NMP Live Meets the UK's most prominent defence and human rights lawyer, Michael Mansfield QC. In our exclusive interview Michael discusses his theories on Princess Diana’s death, our basic human right’s and how he engages both audiences and the Jury. Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Michael Mansfield QC
What made you want to become a lawyer?
The reason I chose the legal profession was the advent of television, which for some people (I am that old that television actually came along while I was a young person) was unheard of. Now, of course, every house, every mobile phone has got it, but then it was very rare and I used to have to go to a friend’s to watch it. There was a series on, and I was captivated by the series called The Defenders, an American series about a father and a son defending and investigating serious social issues, which ended up in court.
So, it wasn’t just about the court case, the court case was right at the end obviously, but most of it was about getting to know the person, what sort of things motivated the person, and why they wanted litigation. They might be defendants in the criminal case, but they might be suing somebody for environmental damage. It was the process of getting inside somebody else’s shoes, finding out how they ticked, and I said to myself ‘yeah, I’d quite like to do that’. Articulate for somebody, particularly those not used to doing it, and it’s not about winning, winning helps, but actually it’s about providing an avenue of representation so that they feel they have had their say, they feel that somebody has listened, so I thought ‘that’s for me!’
Why did you specialise in human rights?
I started when human rights wasn’t really a very common phrase, although everybody knew about it, it wasn’t on everybody’s tongue and it wasn’t an agenda, certainly not an agenda in the United Kingdom that relied on common law and rights derived in a different way – Magna Carta for example.
So there was an assumption, quite false in my view, that British society was underpinned well enough and that we didn’t need a charter, a declaration of human rights like the European Convention or the United Nations Declaration.
I came at it from a slightly different way, I didn’t come at it from the point of view of that legislation but it kind of grew incrementally by doing cases where people were unjustly accused, or people were unjustly jeopardised by their lifestyles or their economic situation, that they were disadvantaged.
I realised that I‘d had a very disadvantaged upbringing myself, it wasn’t particularly grand, it was a two up, two down in North London. I went to a respectable, but not one of the major public schools, my father sort of almost bled himself to death to send me there, well fine, and that was very kind of him, but I realised that was all quite privileged, and I lived in one house all my life and that was it, and it was sheltered.
Then you step outside, and going to Keel University, not only getting in there, but once I was there and you look around the pottery, still an extraordinarily poor area of the United Kingdom, one of the poorest areas still, it was then, I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t believe the conditions in which people were living and working, particularly women, and so I woke up to injustice from the ground level, from the grassroots.
What are a person’s basic human rights?
It’s not rocket science actually. The term has become abused, mostly by tabloids who feel that people are exploiting them. Well, I don’t think that’s right.
I think it is very important, even in the United States they have this, every man, woman and child has a card on which their rights are written. The rights are important for enabling you to create a space for yourself – a space in which you think, breathe, live, speak and so on, according to your soul, and that you are not determined by someone else saying ‘this is how you have got to think, this is how you have got to act’, which is of course the totalitarian way.
And that’s why I am really bothered by the legislation that is being proposed by this government at the moment, for basically tracking our every life, our every move, well I’m against all of that. I’m not against tracking crime and tracking terrorists, but I am against the idea that in order to do that you bulk survey. This is Animal Farm, this is Orwellian, this is exactly what he was talking about, and people are all ‘shock horror’. We are living in it now, and people actually think ‘oh well, why should we be bothered?’ and I go ‘well, I’m sorry’. It’s rather like Snowden said in the first place, ‘why should we be bothered if we haven’t got anything to hide?’ Well, it’s rather like saying why should we be bothered about freedom of speech if we have nothing to say? I mean are we slowly withering on the vine?
So, my whole consuming interest was to ensure that the battles that have been fought to get us to where we are now, where there are certain recognition of certain rights, which have obligations, to privacy, free speech, association, fair trial, and a major one is life, which is so easily expendable.
