I think about Horace Rumpole a lot these days, because he taught me the principles of justice.
Not social justice in the modern sense. I’m talking specifically about the philosophy that underlies English common law and the court systems that sprang from it across the globe.
Rumpole is a fictional lawyer, for those who don’t know – an irreverent, undistinguished (but nonetheless brilliant) barrister at London’s Central Criminal Court, known to everyone in Britain as the Old Bailey. A self-confessed hack, in actual fact.
And I, like millions of Generation X-ers, grew up watching him with more than a little affection. As played by Leo McKern in the whimsical TV drama Rumpole of the Bailey – which ran, on and off, from 1978 to 1992 – he was good-humoured, liberal-minded decency personified.
Any time a social media mob decides to ruin someone’s life on the basis of an unsubstantiated allegation, I envisage portly, dishevelled Horace launching into his speech about the “golden thread” of English justice. Due process and the presumption of innocence, in other words.
But though he always stood up for the underdog and was progressive by the standards of his time, he was an old, privileged, wine-guzzling white man with the reactionary tendencies of his generation (played for laughs). One running joke is that he furtively refers to his nagging wife as She Who Must Be Obeyed.
Viewed through what you might call woke eyes, I should think he’d be a prime candidate for cancellation – as would John Mortimer, the writer and barrister who invented him.
Arguing over rape
When news outlets reported that a member of parliament from Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party had been arrested on suspicion of rape (but not yet charged), I thought immediately of the TV show’s third episode.
If it weren’t an artefact from 1978, I doubt that Rumpole and the Honourable Member could be screened today – not without an uproar, at any rate.
The story is nuanced and challenging, without a doubt. After a Labour Party aide accuses the politician she works for of raping her, his counsel, Rumpole, cross-examines her mercilessly because he sees it as part of his job.
As the alleged victim collapses in the witness box, browbeaten and humiliated, Rumpole’s prospective daughter-in-law – an American feminist – watches in horror from the public gallery. She confronts him over lunch and the two of them argue robustly about his responsibility to his client.
Both make valid points and we, the viewers, are left to make up our own minds about a difficult, emotive subject.
I’ll leave it to you to imagine the hashtags this would generate today.
Problematic?
Mortimer was no saint, frankly. A physically ugly but immensely intelligent and charming man, he gained a reputation for laughing countless women into bed and was monumentally unfaithful to both his wives.
One of his most celebrated cases was the Oz trial of 1971, when he defended the publishers of a magazine aimed at young people against charges of obscenity. (The issue in question featured a cartoon of a well-known children’s character, Rupert the Bear, with a massive erection.)
From there, he developed a sideline as the UK’s foremost ‘dirty books trial’ defence lawyer. But as he advocated on behalf of pornographers, he also racked up progressive brownie points as a penal reformer and outspoken Labour supporter.
When, after 18 years in opposition, Labour achieved power under Tony Blair in 1997, its hardline legal reforms – such as extending detention without trial for suspected terrorists – only served to alienate the celebrity barrister, so much so that he wrote a Rumpole novel attacking them.
By this juncture he’d become a bloodsports enthusiast to boot, lending his voice to a nationwide campaign against the Blair government’s fox-hunting ban.
In short, he was much more the libertine than the puritan; a million miles from the “you can’t say that, it’s offensive” type.
The reboot
To argue that Rumpole was Mortimer’s cheeky alter ego is no great stretch. Horace is less successful professionally – reliant on an extended family of petty thieves to fill his work diary (nice touch of moral ambiguity there) – but his dismissive attitude towards biased, out-of-touch judges, snooty lawyers and clueless clients is clearly no accident.
Both men were very much of their time and imprinted a view of liberal, progressive justice on the minds of viewers my age – who, more often than not, take a dim view of destroying someone’s reputation and livelihood without hammering out the facts in a formal setting first.
It’s been reported recently that Mortimer’s daughter Emily is writing an updated series. McKern died in 2002, followed by Mortimer in 2009, and the betting is that Rumpole II will be a woman, assuming the project reaches our screens.
If Ms Mortimer is anything like her father, she’ll borrow her plotlines from real life. So, what will Rumpole make of trans rights, of Black Lives Matter, of companies sacking staff for their heterodox opinions? Will the show stray into these areas at all?
More to the point, how will a modern Rumpole treat the orthodoxies of the 2020s? Because while the McKern model was by no means a bigot – treating female colleagues as equals while fellow barristers were trying to seduce them, for example – he did enjoy poking fun at the changing world around him. In a culture preoccupied with identity politics, this may not go down well.
If Rumpole held a prejudice, it was usually against the rich, sleazy businessmen who half the time turned out to be the bad guys in the final act. That’s very 2020, now that I think of it.
But is there any chance of the reboot depicting inept, gullible social workers, as Rumpole and the Children of the Devil did? Or bogus sexual assault allegations, like Rumpole and the Quacks?
I’ll be surprised if new Rumpole doesn’t scrupulously observe the party line. Though if I’m honest, that might be the character’s world-weariness rubbing off on me.
Now, where did I put that bottle of Chateau Thames Embankment?
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