Judge’s 33 questions in court about how BA lost his luggage

AFTER Mr Justice Peter Smith’s luggage went missing on a British Airways flight, he was determined to get to the bottom of it.

So when the High Court judge found himself presiding over a totally unrelated case involving the airline, he seized his chance – and launched into an extraordinary rant about his lost bags.

His highly unusual outburst led to him agreeing to withdraw from the case amid claims of bias, as the Daily Mail reported last week.

Now, a transcript has been posted online showing he brought up the topic of his own luggage an incred-

‘What happened

to the bags?’

ible 33 times in a single hearing. The judge, one of Britain’s most senior justices, was presiding over a £3billion dispute involving BA, 30 other airlines and 300 claimants.

Even though it had nothing to do with his own quarrel with BA, he waited only a few minutes before asking its barrister Jon Turner QC: ‘Here is a question for you. What happened to the luggage?’

When Mr Turner replied that they were not dealing with that issue, the judge demanded: ‘Do you want me to order your chief executive to appear before me?’

In another outburst, Mr Justice Smith said: ‘BA … clearly know what happened to the luggage because … they cannot have accidentally left the whole of the flight’s luggage off the plane, can they?’ And in a written judgment explaining why he withdrew from the case, he again commented on his bags. Referring to his return flight from Italy on July 10, he said: ‘Six people were summoned to the departure desk and told they were bumped off the flight.

‘It turns out that they were the lucky ones, because they got their luggage back.’ Yesterday a spokesman for the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office confirmed he was being investigated.