You look around the world – how many places where people are locked up, executed or whatever? Because life has become expendable, and once we treat life as expendable then I am not sure why we are here at all. So, that’s the momentum, that’s the life force.
With today’s advances in forensics, could any of your cases have had a different outcome?
In order to decide if a case I did say 30 years ago could have had a different outcome, I would obviously have to go back and find the scientists to have a look at the evidence and tell me whether they think they could have had a different outcome. Potentially, with the advent of DNA and so on, yes.
I say potentially because I personally feel there has been too much reliance placed on forensic science because it’s not written in tablets of stone. At the end of the day, science, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So, it is as much an art as it is a science. Mistakes are made – fingerprinting mistakes, DNA mistakes, it’s not that the science is fallible. The science itself is infallible. Our hands and fingers are all different, so that is not the problem. The problem is not in the science of comparing the twirls and whirls of my little finger with what’s on the piece of paper, because clearly they are capable of being compared, the problem is who does the comparison and what is it they are comparing? Are they looking at the same items and are the same number of the RICH characteristic, used to be 16, are they the same? So you begin to see how the subjective element of science intrudes and that it’s not as objective as one imagines.
Therefore, the answer to your question is that I really don’t know whether science would have made a huge difference. The difference doesn’t lie within science, it lies within another field, in which all of us – lawyers and judges and legislators – have slowly woken up.
Through some of the cases I did myself, miscarriages of justice like the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward, Tottenham Three, Cardiff Three, the miscarriages were brought about by police forces who were really committed to the usual suspects. Actually what they were doing, never mind forensic science, was they decided on who they thought was guilty and who probably was guilty of something but not the one being charged, so it’s what they call the noble rot, if you like, the ‘we have got the right person for the wrong crime’ sort of approach, and I never approved of that. Anyway, that’s what was going wrong, and that’s what went wrong in the Birmingham case, that they got the wrong people because up here they had prejudices and preconditions about who was guilty.
Is it frustrating when you feel the full truth hasn’t been revealed during a trial?
I think that in every case, whatever the result - some cases reveal the full truth but often there is a bigger story to be told, and I think in all cases the bigger story always surfaces. Now, it may not happen within the lifetime of the person concerned, so it may be historical revelations, and there are historical revelations that surface all the time.
So, in relation to Diana and Dodi, where I haven’t made my views secret at all – I actually think there wasn’t a plan to murder her, but there certainly was a plan to ensure the relationship ended and some injury was caused, but it got out of hand – that’s my approach to it and other people have other theories about it. However you look at it, whether you think it is murder, manslaughter, and the jury did not return a verdict of accident, that’s not what they said, even though the police may wish it had been that, it is not what they said – they said it was unlawful killing basically caused by following vehicles and also the behavior of the driver.
Now there are big questions that arose in the inquest that have never ever been answered, and I think still have to be answered somewhere along the line, that do relate to this. I’ll give you two examples of questions that still bother me. One is that, Henri Paul, the driver was receiving huge sums of money, which were tracked by the British police but they could never find where they had come from, they certainly didn’t come from his being a chauffeur at the Ritz – I go no further.
Second thing is a man who was reputedly in the tunnel as a photographer, called James Andanson – he is British but lived in France for a long time – always happened to be at the scene of some interesting things that were going on. He claimed, according to some, that he got photographs of what happened in the Alma tunnel.
Anyway, whether he did have that or not, his death is, in my opinion, extraordinary – that he travels hundreds of miles from Paris in his car to a plateau region called La Saque in South of France, where he buys some petrol in a nearby petrol station and then goes to a very quiet section of forest on the plateau, sets light to himself having locked the car – commits suicide. I don’t wear that.
I’ve asked many people, it’s only anecdotal, you know, if you’re going to commit suicide how would you do it? And the last thing they would do is burn themselves alive, unless you are making a public demonstration, and he wasn’t doing that. So, I don’t believe it was suicide, I never have, and I think there is a link inside that story to what happened in the Alma tunnel. There’s a link with the money that was coming to the driver to what happened in the tunnel.
