The Supreme Court - Rembrandt and part-time judges' pensions

The panel of judges

'Have you got a knife in your bag, madam?'

The X-ray in the Supreme Court picks up the Swiss Army key fob which I forgot to leave at home.

John Cavanagh QC,
11 King's Bench Walk,
on his feet

John Cavanagh QC

O'Brien v Ministry of Justice is about judges' pensions. Dermod O'Brien, a retired Crown Court Recorder whose work was counted as part-time, is alleging discrimination. A recently retired immigration judge watches intently: a favourable outcome could be retrospective.

Ian Rogers,
Monckton Chambers

Law students file in. They are of the generation which says 'awesome' a lot. Why do so many of the people in the public seats exhibit something like awe? Do people not go to cathedrals any more? Or is it panic - in the original meaning of the word, sensing the presence of the god Pan, or rather the presence of an inexorable justice system? An implacable god requiring sacrifice if people get some code of living wrong?

A few of the girl students flick and preen but attention is not on them: it's on the clock, as it has been all morning. The students have decades before them. Counsel has two minutes left to bang in his remaining points, like nails.

Postcards are on sale at the till. I buy a team photo of the judges. I think of how Rembrandt exploded the conventional group portrait with The Night Watch.

Rembrandt's The Night Watch

Several storeys above the café is a spotless glass roof. So the Supreme Court is protected by something immaculate, incorruptible. The cynic will say this is fanciful, that there is an obsessive-compulsive clean-up squad or a pigeon-zapping force field. But today it is without blemish. I'm told that the glass will take a body's weight.

And  now I have to do a drawing which is going to be looked at more keenly than the others. One of the security staff has offered himself as a sitter.

This has got to work in the watchful eyes of the whole security team. Word of mouth could destroy me here.

I'm lonely. I haven't got long - their shift pattern is relentless. Look, I never said I was Rembrandt. I just draw in society.

One of my sitter's colleagues comes over to look.

'If this was made into a poster the police would arrest you, man.'

Robin Allen QC,
Cloisters

I get my knife back.

Financial Times gig and a dangerous squat

Occupy squatters at the Cross Keys, a boarded-up pub in Chelsea, have just been thrown out by a criminal gang with knives who hold raves in squats and don’t read my blog, or they’d know that bailiffs are due any day. Two male squatters were beaten up. I go to draw somewhere marginally safer: a gig at the Financial Times office.

To get there I walk past the aggressively opulent frontage of law firm S. J. Berwin. It’s a relief to reach the unglitzy, boffiny engine-room that is the newspaper. 

Mary Wilson (vocals/violin)

Peter Whitehead is celebrating 25 years as an FT journalist by holding a charity folk/rock concert with friends and a colleague. They sing and play to a congenial audience in a conference room with the passionate sincerity of non-professional musicians. 

I use conventional pens, quills, a bamboo pen and a few inches of hemp bondage rope.

Afterwards I take the stairs and find a sight which makes a freelance home-worker weep [left]. Last time I had access to something like that the techies wore Fairisle jumpers, corduroy trousers and beards. 

The day before, I borrowed a Cross Keys squatter to model for the life class I go to. She took charge of her life at the age of 13. Now 18, she is confident, well-spoken, absurdly grown up for a pretty fairy and can do things I can’t – smoke, rifle through skips outside supermarkets for food, not feel cold in flimsy clothes, go out in socks but no shoes. She has a pungent insouciance. 

One of the squatters who was beaten up by the gang, Arthur, is quoted in the Financial Times of 5 November 2012 (Chicken with wine sauce from a skip on lunch menu for pub occupiers). He says he sees ‘a choice between wasteland and trespassing.’

The life drawings
are of the squatter

Peter Whitehead and nine other musicians perform songs by Lori McKenna, Sam Baker and Mary Gauthier on his CD Lori, Sam and Mary. Sales benefit the Down’s Syndrome Association. Peter’s wife Grania Langdon-Down is descended from the doctor who gave his name to the syndrome. Details: http://peterwhitehead.yolasite.com/  

At the gig he was joined by Simon Botham/percussion, Heidi Felton/cello, Derek Huff/keyboards, Richard Lloyd/guitar, Martin Nielsen (also of the FT)/guitar and Mary Wilson/violin and vocals. 

