormous fees to flirt with a little prison reform on the side. Such people flourished hugely in ‘Victorian England’. Common to all of them was the belief that the judicial system handed down through the ages was a guarantee of fairness and justice, and that legal ‘radicalism’ needed to be securely confined in the law courts. Most of these gentlemen were not worth an obituary, let alone a biography.

So excited was Captain Fred Holroyd by his new posting to the city of Armagh in Northern Ireland as a fully-trained officer in military intelligence that he took great care to maintain his ‘cover’. He grew a rough beard before travelling across the Irish Sea, and dressed up in suitably scruffy clothes for the journey. He slunk into his ferry cabin without arousing anyone’s suspicion and locked the door. His first test as an active intelligence officer had been passed. No one had rumbled him or questioned him. He lay back on his bunk in relief. Suddenly the tannoy blared out a message: ‘Will Captain Fred Holroyd please report to the Purser’s Office as he has been chosen to be the military families’ officer for the journey.’

For nearly a century, Labour MPs have been going to Parliament to change the world, but have ended up changing only themselves. Tony Benn is unique. He went to Parliament to change himself, but has ended up determined only to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it.

One of the first traditionalists to complain when Home Secretary Douglas Hurd referred the case of the Guildford Four to the Court of Appeal was Ivor Stanbrook, Tory MP for Orpington. Mr Stanbrook was worried about the effect on British justice of all this questioning of verdicts in celebrated criminal cases. Yet when the Guildford Four were freed after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to sustain their conviction, Mr Stanbrook hailed the decision as a ‘vindication of British justice’. The freeing of the Four, he said, showed how British justice could correct its own mistakes. Inside the system, he exulted, the faults of the system had been ironed out.

Hardly a week goes by without the enemies of official secrecy having good cause to sing the praises of James Rusbridger. From his Cornish retreat he sprays the correspondence columns of newspapers with volleys of good sense and good humour. This bluff, meticulous man spent much of his youth as a British businessman in Europe, where he worked in a dilatory sort of way for MI6. Since his ‘retirement’ (he is a prodigious worker who never seems to be at rest) he has become a journalist whose main ambition is to put to flight the sycophantic writers who make fortunes from what he calls the ‘intelligence game’.