On the day that Katie Hopkins’ wilful disregard for the truth landed her, and the Daily Mail, in £150,000 worth of piping hot water, it is reassuring to see that she has not been deterred from jumping straight back on her unicorn.
After Hopkins viciously libelled a family of Muslims as Al-Qaeda supporters in her MailOnline column, a grovelling apology was pushed out on her behalf by the Mail, and was meekly (and, we can safely assume, by obligation of the terms of the settlement) tweeted by Hopkins herself at 2am this morning, in the following sincere terms:
The Mahmood family – an apology https://t.co/PaLFWgn3Hx
— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) December 19, 2016
Happily, for anyone who might have missed this display of fulsome contrition, Twitter was on hand to ensure that it reaches an audience commensurate with that which consumed the false story in the first place. Hopkins though has moved on to bigger and better things, including retweeting her latest column. Which is on the law.
And so, with a heavy sigh, I rise to make the following brief observations, accuracy being I am sure uppermost in Hopkins’ mind at the present time.
Hopkins is exercised about the case of Sgt Alexander Blackman, whom you may otherwise know as “Marine A”. Sgt Blackman was convicted in November 2013 by a Court Martial of the murder of an injured Afghan prisoner after shooting him at point blank range, while on tour in Afghanistan in 2011. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 10 years, reduced to 8 years on appeal. His original appeal against conviction was dismissed, but he now has a further bite of the cherry after the Criminal Cases Review Commission considered that further information relating to Blackman’s mental state at the time of shooting gives rise to new grounds of appeal.
Which is where Hopkins enters. Because her latest column sees her accompany the supporters of Sgt Blackman to the Royal Courts of Justice last Friday, 16 December 2016, where the case was listed before the Court Martial Appeal Court for an application for bail pending the full appeal hearing. And from her vantage point she is able to offer some brief, sage observations on the criminal justice system.
She begins with the following opener:
“Big Al is not even here. He’s keeping clear of the courts in case he jinxes the outcome, preferring to stay and wait quietly, hoping, holding his breath.”
I don’t pretend to be intimately acquainted with the case, but I would observe that section 27 of the Court-Martial (Appeals) Act 1968 provides that an appellant has no right to be present at any proceedings preliminary to an appeal (unless the Court grants him leave), so it’s a curious narrative spin. But who knows – maybe he did apply for leave to be present, have it granted and then turn it down out of superstition. Maybe Hopkins knows something I don’t.
But where I take stronger issue is with the concluding paragraphs, as Hopkins describes how the proceedings are adjourned:
“Then bad news came. This will not be sorted yet. An adjournment. Another week of waiting whilst the prosecution make more submissions.
This wasn’t how I imagined it to be. This was not the happy Christmas the street lights were promising. This was not what we came for. This was awful.
‘The judge is a wanker’ shouted an angry man in the crowd, cross, disappointed.
I am not certain this is true.
But I am sure the law is an ass. A law which goes after our own soldiers, when migrant rapists have human rights to a family life here. A law which tells our Chelsea pensioners they are being investigated for their efforts in Northern Ireland forty years ago when ex IRA sympathisers, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness can assume power, blame free.
I walk away despondent. And wonder, if those judges had to spend another seven days behind bars at Christmas, or their wives endure more time horribly alone, whether they would adjourn a hearing quite so casually ever again.”
The penultimate paragraph is a Hopkins special – a proper old-fashioned brew of non-sequitur and urban legend – but it’s the final line that needs challenge, seeing as this is the dum-dum-dum Eastenders dramatic finish, the rhetorical swirl of her sign-off.
Judge-bashing is of course terribly modish, but in between the schoolgirl giggles at “wanker” judges and condemnation of their “casually” adjourning the hearing, there is space for some cold, hard fact. Fact which Hopkins could have easily discerned by listening to what the Court in fact said. And by reading what it published when explaining why the hearing had been adjourned. Which was as follows:
So, as we can all see, this wasn’t the Court lazily knocking off for an early Friday finish. Or casually adjourning the case for a week because it doesn’t care about the liberty of the subject. But because the CCRC had not served its full reference – the document setting out the details of its investigation and the evidence behind its conclusions – on the prosecution. And the prosecution was therefore unable to indicate its stance on the appeal, or the issue of bail.
I go to these lengths to pick up on these tiny points, because each time an idiot with an audience or their paymasters tell 2 million people that our judges are corrupt, or are wankers, or don’t care about decent normal folk, or are enemies of the people, this all bit by bit chips away at public faith in the rule of law. There is a lot to get upset about when it comes to the administration of law in this country. And often much to legitimately criticise in various judicial decisions. But when sensible, level criticism gives way to name-calling and baseless accusations of bias or negligence, it cheapens debate and demeans public life.
If we had a functioning Lord Chancellor, she might say something like that to warn off the Hopkins of this world. As we don’t, I shall have to rely on a complaint to IPSO. Unless of course, Hopkins wishes, in the spirit of her recent discovery of penitence, to withdraw her unpleasant and untrue attack on the judges and publish a full apology and clarification.
She might even consider tweeting it during working hours.