Activist squat: from the pub to the psychiatric hospital

View from the disused psychiatric hospital

The phone wakes me up. It's a squatter from the Cross Keys, the disused pub at the classy end of Chelsea. Bailiffs are due any time.

'Can you help us move to the new squat?'

I feel like Wendy with the Lost Boys. Or Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, the pastry-chef-poet who turns up with sustenance and transport when things get rough for the ramshackle Gascon cadets.

I hear a whisper. It's Margaret Thatcher saying the Good Samaritan had money. I've got enough cash for dog food and toilet paper.

In the sunless public bar at the Cross Keys, groaning figures wriggle out of sleeping bags. Tom stretches, rolls a fag and looks into the gas flame-effect fire. The light on his perfect cheekbones is Caravaggio. I don't have my drawing kit with me.

After much nagging from me he lugs some clothes out to the car.
'Cool car,' he says.
I haven't got time to tell him he's an activist and cars aren't cool.

The new squat, off the Kings Road, is a disused private psychiatric hospital for young people which was last cleaned in 2007 according to notices on the walls. The building is eerie with an unlit spiral staircase and blind corridors.



It's a landlocked Marie Celeste. The patients' notes, complete with names, have been left lying around in the office by the departed management. Chronicles of harm and self-loathing. A girl carved FAT on her foot with a paperclip. A successful escaper went to Birmingham by train then returned the next day.

Four storeys and 17,652 square feet of dustiness. Individual en suite rooms with nowhere to hang yourself. The windows are sealed so that you can't jump out.

One of the squatters, who camped outside St Paul's cathedral with Occupy through the chill of last winter, models later on for the life class I go to.

He tells me that last night the squatters ate rump steak and sausages retrieved from a waste bin outside Waitrose and cooked in the hospital kitchen.

Outside the Court of Appeal

Leon Glenister of Hardwicke chambers is having his first day in the Court of Appeal.

Inside the courtroom, I wonder if I could use photographs from Spotlight to illustrate what's going on. On the bench we have Nigel Hawthorne, Joanna Lumley as Purdey, Siân Phillips. The nearest court official is Maxine Peake with her hair up.

The case is Fernandes v Watson and Others. The concept of 'good reason' is being discussed. Dean Underwood, Leon's leader, argues that reason for failing to attend court can range from the copper-bottomed one of slipping on a patch of ice and ending up in hospital to the barely acceptable. A judge challenges the copper-bottoming: the person might have gone out wearing inadequate footwear.

I take the drawing of Leon to his chambers and ask the receptionist if it reminds her of anyone.
She looks blank.
'No.'

The Cross Keys squat in Chelsea

What do you do after Johnny Hallyday at the Albert Hall? All that pretend-edge, masking geniality? You go somewhere really edgy, of course. A squat. Except we didn't try to get in. Because as we arrived, in the dark and the rain, two police vehicles drove up and we decided we weren't that edgy. Even though nothing happened.

The squat is the Cross Keys, Chelsea's oldest pub. It was bought by a developer who wanted to turn it into a mansion with a basement pool. But locals wanted it to remain their local. So did the council. Planning permission was denied and it's back on the market.

I return in daylight. The developer has offered the squatters an unknown inducement to leave. Ella explains. 'They said: there will be something in the middle of the road. It's yours if you all come out.'

In my experience, what is in the middle of the road is a flat fox. And why walk out of a pub with a walk-in fridge and a flame-effect gas fire? The developer has now resorted to conventional court procedure.

Charlie

'What's the axe for?' I ask.
'We used it to cut up a five-kilo block of chocolate,' says Arthur.

No time for more than one quick drawing - I'm on a mission, in a Raymond Gubbay frame of mind. This place is ideal for entertainment.

They're playing vinyl on the sound system. Adam Faith sings, 'What do you want if you don't want money?'

