Our British rights have been sold for a Yankee pottage
MIDDLE Britain’s Christopher Tappin can not have known as he stewed in his Texan cell, staring at a striped, foreign sky, but his wife Elaine did him proud.
In patent leather shoes, smart skirt and dogtooth jacket Mrs Tappin, 62, stepped in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee and stiffened her giblets. She proceeded, in a voice not always level, to tell MPS about her husband’s extradition to an American prison.
She was dressed as though for a memorial service or an RNLI fundraiser. Civic worthy. Pillar of the Home Counties. They don’t come much more English than the Tappins. Her grey hair was stylishly, modestly cut. A woman you might meet at the library or Waitrose. One for voluntary work, rose pruning, thank-you letters. One of Cameron’s people, you’d once have said. Not now. Mr Cameron is spending his political capital like a man burning £50 notes.
The only thing betraying Mrs Tappin was a tremor i n her clasped hands and exhaustion under her pretty eyes. With something of Virginia Bottomley to her manner, she breathed deeply and gulped as she described her family’s vortex into legal hell.
The cops had bashed on the door one dawn as the retired Tappins slept. It turned out Christopher had for months been wanted by U.S. courts as a ‘fugitive’. No one had told him. He was captain of his local golf club. It was hardly the furtive behaviour of an Osama bin Laden.
As Mr Tappin himself suggested at Heathrow Airport on Sunday before his exile, we seem to have one law for the Abu Qatadas of this world, another for English grandfathers. Orpington, Kent, the new Peshawar, seedbed of terrorism? As John Mcenroe once told a Wimbledon official: ‘You cannot be serious.’
Each stage of the nightmare, the Tappins trusted in the Queen’s justice. Each time their hopes were crushed. ‘ We were dumbfounded,’ Elaine Tappin said quietly. At other points they were ‘ beyond shocked’, ‘stunned’, felt ‘utter devastation’. She spoke the words softly, a woman unused to hyperbole.
Extradition proceedings had not allowed them – not once – to test the evidence against them. How, said Mrs Tappin, could that be right? ‘Isn’t that a cornerstone of British justice?’
Pah. British j ustice has been surrendered. Rich international lawyer shall speak unto international lawyer but serfs shall stay shtoom. Our British rights have been sold for a Yankee pottage.
The committee was stunned by the theatrical power of this very English, unhysterical, middle-class display of deep emotion. Her local MP, she added, had been of limited help.
She was unable to complete her submission. Finally it all became too much for her. The room fell into heavy silence.
Attorney General Dominic Grieve then gave evidence. In Opposition, this Tory was rhetorical against the extradition treaty with America. Now in office, he comes over all lawyerly. Suddenly, it is ‘a rather complicated question’ with the details ‘quite arcane’. Mr Grieve finds himself now constrained by – delighted by! – smallprint intricacies.
THE glistening tip of his long chin puckered upwards as he enjoyed some tricksy conundrum. In the seats behind him, Mrs Tappin watched, baffled by his levity, by this dusty, conceited intellectualism.
Mr Grieve, who washed his hands of any responsibility for Government policy (while conceding that American justice may seem harsh), had not bothered to listen to Mrs Tappin’s evidence. His failure to salute the humanity of the matter – the sheer misery, so poetically conveyed – was inept.
He is almost the worst sort of lawyer. But let us reserve that stinking garland for one of the committee’s MPS, a revoltingly ambitious Tory called Ellis (Northampton N). This Ellis, a barrister, asked questions greatly to the convenience of Mr Grieve. No doubt the U.S. embassy will be delighted with him. No doubt Mr Grieve will recommend him for promotion. I hope he rots on the backbenches for an aeon.
When Leveson has finished with the media, can we have an inquiry into the lawyers?