The Birmingham Six. The Guildford Four. The Mangrove Nine. The McLibel Two. The Angry Brigade. Kenneth Noye. Valerio Viccei. Bloody Sunday. The Marchioness disaster. Stephen Lawrence. Hillsborough. Grenfell. The landmark cases in which Michael Mansfield KC has been involved as a barrister add up to a legal panorama of the last half-century. Now in his 80s, he has written what amounts to a call to arms for anyone who feels despair at the state of our justice system, our politics – and our planet.
The book, The Power in the People, aims to highlight the achievements of those who have fought injustice, secrecy or bigotry. “People are fed up with the fact that we seem to be in a hopeless situation in which we have feckless people in power who pay no real regard to the constituencies they represent,” says Mansfield. “I don’t think we have a parliamentary system that reflects the public any more.”
Mansfield was one of a group of young lawyers, both barristers and solicitors, who emerged during the 1970s and who felt indignation at the state of the justice system but were far from indifferent. The last time I sat down to interview him was 35 years ago, just after watching him in Knightsbridge crown court as he defended Frank Crichlow, who ran the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill and was a frequent target of the police. Crichlow had been charged with possession of drugs, including heroin, and told me confidently during the trial that he trusted Mansfield completely. The jury, after listening to the barrister’s withering attack on the evidence, duly returned a not guilty verdict.
Now we are sitting in the home in rural Warwickshire that Mansfield shares with his third wife, Yvette Greenway. A picture of their wedding in Belfast in 2019 stands alongside a Banksy in the sitting room, and the countrified nature of the house is embodied by the brief appearence of a field mouse which is cheerfully escorted outside by Yvette. A former colleague with whom he worked on the McLibel case in 1997 is now the leader of the opposition. Did he ever consider a similar move?
Although never a member of the Labour party, he was once asked to stand by a north-east England constituency. “I said: ‘It’s very kind of you’ but the Labour party has never really been something that attracts me. I was conscious of highly principled people who had entered politics, and it had played havoc with their lives and their minds. I just feel you get corrupted by a system. People are criticising the present leader as only reacting to Tories. He is a very solid, bright, person, however he hasn’t got the charisma.” He is an admirer of Neal Lawson, co-founder of cross-party campaign organisation Compass, who has faced expulsion from the Labour party for tweeting about parties cooperating to defeat the Tories. He also supports proportional representation. “The two-party system is a straitjacket,” he says.
On Jeremy Corbyn, he reckons that “he had the message but he didn’t have the envelope to put it in. I think he’s very hard done by and I hope he stands as an independent and gets elected”.
While he might not want to join a party, some of his political views have landed him in hot water. Five years ago, he faced criticism from some quarters for his support for Labour Against the Witchhunt, a group formed in late 2017 to campaign against what it regards as politically motivated allegations of antisemitism in the Labour party.
He said he had joined it in order “to defend the right of those who wished to voice legitimate criticisms of the government of Israel and their repeated violation of international law from being unfairly categorised as antisemitic”. Subsequently, he withdrew as a sponsor after he was shown tweets from the campaign which he described as “completely unacceptable”.
He said he still wanted “to maintain my enduring support for a responsible and vigorous critique of any government which flagrantly undermines the rule of law”.
As for the government and its desire to quit the European Court of Human Rights? “It’s extraordinary. [Suella] Braverman sees the rule of law as ‘wokeism’. Theresa May, on the other hand, as prime minister was wrong person, wrong time but as home secretary was readily accessible and open to argument.”
He points out that at the end of the second world war, legal welfare was regarded as essential as the national health service, and he bemoans the vast cuts in legal aid and that more than half the law centres that existed a decade ago have closed. “We have an austerity situation, a bit like the national health service, but it doesn’t get the same publicity until barristers go on strike.”
As for the recent decision, in the wake of the Lucy Letby case, that defendants should be forced to appear in court for sentencing: “I think that somebody who is convicted of such a horrific crime should have to face the consequences. I wouldn’t want somebody dragged up in handcuffs but there are other ways, such as broadcasting into wherever the guilty person is so that the whole proceedings can’t be blotted out.” He favours cameras in court for trials in general: “There are all sorts of preconditions that have to be observed, but the public needs to see what is going on.”
A decade ago he took part in the staging of a test trial for “ecocide” to explore how such a case might be made. Could he envisage that in reality? “I think it’s entirely achievable. So often corporations can get away with things. They get fined, they can dodge it on a personal basis, for example – but this would ensure that there is a person at the centre of the case.” In his book he recounts how he came to “start treating the planet as a client on whose behalf you are articulating and advocating for earthly rights”.
He has also been acting as counsel for the bereaved families in the Grenfell inquiry and had seen the plays Grenfell: Value Engineering by Richard Norton-Taylor and Nick Kent and, more recently, Grenfell – In the Words of Survivors by Gillian Slovo. He is involved in the ongoing inquiry on behalf of the family of Dawn Sturgess, who died in 2018 as a result of Novichok poisoning in Salisbury.
He also represents families of those who died in the 1972 Springhill massacre, when five Catholics were killed by the British Army in West Belfast.
In 2015, his daughter, Anna, took her own life around the time he met Greenway. “By chance, she had lost a close friend in the same way.” He spoke at Anna’s funeral. “I used the word ‘suicide’ all the way through and didn’t think about it but when I finished a large group of people said: ‘Wow, you said it – you used the word.’ I realised that suicide had been a crime and people feel it’s a tainted word and there’s a taboo.” He and Greenway formed the organisation Silence of Suicide (SOS).
“The idea is like Alcoholics Anonymous in that you have people in a room, those who have attempted it, or are thinking about it, or are bereaved, or those who are just interested.” The aim is to provide a safe haven for people to talk and “remove the shame, stigma and silence”. They have since taken SOS to the Ministry of Justice, to Bristol prison, to Next staff and to many universities. It functions four to five days a week with a bank of volunteers.
Although he is involved, with fellow barrister Lorna Hackett, in a podcast called Two Heads, he finds other ways to relax. “I’ve got a set of drums upstairs which I use a lot, beating the living daylights out of them. I was in a group many years ago. Or I go outside and I sit in the garden and I become a jelly. I do nothing.
“For the first time in a rather busy life I’m able to just sit down and just think. The only part of my body that is still functioning properly is the brain. I think you’ve got to exercise it.”
Having just completed his book, what is he reading himself? Four books are on the go: Black and British by David Olusoga; a local Warwickshire history by Ronald Binns; the Walter Scott novel Kenilworth; and The Skripal Files by Mark Urban.
He has been a vegeterian since seeing The Animals Film, directed by Victor Schonfeld, in Channel 4’s opening days in 1982 and is a patron of the charity Viva!. Fellow patron Benjamin Zephaniah was for a year a poet in residence at Mansfield’s chambers. In his book he quotes Zephaniah’s poem, which refers to the case of Ricky Reel, who died in 1997, aged 20, in mysterious circumstance and whose family Mansfield represented. The death is now being reinvestigated. The poem includes the words: “There is a great wickedness here / And it thrives on people who do nothing.”
And doing nothing is something of which no one could ever seriously accuse Michael Mansfield KC.
The Power in the People is published by Monoray, £14.99
