STEPHEN WARD AND THE ESTABLISHMENT LYNCH MOB
‘Stephen Ward was Innocent OK,’ Geoffrey Robertson QC Biteback Publishing
In a very crowded field
the prize for the most smug, self satisfied, and complacent British institution
must surely go to the British judiciary. Despite a catalogue of instances in
which the courts failed dismally, Stefan Kisko, The Birmingham Six, the
Guildford Four, to name but three, the self congratulatory
attitude of British judges remains untouched. They dispense, so they believe
and given half the chance will tell you, the finest justice in the world.
Nothing it seems can burst this pompous bubble of complacency.
When reading Geoffrey
Robertson’s book what strikes you most is not however judicial incompetence but
sheer brutal spite and malevolence, for Ward was not simply a victim of
injustice, he was the victim of an establishment lynch mob.
The trail at the Old
Bailey, not normally a venue used for hearing minor criminal cases, represented heresy hunting 20th
century style. Ward’s real crime was his class background, his attitude to
sexual promiscuity and his obvious delight in hedonism. Such delights were of
course not new to the ruling classes, what was new, in the eyes of the
establishment, was the intrusion of a jumped up little middle class osteopath. Bad
enough, Justice Marshall you can almost hear thinking, for people of standing
to engage in loose morals but to have such activities facilitated by a
glorified GP!
To say that Ward did not
receive a fair trial is a bit like saying the indigenous populations of the America
Ward was convicted of
living on immoral earnings, whilst all the evidence pointed to the fact that
the girls concerned, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, were in fact
sponging of him. Both girls were widely described as being ‘prostitutes,’ not
least in parliament by members of the Labour Party-not its finest hour- without
a scrap of evidence that this was the case. It was in fact untrue, though by
the standards of 1963 any single girl who admitted enjoying sex, particularly
with more than one man, fell into the same category. Keeler had already
perjured herself in another trial, something that the judge, in one of the most
improper aspects of the trial, was prevented from putting before the jury, as
this would have ruled Keeler’s evidence inadmissible and the case against Ward to crumble.
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| Stephen Ward in the hands of the righteous |
Justice Marshall’s summing
up was so biased against Ward that he gave up hope and took his own life, a
victim of the establishment closing ranks and staking out a suitable scapegoat.
Ward in so many ways
presents as a tragic figure, he seems to have experienced a substantial portion of pleasure
vicariously, he enjoyed playing the matchmaker, he enjoyed being the
facilitator of other peoples pleasure as much as he enjoyed his own. Sex, he
understood, amongst many other things is an exiting game that gave pleasure to men
and, herein was his greatest heresy, to women.
He trusted the establishment circles in which he moved and also provided valuable intelligence to MI5, both however deserted him when he was arrested and charged. The only person who emerges with any decency from the whole sorry saga is Mandy Rice Davies, vilified as a ‘tart’ and a ‘harlot’ at the time of the trial. She protested Stephen Ward’s innocence then and has continued to defend his reputation ever since. So if Mandy, in the arcane vernacular of the time was ‘a tart’ give me the company of a tart any time over the hypocritical, bigoted and pompous judiciary and two faced and deceitful aristocratic liars who passed judgement on Stephen Ward.
He trusted the establishment circles in which he moved and also provided valuable intelligence to MI5, both however deserted him when he was arrested and charged. The only person who emerges with any decency from the whole sorry saga is Mandy Rice Davies, vilified as a ‘tart’ and a ‘harlot’ at the time of the trial. She protested Stephen Ward’s innocence then and has continued to defend his reputation ever since. So if Mandy, in the arcane vernacular of the time was ‘a tart’ give me the company of a tart any time over the hypocritical, bigoted and pompous judiciary and two faced and deceitful aristocratic liars who passed judgement on Stephen Ward.
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| Mandy Rice Davies (left) and Christine Keeler |
The book is in fact a
direct appeal to the Criminal Convictions Review panel to overturn the
conviction. In doing so he illustrates two further scandals, firstly that the
Denning enquiry into the Profumo affair is still classified and looks to remain
so for the foreseeable future, second and far more scandalous is the fact that
the trial transcript itself is also kept secret. This is truly an abuse of power on a
large scale; justice must not only be fair it must also be open. The transcript
contains statements made in open court; the only possible reason
for keeping the transcript secret is the fear of exposure, that to do so would
reveal just how improper the conduct of the trial was.[1]
Does any of this matter now? Well, aside from righting an historic wrong, it is important that the establishment is not permitted to bury its misdemeanour's and that those who hold power be allowed to believe that they can simply stuff evidence into an envelope which they then stamp ‘secret.’ The call for justice in the Stephen Ward case should not be a plea but a demand.
[1] I will be writing to my MP
about this, I suggest that you think about doing the same.
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