Now, there are a large number of other questions that are still hanging in the air after the inquest, and I think the answers to those questions will slowly start to unravel over the next, maybe 50 years, so I will be long gone but I’m pretty sure they will come out.
Whether you’re speaking in court or at a dinner, how do you really engage people?
You have to be able to look at the audience you are addressing. The first thing is look at the person. Don’t look up there and all around – look at the person and see whether they’re actually listening to what you are saying.
Second thing is who are they? If it is possible to do a little bit of research beforehand so you do know who they are, obviously if you do know them already then that helps, and if you are seeing the same judge most days of the week you have probably worked out who he is by the time you have been in front of him for six years, or her. So, knowing the person a bit, so you know what it is that’s going chime with their approach.
Now, if you have got a jury of 12 then that’s tricky because you have got a much bigger audience and if you have got a whole audience of people you can still do it because the people who come together collectively have a personality. In fact, all the individual personalities come together and a whole audience has a personality, it will differ.
Comedians will probably have worked this one out, that they may go to the same theatre, with the same numbers of people, and it be an entirely different audience, and some nights it just goes flat, it’s not working. Now, it may not be working because maybe they are not on form and the wrong jokes or something.
So, I think, touching the audience, you have looked at them, you have worked out who they are, and then they have got to know who you are. It’s no use pontificating; they have got to know that you’re just an ordinary person. Telling personal stories about yourself I think are extremely important so they begin to engage with you, because I think that’s the thing some people say about me, they say ‘we didn’t realise actually that you’re very approachable, and actually you are quite funny now and again’ and I say, you know, that’s it. It’s because people have an image of somebody and you have got to break down the image and say I’m not actually like that, if that’s what you think.
I did it once in a very strange way at a party somebody came up and said ‘you’re Michael Mansfield’ and I said ‘no I’m not’, ‘what?’, I said, ‘I’m his brother Edward’, ‘oh, you’re his brother, oh right, um well, what’s it like?’, I said ‘dreadful! He is a right arsehole, you know, he is arrogant actually, and his views! Socialism and all the rest of it, gets on our wick, you would think he never goes to sleep! As for all the work he does, God I wish he would shut up!’ And of course this guy said ‘It’s really good to meet you’ and he shook my hand and he walked away, he walked away to another group of people and said ‘do you know who I have been talking to? I have been talking to Michael Mansfield’s brother’, and they go ‘Sorry, that is him’. And so, you know, it was one of those…it was perhaps a bit mean, but again you have got to touch them. You have got to get in there and do it against yourself.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career?
This may sound a little bit arrogant for me to say it about myself, but one of the most pleasing rewards of the whole of my career hasn’t been necessarily that I am a QC and all that, it’s been that ordinary people in the street come up very regularly and they don’t always remember exactly who I am, which is also quite comforting, but they know ‘yeah, you’re that lawyer person’. Sometimes they get the name wrong, it doesn’t really matter, then they come out with a story, usually about something I have done, sometimes I have been involved with them and sometimes I haven’t.
And so I think that when you hear the stories of people, that maybe I met 30 years ago, and they say ‘we have always remembered, funnily enough, how you made me feel – you made me feel that I’ve got to do this.’ It may be young barristers or other lawyers, and I think therefore, that getting inside life and being positive, not negative, positive about what can be achieved, that you can not only make people feel good but feel sufficiently good that they can make a different. Because most people feel disempowered and they don’t think they can do anything, they think what difference does it make whether we do this? And I always say it makes all the difference, but you wont know now what difference you have made, you may never know.
In my case I’m very fortunate, I do know because people come up and tell me. I’m lucky that I’ve lived long enough for people to do the full circle and come and say ‘wow, that was good!’
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