The Edmonton County Court clerk and I were laughing about his 100-year-old nan: she was medically blind and had recently spent a whole afternoon in a high-street bookies under the misapprehension it was the Lidl next door. I told him I’d been sent there to write up a story about ex-Arsenal midfielder Emmanuel Frimpong’s filing of a dubious eviction notice against two of his tenants. The tenants – a warm-spirited mother-and-daughter duo – soon arrived in the reception area and explained to us in detail how the footballer had been forcibly moving his ex-partner and children into the place they considered their rightful home.
My impartiality was slightly compromised by my soft spot for their landlord, both as a footballer and an entrepreneur. Any naïve visions I had, though, for an amiable meet-and-greet with Frimpong, one of the few people I still followed on Snapchat, were quickly shattered. As an emissary from the press, my status as persona non grata was made clear when his agent sidled up beside the mother and asked, nodding his head towards me, if the situation had ‘really come to this?’. My uneasiness mounted further when the aforementioned clerk stepped in, apologetically, to say I had to officially identify myself to Frimpong as a reporter before the hearing began: it was a legal requirement.
Seconds later, I was stood in front of the man himself. In any other context I might have asked for a selfie, but his vibe was frosty and I’d already clocked him shaking his head as I made my way over, laptop stowed nervously under my arm. Midway through mumbling my legal obligations, I heard his tongue click: ‘No-one wants to speak to you, G’, he muttered, ‘No one’. It didn’t come as a surprise, but the effect of being dressed down in court like that for the first time was almost dissociative – was it really me he was angry at?
Frimpong turned out to be the first in a dizzying procession of B, C and D-list celebrities I saw pass through the Greater London courthouse sprawl. Snapshots of a stolid Huw Edwards pronouncing his name with newsreader-like clarity for the clerk at Westminster sit next to visions of Laurence Fox, in bootcut jeans, swaggering into the dock at Woolwich Crown Court, or Russell Brand – after a plea hearing – laughing manically in front of one of the Monet reproductions that line the wall at Southwark.
Such constant exposure to the pantomime rhythms of court reporting has led to all manner of strange occurrences. During his trial at Wood Green Crown Court for a string of deranged sex offences, I wound up in a deeply unpleasant altercation with the now former-stand-in-lead singer of pop group Spandau Ballet. It somehow culminated in Ross Davidson – the man drafted in by bassist Martin Kemp to replace Tony Hadley for the live shows – promising he would ‘remember my name’ in the waiting area outside court four.
On another occasion – in jubilant spirits outside court after successfully contesting a closure order on his west London mansion – disgraced socialite ‘Fast’ Eddie Davenport slipped me a business card with a scrawled invitation to one of his ‘little soirees’ at 32 Portland Place. I politely declined. It was at this very soiree, I later found out, that ‘Bonnie Blue’ had completed her now world-famous ‘24-hour 1000 guy challenge’.
As a court reporter, you try and accustom yourself to this constant churn of humdrum, depraved and profound. An afternoon spent watching an ebullient Micah Richards give evidence against a man who headbutted Roy Keane at Highbury Magistrates can drift into weeks spent at the Royal Courts of Justice covering the implosion of a Coventry-based Hinduism cult. Jostled between the geopolitical and the provincial, you always feel at the epicentre of something. High-level Russian espionage at the Old Bailey one day, evidence about ‘two-day anti-ULEZ fasts in Purley’ the next. It’s all copy.
One morning, at Isleworth Crown Court, I was sent to cover what should have been a run-of-the-mill jewel thief sentencing in court eleven. The hearing was suddenly disrupted by a panicked member of the security team entering with information about a defendant from another court having escaped from the dock. She couldn’t be sure, she said, but he was rumoured to be wielding a knife.
