The great defender
It felt as if a great batsman had laid down his bat for the last time, or Lester Piggott ridden his last Derby, or Gielgud or Olivier said their final lines. George Carman, too ill to continue to achieve the impossible in court, will never again walk through an expectant crowd to do battle in the high court, his Lord’s, his Epsom, his great stage.
He is sitting on the sofa in his large, modern Wimbledon home chain-smoking cigarettes as usual and complaining that coffee makes him cough. He will not reveal his condition but it is serious enough for him, on medical advice, to retire from the bar with immediate effect. (I don’t dare to ask the medical advice on the cigarettes, but they are evidently non-negotiable.) His garden is full of photographers who have got wind of the news that the superstar advocate will never again appear in court.
Carman is a little unsteady on his feet and asks for a stick to help him to get into the garden for photographs. He also needs the occasional glass of water to help him though our lengthy interview, but, as he looks back over almost half a century of advocacy, and some of the most sensational cases of the age, he is as sharp as ever. “Whose life would stand up to being Carmanised?” I wonder. “That’s a matter of judgment for people who decide to involve themselves in the luxury of litigation,” he counters instantly.
He has been weighing up whether to retire over the past few days and is clearly saddened to have been compelled to retire. “It’s a very traumatic thing after 47 years. To have retirement forced on you without adequate time to think of the consequences is slightly more traumatic than a leisurely run up to it. I’d thought vaguely of perhaps next year. Chambers said take a break, but age is against me.”
Carman decided to make a public announcement to clear the air and prevent rumour. “I had to start returning individual cases and I didn’t want, to use an Aitkenesque word, to dissemble.”
Carman’s case list is matchless – Jeremy Thorpe, the spy Geoffrey Prime, the Sun against Gillian Taylforth, Elton John, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Ken Dodd on charges of tax evasion, Imran Khan against Ian Botham, the Guardian against Jonathan Aitken. Mohamed Al Fayed against Neil Hamilton. He has rarely been out of the headlines in the past 20 years and has appeared to enjoy the celebrity status – he was an enthusiastic guest on the party circuit – yet insists that he never sought star status and dislikes the “undisciplined and unlicensed behaviour” of American celebrity lawyers.
As the snappers in the garden tread on his flowers, I liken the media interest to a great star taking his final bow. “Certain people in various walks of life are picked up by the press and then dropped; indeed they are often picked up only to be dropped. My name happens to have been in the press in recent years because of the high-profile nature of the clients in some of the cases.”
He talks of the brilliance of QCs who specialise in tax and shipping, and no doubt he means it, but he knows that commercial lawyers will remain rich but anonymous while his courtroom brilliance has earned him fame as well as money. “Gorgeous George”. “The Great Defender”, the man who, it was said, could get the Devil acquitted.
Yet he did not reach the starry heights until 1979 when Jeremy Thorpe’s solicitor, David Napley, chose Carman to defend the former Liberal leader on charges of conspiracy to murder. Carman had been a barrister on the northern circuit since 1953 and had become a QC in 1971, but it was the Thorpe case that established him nationally and laid the first stone of his fearsome reputation.
“I had met David Napley in the early 70s and worked for him intermittently,” Carman recalls. “He rang me in 1978 to say that Thorpe was probably going to be committed to trial on charges of conspiracy to murder and that he was going to retain me. Thorpe was committed for trial – I heard it on the one o’clock news in Cornwall – and I realised that it would be the greatest professional challenge I had faced and that it might affect my career. It did.
“Thorpe was tried in May 1979 and it was a sensation. He was a privy councillor, a former leader of the Liberal party, and he was charged with conspiracy to murder. The case had everything, including the dog Rinka.”
Carman bridles somewhat when I suggest that his career neatly divides into pre-Thorpe and post-Thorpe, northern obscurity and southern stardom, the West End and rep. “I wasn’t some little country boy who came here,” he says. “I’d studied law at Oxford, done my pupillage in London, and built up a successful practice on a great circuit that had produced many great advocates. But the Thorpe case was a dividing line; it was a watershed for my career.”
