Nice to Send You Down: To Send You Down, Nice

Dear Diary,

It appears that Mr Bruce Hyman of counsel is on his way to prison. He decided that his client’s case would be assisted if Mr Hyman were to create a fake Judgment and send it to the father of the children in the custody dispute in which Mr Hyman was instructed. He sent it to the father, who promptly cited it to the Judge, believing it to be genuine. Mr Hyman then struck and accused the father of forgery.

The Guardian has the story, complete with sympathetic references to Mr Hyman and why such a successful man should do such a thing. Laughably, it matters to Mr James Doward, that Hyman’s dinner parties were “eagerly awaited”. This seems to be based on the fact that Brucie was a media producer and hence automatically to be admired by the Guardian and its fellow travellers. Indeed, in the Guardian’s pecking order, media producers are only just below right-wing Islamic preachers unwanted anywhere but Britain. Dear Diary, the dinner parties of Lucrezia Borgia were also much admired. 

Depressingly, I fear that Mr Hyman was yet another ’successful’ man who thought that being a barrister was both easy and important. In reality, most of the time it is neither. But for those who feel that way it is vital to win. The proposition that the Bar is about assisting justice is lost on such people. The scale of the dishonesty can range from misrepresenting whether one has photographs to full scale forgery, depending on the how overweening is the self-confidence of the barrister involved. Fortunately there are remarkably few such people: very soon their numbers will be reduced by one…

Another depressing feature is that such barristers tend to be, as Tucker would say, completely shite. A look at the Judgment faked by Brucie reveals the following deficiencies: 

• The citation is EWHC not EWCA.
• The Court is referred to as ‘The Panel’
• The Court of Appeal is supposed to have consisted of 2 Lords Justices, not 3.
• Lord Justice Wall is supposed to have uttered the words, “Harsh criticism of the kind which has characterised this case (and regrettably, many others) is potentially a cause of such perceptions and if they occur then it is clear that the sensible course of action is for the judge in question to remit the case to a different judge, who in any event will be able to review the case with fresh eyes”. Whilst Brucie may well write such hideous English it is difficult to conceive of one of Her Majesty’s Lords Justices doing so.

Brucie will be sentenced on 19th September. It should be 12 months. Ms Recorder VM might well give rather more. I will await the outcome with interest: it seems to me that Brucie might be about to discover that the time is ripe to rerun ‘Porridge’.