Sir Desmond de Silva
Brilliant QC and bon vivant who was determined to bring Charles Taylor to trial for war crimes
SIR DESMOND DE SILVA, who has died aged 78, was one of Britain’s most outstanding and colourful jury advocates; as a defence counsel he was often the saviour of celebrities, especially sporting stars, and later became a scourge of war criminals as an international prosecutor. His greatest legal achievement was the role he played in the prosecution of Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, who in 2012 became the first head of state to be convicted of war crimes since Grand Admiral Doenitz at Nuremberg.
A witty, generous man who had a great love for the finer things in life, de Silva was particularly fond of Armagnac and, as he recounted in Madam, Where Are Your Mangoes?, a lively volume of memoirs published last year, he once threatened to sue a newspaper for reporting that he spent £400 a week on his favourite tipple. It was, he protested, an “outrageous slur that damages my reputation. I spend much more.”
In fact his love of brandy once saved him from an excruciating death – one of several attempts on his life over the years. On July 29 1981, a Marxist coup took place in the Gambia, a former British colony. Once the rebellion was put down de Silva, who had an awesome record of success (mainly as defence counsel) in trials in the Commonwealth that carried the death penalty, was sent out to prosecute the ringleaders for high treason.
One night, returning to his hotel suite, he poured a glass of brandy for himself and for a junior in his chambers. A slight discolouration was sufficient to alert him and enable him to stop his junior before he could take a sip. Analysis the following day showed that the brandy in the bottle had been poisoned.
In Britain, de Silva was probably best known for his remarkable success in defending sports personalities who, had they been convicted, would have faced ruin and imprisonment. Those for whom he secured acquittals included Hans Segers, the Wimbledon goalkeeper charged along with John Fashanu and Bruce Grobbelaar in a match-fixing case that put the integrity of English football on trial; Lee Bowyer, the Leeds United midfielder tried for grievous bodily harm; John Terry, the Chelsea and England player (also on GBH charges); and Jacqui Oliver, one of the leading woman jockeys of her time, tried for fraud.
De Silva also prosecuted a number of intriguing murder cases, most notably the extradition of Roderick Newall, a former Royal Green Jackets officer, accused of murdering his parents in Jersey in 1987. He also represented Lord Brocket in an insurance fraud case and appeared for the defence in the Roger Levitt City fraud trial.
In the press, de Silva was often referred to as “the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Bar” for his success in saving so many from the noose in murder and treason trials in Commonwealth countries. And like Baroness Orczy’s chivalrous hero, he was tall, dandyish and patrician in his ways.
George Desmond Lorenz de Silva was born in Kandy, Ceylon, on December 13 1939, into an extraordinary legal and political family. His grandfather, George, also a lawyer and a dandy, was one of the founding fathers of Ceylon’s independence and a revered statesman. In childhood Desmond lived at his grandfather’s home in Kandy at the time of the Japanese attacks in 1942, when his grandfather was a minister in Ceylon’s War Council.
His father, Frederick, another barrister, succeeded George as the member of parliament for Kandy and later became a diplomat. In 1968, when his father was ambassador to France, he was persuaded by Desmond to secure him a temporary diplomatic appointment so as to fulfil a long-held ambition to meet President de Gaulle; wearing one of his father’s diplomatic uniforms, with a suitable number of oak leaves removed from the collar, he accompanied Frederick to a reception at the Élysée Palace, where de Gaulle and his Prime Minister Georges Pompidou were so taken with him that they spent more time talking to him than anybody else present.
Apart from his Sri Lankan background, de Silva had Dutch ancestry through his paternal grandmother, and English and Scottish ancestors through his maternal grandmother, whose antecedents lay in the landed gentry of Co Down.
After the war his parents brought him to England and sent him to board at Dulwich College Prep School. However, his father wanted him to master the Sinhalese language in case he wanted to make a life for himself in the law and politics of that country, so he was sent to Trinity College in Kandy, run on English public school lines with an English headmaster and other English staff.
De Silva’s mother, however, took the view that her son would not fit into the new Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972), and with most of the family having emigrated to Australia, she decided he should settle in England.
Called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1964, de Silva entered the chambers of Sir Dingle Foot, QC, MP, the Solicitor General, and took silk 20 years later.
In 1987 he became head of chambers at 2 Paper Buildings in the Temple and remained head until 2002, when he was nominated by the Government of Sierra Leone, and accepted by the Secretary General of the UN, as the first Deputy Prosecutor to the Un-inspired War Crimes Tribunal, set up to deal with the horrors of Sierra Leone’s savage civil war.
De Silva went on to negotiate the transfer of Charles Taylor, who had been indicted for aiding and abetting war crimes, and crimes against humanity, in Sierra Leone, to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and subsequently to The Hague for trial.
Once that was accomplished, in 2006 de Silva retired – as Chief Prosecutor – for health reasons, leaving his successor to conduct the trial. Taylor is currently serving a 50-year jail term in a British prison.
In his memoir de Silva recalled many amusing moments in his long legal career. Early on, he shared a chambers with Learie Constantine, the former West Indies Test cricketer and later Britain’s first black peer, who had three trays on his desk, marked “In” “Out” and “LBW”. When asked what the initials stood for, Constantine replied, “Let the buggers wait”. The title of his memoir referred to an occasion when the 28-year-old de Silva and bon vivant Noel Gratiaen, QC, to whom he was acting as junior, unwittingly took rooms in a Freetown hotel that turned out to be a brothel.
Returning to their rooms after an evening in the bar, they were accosted by a scantily clad lady of the night who asked if they would like some mangoes. A few minutes later de Silva, disturbed by sounds in the corridor outside, opened his bedroom door to see Gratiaen towering over a topless prostitute, wailing: “But madam, where are your mangoes?”
In 1980 de Silva, a staunch Conservative, decided to stand in a by-election for Farringdon Without – the largest ward in the City of London. In a contest with four candidates he received 60 per cent of the vote and remained a councilman for 15 years, retiring in 1995 when the demands of his practice outside London prevented him from attending committee meetings.
In 1987 he married Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia, the great-great-great granddaughter of Queen Victoria, thereby becoming related by marriage to most of the royal houses of Europe; indeed he was consulted by some of their members.
In 2002 he flew back from his duties in Sierra Leone to attend the opening by the Queen of the Memorial Gates in Constitution Hill commemorating the contribution made by the soldiers of Empire in two world wars – a project in which he had been intimately involved.
He also gave more than 30 years of support to St John Ambulance and for many years served as vice president of St John, London District. In 1995 he was appointed a Knight of the Order of St John.
He was knighted in 2007 and sworn of the Privy Council in 2011, when he headed the inquiry into alleged links between the security services and assassinations in Ulster during the Troubles.
At the launch party for his memoirs de Silva revealed that among the guests was one of the many would-be assassins who had tried their luck over the years. The man was later named as Daniel Chadwick, a landowner who, as de Silva’s memoir revealed, had once drunkenly burst into his bedroom at a country house weekend “with a sword in his extended hand” after he mistakenly thought the lawyer was in bed with his girlfriend.
De Silva’s marriage to Princess Katarina ended in divorce, though they remained friends. She survives him with their daughter, Victoria.
Sir Desmond de Silva, born December 13 1939, died June 2 2018