Blast from the past-part 2
The Privy Council sits in Downing Street. Therefore before you get to the court room you have to go through the understandable security checks. (With various tourists erroneously assuming you are going to some sort of important meeting at number 10 or number 11). Being in Downing Street can sometimes be unhelpful. On one appearance in the Privy Council there was a countryside Alliance pro hunting demonstration going on outside Downing Street, and it was with some difficulty that I made my voice heard above the clamour outside.
One peculiarity of hearings in the Privy Council is the layout. You address the court from a sort of enlarged lectern, which does not leave you with very much space for paper. Your papers are kept on an adjacent table. However Privy Council papers are not in the usual lever arch form. They are in soft bundles, pages double sided, with a plastic spine. Apparently this makes retention of Privy Council documents for storage much more economical in terms of space. It makes using them an absolute nightmare.
All barristers are well used to using hard lever arch files. You stand them up in numbered order. You become very adept at grabbing the numbered bundle and locating the page quickly. However it is completely different with Privy Council files. They flop all over the place. Because they do not have a rigid spine it is much harder to flick through and find the page reference. With normal files you can often do two things at once, finding the page that you have been asked for, while simultaneously scanning the index of the file to find a page you have been asked about. That is fairly commonplace with normal bundles. It is inconceivable with Privy Council bundles.
In addition of course questions, or requests about the page number where particular documents are to be found, can be being barked at you from a number of different directions. There are five law lords sitting, all extremely shrewd, bright and learned. The last thing you need whilst trying to respond to such pertinent questions is to be physically floundering through the documents. It is no pleasure to watch other advocates have the same difficulty. You all suffer alike.
Whilst I was dealing with a series of interesting questions from one law lord (or difficult ones depending on your perspective) I was also asked for the page references of certain documents. As I was leafing through various bundles to find them, my former tutor (and junior on the other side) whispered to me one relevant page reference I was having trouble finding.
People outside the profession would sometimes find it odd to think that counsel on opposite sides would assist one another in this way. It is however fair dealing and professional courtesy. If you have a page reference for the court wants and someone else is looking for it, you help them out. Always bearing in mind that what goes around comes around. It was nice to see that the person I remember as a law don had lost nothing of his pleasantness or courtesy
Next week I will conclude the story of what happened at this hearing.