Defending the Guilty author Alex McBride on the truth about life as a blundering, backstabbing barrister
Who’d be a barrister? The clock reads 3.29am. I’m wide awake and trying to find an escape route. I’ve screwed things up; made a basic error which is going to sink my client, Simon. His arson trial has barely started and I’m already staring at defeat.
The prosecution’s case is that Simon and Brian went to steal red diesel from diggers in an industrial estate, but having failed to get the caps off the diggers’ tanks, Simon broke into an adjacent complex of Portakabin offices and burned them to the ground. Simon admits the red diesel but not the arson. Who can blame him? He’s looking at five years in prison, while his little daughter grows up without him.
Cross-examining Brian, the prosecution’s sole witness, had been going so well. He had admitted he wasn’t facing an arson charge like Simon, because he’d informed on his mate. This made him look untrustworthy in front of the jury - as if he would say anything to get himself out of trouble.
But then, leaning on the lectern, hubris came calling.
“Simon didn’t say, ‘I’m going to torch the place’, did he?” As soon as the words left my lips, I knew I’d messed up. One of the golden rules of criminal defence is: never “verbal” your own client - in other words, put guilty-sounding words into his mouth.
At one stroke, I had sketched out a credible-sounding scenario in which Simon was the guilty party. The judge, an ex-solicitor who liked nothing more than watching the junior bar blow it, smiled delightedly.
The only people who’d enjoy my disaster more than the judge were my fellow pupil barristers: Harriet, Hannah, Will, and Liam, especially Liam. In the pupils’ room, a squalid basement with a scarred table and an overwhelmed ashtray, my defeat was going to be cheered. Once word got out, they’d be figuring out how to use it against me, without, of course, looking as though they had. We were in a fight to the death for tenancy, a permanent job in chambers. There could be only one winner.
I started to write about my pupillage mishaps really to bear witness. The pieces became a column in Prospect magazine and then a book which was serialised on Radio 4. There was a gap in the market: other barrister memoirs tended to be about how brilliant the barrister was, paladins of justice righting wrongs against the odds. That wasn’t me: when you’re a screw-up criminal barrister, write what you know.
Years later, someone in a television company read my book and realized that desperate, back stabbing pupil barristers is a great premise for a sitcom. The television company hooked me up with a top-notch comedy writer called Kieron Quirke. There’s nothing like a smart outside eye to get the measure of a thing. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville did it with 19th century America and I like to think Kieron, with some help from me, has done it with the junior Criminal Bar except with more laughs.
Of course crime is not a laughing matter, but the first few episodes avoid dark and upsetting stories and concentrate, instead, on fleshing out the characters and the world they work in. As the series unfolds things do get a bit darker, however. The twists are still funny, but they become colder, and more poignant.
It’s a peculiar experience having your old life turned into a comedy. Will Sharpe, who plays idealistic pupil Will Packham, is a ‘sort of’ me, who’s come to the Bar late having hit the nearly-30 panic button marked, ‘Law’. His fellow pupils are now Danielle and Pia (Gwyneth Keyworth and Hanako Footman). The pupils update their odds of getting tenancy on a board in the pupils’ room and continually try to shaft each other in hilarious ways.
The series also reveals some of the tricks of the trade, like dressing your client. When someone’s on trial for a pub fight, you don’t want them walking into the witness box looking like a blinged up second division footballer, you want Marks & Spencer’s head to toe. A barrister’s job is to present their client’s case in the best possible light, and yes, that includes their wardrobe.
Another wheeze when the evidence is against you is trying to unearth what the prosecution might be hiding. They have a duty to disclose all relevant information which assists your client’s defence. The question in Defending the Guilty’s first episode is whether the prosecution have an informant they have failed to declare.
Defending the Guilty, the show, has a freedom which I as a working barrister did not when I wrote the book. My pupil supervisors stayed in the background. I worried that writing about them might jeopardise my future employment prospects. I was a bit in love with mine. She was beautiful and fun and wise. Will’s pupil mistress, Katherine Parkinson’s spiky defence barrister with a heart, is at the centre of the show, and in a battle of her own with her mid-table rival, Ashley (Prasanna Puwanarajah).
Defending the Guilty is also a love letter to the classic archetypes that populate the Criminal Bar: the ‘Peter Cook’, dressed like he’s in the 1920s with a girlfriend younger than his daughter; the ‘Gerrard’s Cross’, the commuter who arrives at court drunk but, somehow, manages to stay awake long enough to get his client a result; or my favourite, the ‘Reinvention’, with a changed name, a drugs supplier, and murky past in forgery and prostitutes.
But, the series is also a tribute to the Bar. It has done a brilliant job in providing clever, determined people from all backgrounds, genders and ethnicities a way into a high status profession. The best barristers in my pupil’s room were women. They were smarter, scarier and much more organised. Now they are the stars of the Bar, prosecuting and defending in the gravest cases. If I were accused of a crime, I’d be glad to see anyone of them heading my way.
This is now under threat. Since 2010, savage cuts have, year by year run down the criminal justice system to the point of collapse. In Defending the Guilty we call it a creaky system, a cosy, but pointed understatement. We now live in a world where prosecutions are replaced by endless police re-bails, where investigations don’t happen, and trials are repeatedly adjourned for the lack of just about everything, leaving victims, witnesses and defendants to suffer.
Many of the clever young barristers in my pupil’s room couldn’t afford to come to the Criminal Bar now. Without them the vital function of making the justice system work fails, and we’re left with the sort of impunity that you’d expect in a banana republic, not Britain.
What about Simon, the maybe, maybe not arsonist?
There is another trick of the trade deployed by barristers: blame the other guy. Blame Brian! His hesitant testimony gave the impression he was trying to hide something. The fact that he’d said in his witness statement that Simon was going to torch the place but failed to say it under oath was "proof" he knew it was a lie. I got lucky. I had a university town jury - nice people with backgrounds in liberal arts, best in the criminal defence business. To everyone’s astonishment, Simon was not guilty.
Was that the right verdict? The offices were insured. No one got hurt. A little girl had her dad. And me? I slept soundly in my bed, until the next disaster.
Defending the Guilty begins on September 17 at 10pm on BBC Two