Anyone who has ever been hit amidships by that assegai known as a solicitor's letter will know the meaning of brisk invective: "My client has suffered grievous hurt, personal distress, profound trauma and grave financial loss on foot of the entirely baseless allegations, made by Mr Obadiah Haddock, journalist, that our client, Bean Ui Hanrahain, was running a massage parlour at 35A Montmorency Paddocks, Kinnegad, specialising in Swedish Discipline and rubber. Unless you publish an immediate retraction, an apology, and a correction to the effect that Bean Ui Hanrahain operated her massage parlour in 35 Montmorency Paddocks only, that it specialised in Norwegian Discipline - known as Fjordesborg - and in pvc, and that 35A was used solely for purposes of colonic irrigation, we shall be forced to seek punitive and exemplary damages.
"The publication of such an apology, a retraction and a correction, will not be regarded as prejudicial in any way to the payment of damages in compensation for the enormous losses inflicted on our client and the personal distress she has suffered, in addition to the substantial costs which she has incurred in initiating these proceedings, which already amount to £5.3 million. . .£5.4 million. . .£5.5 million. . .£5.6 million. In other words settle, before we sue you to the last follicle of your being, and you are reduced to selling your toenail clippings."
Thrust and parry
The first time I saw such a letter I emitted a little squeal of horror and fainted outright. Oxygen was required. I had to spend several weeks in both 35 and 35A Montmorency Paddocks, Kinnegad, recuperating, before spending a few days in Bean Ui Hanrahain's convalescent home, staffed by tall and sturdy Nubians.
Of course, lawyers once traded in this verbal thrust and parry merely for a living and, like professional boxers and all-in wrestlers, who are savages in their profession, privately were always cut from the cloth that results when you hold Kleenex under a powerful hot shower.
Dem woz de daze, mi frenz. In recent years, lawyers have been as reticent about their own interests as Ian Paisley would be if he woke to find the Bishop of Down and Connor anointing him, with the choir of the ProCathedral uttering a gleeful Te Deum while a fleet-footed troupe of nuns performed an ecumenical dance of joy through clouds of incense.
High-powered aggression
A new generation of lawyers has emerged who seem to be in life what they once were solely in their work, laying about them with their strange weaponry of misfeasances, torts and misprisions. The once personally polite but professionally aggressive lawyer is now fuelled by high-powered aggression in all his or her guises.
Things have got out of proportion. It is as if cigarette lighters contained plutonium, grannies were learning how to break the necks of impudent children between thumb and middle finger, and the blind were given guide-tigers.
Simply, what has happened is that power in the land has shifted towards the practitioners of law and away from the makers of it, and the new mandarins of the land are seizing it gleefully. But contrary to the likely expectations of Ken Murphy, director general of the Law Society - who wrote this week, by the chainsaw-standards of modern solicitors, a letter of almost decorous complaint about me - I do not blame them for it. Our elected representatives have permitted this constitutional shift to occur.
Loot is plummeting towards the law like greased goldbars on a see-saw. Were nuggets to be hurtling headlong towards journalists in such a benign cataclysm, I would be the first to approve - and no doubt in the headshaking, it-pains-me-more-than-it-does-you tones employed by the new generation of lawyers as they pocket the ingots and head for Tuscany.
But I might wonder as I lay beside the swimming pool, peeling a Minister for Defence or two, why courts come up with the figure of £25,000 as being appropriate compensation for a deafened generation of soldiery. The figure makes no difference to their hearing, and the State will do what it can for the victims anyway.
So wherefore the magic £25,000? Why not £2,500? £250,000? £2,500,000? Is it compensation according to the ancient legal principle of Nice Round But Bearable Figures?
A cataract of wealth is about to burst out of the central Exchequer and cascade all over the legal profession, who have no hearing loss at all. Ken Murphy has been promoting the fantastical notion that because 97 per cent of the tiny handful of cases which have been concluded have gone the plaintiff's way, therefore the thousands of cases to come must do the same. In that case, why bother with any trials? The answer cannot be beyond our Ken.
Legal probabilities
I repeat: the ascertainment of (a) the legitimacy of the complaint and (b) the apportioning of responsibility for it are matters to be decided by the courts and by lawyers (of course), some of whom will be representing me and the State in these matters. How charmed they must be to hear the director-general of their professional body so casually dismiss their defence even before they present it.
But aside from Ken's adumbrations upon the theory of legal probabilities, I can certainly understand why other lawyers who are standing there with their mouths open want the Niagara of aural auriferousness to continue; in their place, I would too. I just hope I wouldn't dress up such natural acquisitiveness for myself as natural justice for all.