I hate when you see a film and after one scene you know what’s going to happen.

January 24, 2025 – Noomi Rapace

Despite all our best intentions, we find change rather more difficult to effect, both as a species and a profession, than we imagine. We end December full of resolve to do things differently the following year only to find by the end of January that it has all gone wrong. This is especially true when it comes to prediction. Despite our regular experience that we are rather poor at working out what the future really holds, we soon find ourselves falling back into old habits of confidently predicting it.

The Bar is no exception to this vice. There are those of us still around who remember when the law permitted the Defence in a criminal trial to object to up to seven jurors before they were sworn without having to demonstrate cause. Then the number was dropped to three and eventually fell to zero. We knew that our American colleagues had a right both to peremptory challenge of a certain number of jurors and the ability to challenge for cause in the case of any juror who might be suspected of bias. This involved examining potential jurors by both sides to try and ascertain whether bias or partiality existed. Indeed, a whole industry was devoted to the techniques of this dark art.

The English predictably preferred a totally random process of jury selection, nowadays without any amelioration. In the days of peremptory challenges, I remember how many barristers professed to have skills of divination to establish which jurors should be unceremoniously dumped. They forgot that potential jurors also understood the process. I had a friend, a radical young criminologist, who saw all punishment as evil, who was removed from every jury during his period of service simply by wearing a tweed jacket and carrying a copy of The Telegraph prominently under his arm to catch the eye of the defendants’ counsel. Indeed, I suggested the ploy to him as I knew his university thesis on juvenile recidivism was way overdue.

Sports commentators too often exercise a professed ability to foresee events. I much enjoy watching snooker on television. Like the Parliament Channel it can be combined with paperwork – a comfortable background of bearable noise punctuated by very occasional moments of interest. Only recently, I heard a commentator say that one player was so far behind he could not now win, clearly forgetting that he himself had overcome double the deficit in a memorable match which lasted until the early hours; an event which those who saw it always recall.

It turns out, however, that I am just as bad. I spent most of the time between Christmas and New Year fretting about having seen Paddy Corkhill, one of my oldest and most beloved friends in Chambers, clearly entertaining a woman who was not his wife in the restaurant to which I always went with friends every Christmas for my Christmas Dinner, as I recorded in my previous diary entry. Paddy had accosted me in the loo, having seen me see him in the restaurant. His excuse, which seemed to revolve around his having had too much spare time on his hands after his Recorder sittings had been cancelled in a current and counter-productive Treasury economy drive, seemed to add national significance to this domestic tragedy.

I had imagined what the news would be like for his wife, his family and his friends. The gossip at the Bar, the sniggers as he visited local hostelries. I had it all mapped out, even down to the involvement of mediators and the family Bar. So, I was rather disconcerted when I went into Chambers after New Year to see Paddy swanning round in the basement common room. After we had eyed each other for a second or two, I dragged him off to my room. It turned out that my predictions were very wide of the mark. The lady in question, a family friend, had been recruited by Mrs Corkhill to cheer Paddy as he moped around the house instead of sitting at some Crown Court and, since Mrs C was in fact staying with an ill sister, Mrs C’s friend (herself widowed) thought it would be kind to treat Paddy to his Christmas Day Dinner at this favourite restaurant of hers. That was where I had seen her before. His look of horror in the restaurant, it turned out, had in fact been because he saw my look of horror and imagined that I might be getting the wrong end of the stick. Oh dear! I feel rather guilty now.