Simon Morgan – Freelance

I apologise to readers for not fronting up in November but my start up law practice is, thankfully, taking up more and more of my time and so I have decided to settle for a Christmas Rant. I must say that I will be very happy to see the back of 2009. On reflecting upon my past I have come to recognise that all the years ending in ‘9’ have not been happy ones but, and this is the good news, they have all been followed by much more enjoyable ‘noughty’ years. Let us hope the tradition continues.

Certainly the initial signs are encouraging. For a lawyer, one of the more obvious signs of vibrancy in one’s career is to get a call from a legal head hunter. For cultural reasons law firms have never been very good at recruiting staff. This has led to the rise of the legal recruiter. These enterprising souls either act on instructions from firms who know what they want or simply ring up senior partners on the off chance to try and dazzle them with their stable of talented lawyers.

Both options require them to assemble a beauty parade of willing candidates and this means many hours on the telephone assembling their list. If you get it right the rewards are very lucrative. Typical fees are 20% of the successful candidate’s starting salary. Clearly the more demand there is for lawyers the more these bottom feeders of the legal industry have to fight over the available pool of talent. This means that in times of high employment, such as occurred during the late Nineties and most of the Noughties, one could expect to receive at least one call a week from a recruiter especially from those who had acted for you in the past.

Like many lawyers I have built up a coterie of such contacts from my own career moves. They become a sort of therapy. In order to persuade you to become a candidate these people lay on the charm and the flattery. They assure you that they have received glowing reports of your competence, energy and enthusiasm and believe that you would be the perfect fit for this truly wonderful opportunity they are instructed upon. If you feel a bit down you ring one up and they are immediately suggesting all sorts of wonderful opportunities.

Of course, wonderful is a matter of opinion. For every potential partnership position with a leading London firm there are many less attractive berths such as assistant probate clerk in Scunthorpe. Anyway, the fact is that after an Eighteen month absence they have started to ring me again. So, things must be beginning to move. Scunthorpe here I come!

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If anybody had any doubts that the European Union is an expensive irrelevance then the appointment of two complete non-entities to the posts of President and High Representative must surely have blown them away. There may still be a number of foolish and misguided people who think that the Union is a sincere attempt at political and social integration in Europe but if so let me assure them that this is not what it is for; not now, not ever.

No, the real raison d’etre for the European Union is something much more obscure, fundamental and, frankly, spiritual. It is no more and no less than an attempt to recreate the old Holy Roman Empire. Despite the millennium that has passed since its decline and fall the ‘folk memory’ of the Empire and a desire to recreate the feelings of  safety and security that arose from having a common language, law and religion is still a very powerful and fundamental impulse. Once one realises that then the whole silly argument about political union and the creation of a central European authority become an irrelevance. There can only be one head of the European Union, one symbol of pan-European unity, one fountainhead of a central continental culture. Ladies and Gentleman and fellow Europeans I give you His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

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My stubborn yet entirely hypocritical adherence to Roman Catholicism and my confident prediction of a counter reformation in England have long been a source of amusement to my friends. A number of the more intellectual ones have teased me by remarking how sad it is that compared with France and Italy it is a great pity that the English Catholic Church never built any decent churches over here. However, it seems that I might be about to have the last laugh. In a rather odd piece of seemingly open gamesmanship the Pope has extended an invitation to join the Roman Church to any Anglo-Catholic clergy who wish to leave the Anglican communion over the issue of female Bishops.

As an aside this has given rise to a verb that is entirely new to me. Apparently the act of defection by an Anglican clergyman from Anglicanism back to Rome is known as: ‘to pope’. How many will actually pope remains to be seen but it may well mean a number of English churches, built before the reformation, will once more conduct worship according to the Roman rite. Theoretically it could include the Bishop and Chapter of one of England’s great Cathedrals. Imagine solemn Latin mass once more being celebrated in the splendour of Salisbury or Lincoln or, joy of joys, Durham Cathedral?

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I have decided to try and devote future blogs to humour and satire rather than invective. Ranting middle age is becoming a bit passé. Jeremy Clarkson seems to have cornered most of the popular market and anyone wanting something a bit more high brow can read Simon Heffer.  To be honest moaning at the modern world is a bit like spearing fish in a barrel. Simply open the Daily Mail at the comment page, get a Thesaurus and you have an instant 500 word harangue. The fact is that ultimately such work is entirely selfish. The author may get a happy feeling of catharsis but nobody else does. The aim is to outrage and inflame; either in support or opposition of the writers’ stance with little in the way of constructive advice. Satire, however, employs ridicule. This makes it very difficult for anyone to try and take its targets seriously again. For example, it is a brave director who stages a crucifiction scene and braves comparison with ‘The Life of Brian’ or a politician who tries to invoke memories of footballing idols. So out goes the rant and in comes the barb. I would welcome your views on respective merits.

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When I was serving in Northern Ireland it was made very clear to us that the success or failure of the campaign against sectarian terrorism depended upon the obtaining and exploitation of intelligence. This meant that all of us in the military had a responsibility to keep our eyes and ears open and to report anything, however trivial, that might give an insight into terrorist operations.  But the main intelligence priority, the one which we were constantly told be alert to was the spotting and recruitment of  informers. Due to the high level of professionalism and secrecy with which most of the terrorist groups in Northern Ireland conducted their operations it was only by obtaining inside information from touts and stool pigeons that we had any hope of pre-empting terrorist attacks. A well placed mole could save many lives and to find a good one was a great feather in one’s cap.

But we were also clearly told that we must assess potential candidates very carefully. The specially trained agents that followed up our reports were not impressed if they found they were meeting drunks, cranks or fantasists. It was, therefore, with some incredulity that I learnt that one of the top sources relied upon by British Intelligence to support the contention that Saddam Hussein not only had weapons of mass destruction but also had the ability to launch them against British assets within 45 minutes of the order to launch being given was a Baghdad Taxi driver called Abdul.

If we had suggested a Belfast cabbie called Paddy as a potential informant we would have risked a visit from someone very squat and wiry called Kev who would tell us to stop wasting his ‘effing time! It would have saved a lot of people a lot of bother if MI6 had employed the same degree of judgement.

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So, cliché or not: a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers.