After persistent questioning, Higgs said that it was the police who had asked him to leave out the reference to Woolwich in his second statement. Judge Cantley wondered aloud who, in particular, had asked him. The answer to that question emerged in court when, under cross-examination, Chief Superintendent Jim Nevill divulged that it had been the Director of Public Prosecutions, the late Sir Norman Skelhorn, who had sent a directive down the line to Douglas Higgs to remove the Woolwich reference from his 17 June statement.
Sir Norman Skelhorn was a man who neither shirked his responsibilities nor hid his prejudices. In October 1973, at the Harvard Law School Forum, he told the audience he accepted that torture had taken place in Northern Ireland, but, ‘When dealing with “Irish terrorists”, any methods are justified.’10 This end-justifies-the-means approach from Sir Norman explains why he had no qualms about sending instructions to Douglas Higgs to doctor his statement. Only one conclusion emerges from this revelation: Sir Norman Skelhorn attempted to pervert the course of justice in order to make sure that the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven should serve out their full sentences. While the prominent High Court Judge and Master of the Rolls Lord Denning did not accuse Sir Norman of perverting the course of justice, he nevertheless identified him as the single most culpable person in the false imprisonment of those convicted of the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. In 1990, a reporter for The Spectator asked Lord Denning to comment on the evidence that the Guildford Four were innocent and the judge replied: ‘That troubles me a lot, because I knew Sir Norman Skelhorn, the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, a first-rate man. He’s dead now. He’s unable to explain what happened, and it was his responsibility.’11
Detective Chief Superintendent Hucklesby of the Metropolitan Police was asked to retake the witness stand and was forced to concede that he had recommended to Sir Norman Skelhorn that Eddie Butler and Joe O’Connell should be tried for the Woolwich pub bombing. The police, to all intents and purposes, had a strong case in the form of damning forensic evidence and, by this stage, five admissions of guilt from the IRA cell, which, crucially, they were prepared to stand over in court: it does not get any better for prosecutors. Predictably, Sir Norman Skelhorn did not act on Hucklesby’s recommendation, and thus once more left himself open to the charge that he was intent on perverting the course of justice and keeping innocent people in prison.
Questions remain to be answered: did Sir Norman Skelhorn act alone, or was he merely the cutting edge of an establishment conspiracy? Did he receive instructions from above – from the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, or even from Prime Minister James Callaghan? Gerry Conlon’s view on this matter was unambiguous: ‘And in our case, and that of the Birmingham Six, we are now, at this moment, actively pursuing the release of confidential documents that have been held from 1974 under the Official Secrets Act that are not to be released for seventy-five years. Now that only proves our innocence from day one, and it proves state collusion between the government, the judiciary, the police and the press.’12
As anticipated, the four members of the IRA cell were all sentenced to life imprisonment, but they had prevailed in the trial of contradictions: they had demonstrated that it was they, and not the Guildford Four or the Maguire Seven, who had carried out the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings.
Category ‘A’ prisoner 462779, Gerry Conlon, now locked up in a cell on the third floor of ‘A wing’ in Wakefield Prison, Yorkshire, was closely following events in court. Writing to his mother, Sarah, on 31 January 1977, Conlon said:
It’s the first time I’ve shed a tear in prison. Mum, you’ll never know how happy I was to read it [the IRA cell’s assertion that they, and not the Guildford Four, had carried out the Guildford and Woolwich bombings] and see for the first time since I was arrested that the truth is coming out. Now it’s been publicly admitted in a court of law that we were not responsible for the charges on which we were convicted. I’m feeling confident about the outcome. Everyone must know now that I should be out, as the police fitted up the wrong people and it’s now out in the open, Mum.13
Gerry’s optimism was premature and was soon to be dashed. On 10 October that year, the Guildford Four appeal opened at the Old Bailey. Lord Roskill presided, accompanied by Mr Justice Boreham and Lord Justice Lawton. Once again, the indefatigable Sir Michael Havers led for the Crown.
The Guildford Four’s appeal was based on affidavits taken by Conlon’s and Hill’s lawyer, Alastair Logan, from members of the IRA ASU while they were in prison, and from the evidence garnered at their trial. It included 135 discrepancies between the IRA men’s accounts of the bombings and those of the Guildford Four. Such was the strength and quality of detail in their evidence that Havers, after grilling Eddie Butler, said he accepted Butler had been present at the bombing. Then he found Harry Duggan’s evidence ‘convincing’. Of Joe O’Connell’s testimony that he had been at both the Guildford and Woolwich bombings, Havers said there was ‘such a ring of truth’ about it, the Crown accepted that ‘a great deal of what he says is true’. On hearing these astounding admissions, Gerry Conlon and the other three defendants must surely have thought that their ordeal was over and that they would soon be walking out of the front door of the Old Bailey. How elated they must have been when they heard even Lord Roskill fall in behind Havers: ‘We are content to assume that O’Connell’s story of his presence [at Guildford] and preparation may indeed be true and that Dowd may also have taken part.’ How sweet those words must have been to the ears of the Guildford Four, but they would have been wise to remember Banquo’s words in Macbeth, ‘What, can the devil speak true?’14
Havers, rather astutely, had anticipated it would be almost impossible to counter the deluge of intimate detail that the real culprits would bring to the court and instead offered a new proposition: far from having arrested and sentenced the people who had carried out the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings – which had been the Crown’s position right up until the appeal – there were now another four culprits: the IRA ASU. It must have been a mouth-dropping moment for Gerry Conlon and his co-accused. Since the Guildford Four were innocent of all the charges, Havers could not offer the court a single piece of evidence to link them with the IRA ASU, despite the fact that when police searched the IRA men’s safe houses, they had found documents, letters and eighteen sets of fingerprints, none of which matched any of the Guildford Four’s.
In a case noted for its anomalies, observers were left wondering why, having accepted that the Balcombe Street IRA unit had bombed Guildford and Woolwich, no direction was given to police from the bench that they should be charged with the murders of the five people killed in the pub bombings. Despite the absence of evidence, the appeal court judges accepted Havers’s proposition that the Guildford Four had been in league with the Balcombe Street IRA team and they upheld their convictions.
In many ways, the British judiciary was a prisoner of its own inflated ego. In the Guildford Four appeal, it appears that it mattered little what defence counsel said or proved, because Lord Roskill and his fellow judges were never persuadable. Rather, their judgement was always infected by self-interest and fear, and by that which they held most dear – the British judicial system. Given the manifold implications of allowing this appeal to succeed, their view was that they had no option but to send these four innocent people back to prison. Lord Denning succinctly summed up his fellow judges’ mindset when it was put to him that, had the Guildford Four been hanged, they (the judiciary) would have hanged the wrong people: ‘They’d probably have hanged the right men. Not proven against them, that’s all.’15 Lamenting the days when judges had the power to sentence three men to hanging before lunch and two afterwards, Denning went on to say: ‘The Guildford Four should have been sentenced by twelve good men of Hampshire to be hanged. Then we should have forgotten all about them.’16 Unfortunately for His Lordship, Gerry Conlon and his co-accused were not forgotten about, even if they had to spend another twelve years in prison before they obtained their freedom.
During those twelve years, Conlon crossed paths