It projected Carman into the super-league and he left Manchester and headed for London, where a string of headline-grabbing cases cemented his reputation. “I defended Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ spy, in a very high-profile case, and a scion of the Vestey family who had beheaded his wife and put her head in the freezer. The issue was, was he suffering from diminished responsibility? He took the body down to Devon and buried it in a shallow grave. A psychiatrist from Broadmoor said he was perfectly sane, but I reminded him that he had set fire to three different public schools and we got a verdict of diminished responsibility.”
Do his celebrity clients keep in touch? “Sometimes I get Christmas cards. Elton John sent me a crate of champagne; Tom Cruise sent me a crate of very expensive vintage wine.” His critics would say that he started to enjoy the celebrity lifestyle, but he insists that he never sought the limelight, took plenty of bread-and-butter cases, and never earned the vast sums often mentioned in the press.
Whether or not he courted the fame, his two decades of superstar status were an extraordinary contrast with his early days in Manchester, when he struggled to make a living. “After five years I was earning as much as a Manchester bus driver without overtime. I almost left the bar three times.”
Carman recognises that there have been times when he won acquittals for clients who may have been guilty, but he explains why, for the advocate, that presents no ethical dilemma. “I didn’t get them off; the jury aquitted. I merely presented their case. All you can do is your best. The surgeon can’t go home and weep if the patient dies on the table, though no doubt he’s pleased when they survive. It’s a misunderstanding of the role of the advocate.”
Carman was often criticised for focusing on the litigants’ sex lives, in particular the EastEnders actress Gillian Taylforth and the South African journalist Jani Allan, both of whom were undermined by sudden and revelations about their past. But Carman is unrepentant: “Legally, you can’t go on undisciplined shopping exhibitions about every hole in the corner of people’s lives. But if there is something that touches on the issues of truthfulness or credibility, then it becomes important and necessary to go into them. All of us might be vulnerable to that sort of examination, but that is not a reason why an advocate should refrain from embarking upon it if it’s proper and relevant.”
He also dismisses suggestions that his technique depended on producing 11th-hour rabbits out of hats: “A lot of these things turned up by chance. The Jani Allan diary [detailing her sex life] turned up in the course of the case; it wasn’t as if I kept it back. If we’d had it, we would have had to disclose it. Equally, the Gillian Taylforth video [“I give good head”, she declaimed to her fellow partygoers while suggestively brandishing a sausage] turned up by chance; two people arrived at a newspaper in the middle of the case. With Aitken, the records of his wife and daughter’s air trip to Switzerland emerged in the currency of the case. We didn’t have them at the start. We didn’t know it was coming. More importantly, neither did he.”
Carman refuses to single out his greatest moments, but it is clear that he enjoyed winning acquittals for Ken Dodd (“some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants,” Carman famously said) and Dr Leonard Arthur, the paediatrician charged with attempted murder after prescribing “nursing care only” for a Down’s syndrome baby.
What will he recall most fondly? “The unique camaraderie of the bar, the fairly generous patience of judges that had the misfortune to deal with me, the sense of achievement in cases, the feeling – this may sound a little pompous – that you are chipping at the cornerstone of justice. It’s more exciting than making and selling a can of baked beans.” Carman hopes that his health will allow him to write a book about his life at the bar, combining memoirs with reflections on the way the legal system could be improved.
He will always be seen as the great theatrical advocate, the master of the pause and the devastating one-liner, the maker of coups, the magician who could win a verdict against all the odds. He accepts the analogy with an actor, but only up to a point. “In terms of presentation, comparisons can be drawn, but that’s where the comparison ends. In the theatre the actor holds the audience but when the curtain comes down, everyone goes home and knows it’s a play. In the courtroom, there’s no rehearsal and it determines, possibly conclusively, the happiness or misery of the people involved in the case.”
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