Occupy's anniversary at St Paul's Cathedral: only our love hath no decay

Occupiers gather outside St Paul's Cathedral. Female wedding guests clip-clop by, exposing hefty thighs in too-short flimsy skirts. Heels tilt the pelvis provocatively. Careful on the cobbles, ladies.

The protesters are here for meditation and speeches. It's almost the anniversary of the day Occupy arrived outside the cathedral and stayed, in tents, for nearly five months, mostly cold ones.

The Dean of St Paul's, Dr David Ison, sits on the steps talking to Tanya Paton of Occupy Faith. (The following day, they will both be taking part in evensong when four chanting Occupiers chain themselves to the pulpit.)

He is the latest to try to fill the eternal vacancy left by John Donne. His appointment follows the resignation of the previous Dean who responded to Occupy's advent by closing the cathedral for a week. 


'What did you talk about?' I ask Tanya.

'Empires. Justice. How you go about changing cultures. You have to do it slowly to get it right. He talked about Bismarck and socialism. Thank goodness I've studied German history.'

So many of the Occupy faithful are here. We greet each other with kisses and cuddles. 

I draw Zeph while he meditates. Then he gives me a quartz crystal. He set up Occupy's meditation tent last year. 

Over the year I've blogged Occupy as an outsider. 'You're a witness,' says Tina-Louise to me. 'You're here to tell the truth. Sometimes it's ugly.'

Beautiful desperado Johnny Teatent, who never seems to have a full complement of anything, has just the one shoe today. Front tooth, shoe, seems it's always the police's fault. 

I'll leave you with the Dean:

The Anniversary
By John Donne

All kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun it self, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas ! as well as other princes, we
—Who prince enough in one another be—
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
But souls where nothing dwells but love
—All other thoughts being inmates—then shall prove
This or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.

And then we shall be throughly blest;
But now no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we're kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore; this is the second of our reign.

From the Privy Council to a squat

Lord Walker (extreme right) from afar

I take the wrong bus. Then I miss the right bus because I'm looking in a shop window.

My gloves have metal studs and they set off the security alarm at the Supreme Court.

I sit in on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for a nice rest.The court setting aims to give the five law lords a Mount Rushmore prominence, but from the back row their heads are the size of beads.

Lesage v the Mauritius Commercial Bank Limited concerns fraud. Mauritian law appears to be an awkward fit of the Code Napoleon and English law; the case has squeezed through the gap to get to London.

A regular supply of tourists come and go. They last a few minutes in the public seats, then negotiate silently with each other about when and how to leave.

When the lunch break comes I learn that squatter-activists, including people from Occupy, are heading to the Royal Courts of Justice for an eviction hearing. I arrange to go there with a client who's writing a newspaper article about squatting.

Law student

As I leave the Supreme Court, I'm stopped by a security guard.

Uh-oh.

'You're the one who does the drawings, aren't you!'
He beams at me. Poised. Interesting highlights on the skin.
I promise to draw him next time.

No drawing is allowed in the Royal Courts of Justice.

Laymen are too easily intimidated by a courtroom setting. Why say 'Not at this precise moment in time, my lord' instead of 'No'? Even so, the hearing is brief.

The activists cluster outside for a smoke, oblivious to the designated smoking area a few yards away.

'Look, man!' Someone points down at the formal black shoes he has worn for the courtroom. 'My feet just ain't that shape!'

Law student

'Excuse me!' A solicitor for the claimant is exasperated by the smokers blocking her way. 'Honestly!' she sighs to her colleague as she tittups away in high-heeled boots that are not the shape of human feet.

We head for the squat in High Holborn, which has been empty for 11 years and is theirs for at least 72 hours more. They are hungry. There is dried pasta but nothing to eat with it. Yes there is - some sandwiches retrieved from skips outside supermarkets. They talk about using sandwich fillings to make a sauce.

I'm too tired for drawing, the atmosphere too jumpy.

Johnny Teatent comes downstairs barefoot to greet the courtroom squad. His pale cheek has a zig-zag red wound about two days old. He's been glassed.

I go home, break a plate and cut my finger open on it. They'll find another squat.