Smouldering fury – then his parents snapped
FOR the best part of an hour-and-a-half, Charlie Gard’s mother managed to maintain a composure bordering on the heroic. Connie Yates was furiously busy, scribbling notes, thrusting them in to the hands of the family’s lawyers when not firing off texts to medical experts around the world – anything at all which might just keep the door marked ‘hope’ ajar for her desperately ill little boy.
Her frantic efforts were as agonising to watch as her partner’s smouldering fury. Chris Gard preferred to sit, head down, staring at one of his son’s favourite toys, a little stuffed brown monkey clasped between his trembling hands. Pale and stressed beyond comprehension, the couple finally snapped.
As the barrister for Great Ormond Street Hospital coolly restated her client’s position – that Charlie’s life support machinery should be switched off because of his ‘irreversible brain damage’ – Mr Gard could contain himself no more. ‘When are you going to start telling the truth?’ he yelled. Connie piled in, too.
‘It’s very hard to sit here and hear this when it’s not true,’ she said, doing her level best to hold back the tears. In most cases in most courts, a judge would explode with dire warnings against any further such interventions. But as Mr Justice Francis himself was the first to admit, this continues to be an extraordinary case making extraordinary demands of all involved, none more so than Charlie’s parents.
He deplored the fact that they had been deprived of legal aid, while also praising their legal team for providing services free of charge. Court 47 of the High Courts of Justice was packed, an exasperated usher eventually locking the door on press and public crowded outside. Journalists from all over the world had turned up, many from Italy and America, the two countries which have now offered Charlie Gard the prospect of pioneering medical treatment. Here too were friends and well-wishers from ‘ Charlie’s Army’, the vast online diaspora of supporters of the 11-month-old from West London.
Katie Gollop QC, for the hospital, resumed her argument against the family’s case for taking Charlie abroad for treatment.
She may be a briskly efficient operator going about her job but there was something in Ms Gollop’s manner which jarred in these most delicate of proceedings.
Charlie’s mother, she said airily, had contradicted herself by claiming in interviews that treatment overseas might have a ten per cent chance of success or a 50 per cent chance, or even ‘make Charlie a normal boy’ – and that the parents were being ‘unhelpful’.
THESE are inconsistencies, of course, but it seemed unnecessary to traduce what was obviously the desperate wishful thinking of a mother at her wit’s end.
Ms Gollop even asked the judge to stop Charlie’s parents badgering the hospital for further medical records to prop up their case. It was imposing an extra burden on staff resources. ‘It’s to do with the computer system the hospital operates,’ she explained. ‘It takes one person hours and hours of work.’ A feeble argument which would do no credit to any public organisation, least of all a world-famous hospital like Great Ormond Street Hospital if it wants to convince us all of its unimpeachable wisdom in stopping Charlie Gard from having one last throw of the dice.
I was suddenly reminded of that Great Ormond Street worker who appeared on BBC Question Time after the EU referendum saying she hoped Brexiteers would suffer the horror of having a sick child.
It may be a great and venerable institution – but is it infallible?
Connie Yates, who had been trying to calm herself with deep breathing, snapped once more. ‘They told us we could go to America if we raised the money!’ she shouted, quoting what Great Ormond Street had told her and her partner back in January. ‘That is what they told us! Please, he’s our son!’ ‘ Disgusting!’ shouted Mr Gard.
ONCE more, Mr Justice Francis remained calm and sympathetic. He was adamant that he would only be moved by fresh evidence and gave the family until tomorrow to supply it. He would not, he said, be swayed by Twitter (for which read ‘Donald Trump’) and nor was he troubled by ‘public perception’. Outside the High Court, there was no doubt which way that was leaning. A posse of protestors, mainly young mums, held up posters urging passing traffic to honk its support. Back there came much honking. There was also the usual hotch-potch of oddballs who are drawn to a big media bunfight on the court steps. Spider-Man had chosen to lend his support yesterday.
Yet, by the end of an emotional afternoon which took us deep in to the minutiae of mitochondrial depletion syndrome and ‘analogues between TK2 and RRM2B treatments’, we were back in the same place, pondering the same, simple clash of arguments: a medical establishment, on one hand, saying that nothing can be done, versus a family not prepared to concede defeat as long as there is someone, somewhere saying that something might be done.