MONDAY 23 DECEMBER 2013
So far, the grub is OK. As I come down the stairs from Court Number 9 at the Old Bailey, at about the time I would be making my morning cup of coffee, I don’t know what to expect. I have just been sentenced to six months in prison. I go down the narrow flight of stairs from the dock and I am handed over to a polite woman who handcuffs me to her wrist. Prison life has begun.
The Homebase-looking wooden panelling of the court quickly gives way to the old institutional cream stone and concrete wall of schools, hospitals and police stations from my schooldays in the ’60s. I am marched, no, accompanied, along a narrow corridor. Doors open and shut. The clanging sound of doors is the most common sound in a prison. Heavy doors and noisy keys tell me I have left freedom and entered captivity.
There is no hostility or even interest. I am being processed. It will take time to get used to who is who. With a mixture of Irish and Polish blood, my default personality setting is anti-authority. After experiences of being arrested in political demonstrations in Britain, Europe, even South Africa, I know the correct posture: be polite, head-down, cooperative. Inside, you may be boiling over with injustice or your own idiocy, but there is no point in fussing once in the hands of men and women in uniform.
There is a first time for everything and my natural curiosity and journalistic instincts take over as I try to make a mental note of what is going on. The first stop is a counter where my details – name, address and date of birth – are entered in a register. This is the world of ledgers and big, bound books. Computers have no place.
In my anorak, over a formal suit, there is a thriller in the pocket. A friend who has done time inside warned me to make sure I had books with me. My suitcase, which always amused the press as I trundled backwards and forwards off the number 11 bus to the Old Bailey, is full of books. I am taken back to a small cell where I get out the thriller and start reading.
After a short while, the door opens. ‘Legal visit,’ I am informed. I follow the guard down the long corridor to a cream-painted interview room. I was never really sure of the point of having lawyers at the end of a long process that began with the BNP making a complaint about me in 2009. Martin Rackstraw, my solicitor, comes from Bindmans, the wonderful King’s Cross firm founded by the great Sir Geoffrey Bindman decades ago. It has been the left-liberal reference point for so many people in trouble with the police. I have been using them for forty years and have always liked the different solicitors there.
Martin had found a barrister, Mark Milliken-Smith QC, who had done his best. I suspect he knew, as I did, that my case was never to be about truth or justice or proportionality, but was intensely small p and big P political.
Like a journalist, or perhaps a politician, the judge had the facts wrong in his sentencing statement. My QC is dismayed that a 65-year-old first time criminal who had not profited from the offence, whose case file had already been closed by the CPS and the Metropolitan Police, and where the contested moneys were nugatory, is now to spend Christmas in prison.
I calm him down. The judge who insisted on sentencing me is already a part-timer on the court of appeal and destined for full-time appeal court work. So appealing against his sentence to his own friends, all from the same back
