Not So Super: Andrew Marr and not falling off the tower

Alex Wade, occasional Swordplay scribe and former lawyer with, among others, Carter-Ruck and the News of the World, reveals a curio about Andrew Marr and the dread superinjunction.

A few years ago I arrived at a Soho pub to meet the man who was then my literary agent, David Milner. The purpose of our rendezvous is clear to me – to discuss progress on my first book, Wrecking Machine – but the pub in which we met eludes me. I think it was the Duke of Argyll, but it may have been the Glasshouse Stores. Certainly, it was on or near Brewer Street.

Agent Milner was a little late, or perhaps I was early, but either way I found myself alone at the bar ordering a lager. To my left, engaged in a similar task, stood Andrew Marr. I had dealt with him once or twice in my days as a night lawyer for The Independent, when Marr was the paper’s editor. He wouldn’t have remembered me – night lawyers are a transient and invisible bunch – but I felt emboldened enough by this slim connection to introduce myself.

In fact, if I recall correctly, and I think I do, I said: “Andrew Marr, Alex Wade. We worked together a few years ago at The Independent.”

Marr was courteous and friendly. Unsurprisingly, he did not remember me, but he asked what I used to do for the paper. He too was evidently killing time while waiting for someone, for our conversation moved beyond the merely desultory (as an aside, I might say that this is a complement to Marr’s journalist’s nature – curiosity moved him to find out more about the man he’d just met). He asked me what I was doing in the pub and I explained that I was waiting for a literary agent. This inevitably prompted an enquiry about the nature of the book I was writing.

I explained that Wrecking Machine was part-memoir, part-reportage, a book which explored the subterranean world of white collar boxing by way of numerous segueways into my own errant life as a lawyer, the parallels between law and boxing, the nature of pugilism per se and the ties that bind in a marriage that has gone wrong. I had just finished Wrecking Machine, and Agent Milner and I were meeting to celebrate its completion. This would have put this impromtu chat with Marr sometime in early 2005.

Marr listened intently to my story. I had gone off the rails as a media lawyer with Wiggin, drifting hopelessly into drink at the same time as an extra-marital relationship. Eventually, I was sacked for gross misconduct, having rearranged a restaurant in unexpected ways at a work function. I deserved my fate, for, as the senior partner put it to me when letting me go, this was “conduct unbefitting to a solicitor”. Subsequently, however, I had got my life back on track, attaining good jobs in the law again and salvaging my marriage, largely through throwing myself into white collar and amateur boxing. I would box six nights a week at Walcot Amateur Boxing Club in Swindon and it did me no end of good.

A couple of years before this encounter with Marr, I quit the law of my own volition in favour of writing and freelance journalism. I have written often about media law, and, like just about everyone else in the media industry, knew full well about Marr’s affair despite the injunction which would supposedly keep it a secret. I have also often reflected on the way in which he was interested in my story, something articulated by a complete stranger with only the most tenuous of prior connections with his interlocutor. And Marr’s words, when I finished my brief vignette, struck me then as surprising and since as revealing:

“I can empathise. There are times when I’ve come close to falling off the tower too.”

It seemed, then, that Marr was doing more than simply evincing courtesy, though the fact that this word has now appeared twice says a lot. He is a courteous and decent man. These qualities led him to try and protect his family, having trangressed in a way which is not exactly uncommon the world over but which is greeted – thanks to the embedded sense of prurience in the British – as a deadly sin which must be exposed, come what may. Marr’s decency has also led him to come clean now, in the face of Ian Hislop’s understandable accusations of hypocrisy.

In which pub did we meet? The Duke of Argyll, resonant owing to the famous Argyll v Argyll case, which enshrined the law of confidence in domestic law? Or the Glasshouse Stores, a place in which it pays not to throw stones, or burden the world with injunctions which prove to be not so super after all?

I can no longer recall. But two things are clear: one, if the British were not so hung up about sex there would be little interest in the affairs of the likes of Andrew Marr, and two, for all the lamentations about a lack of clarity about the law of privacy, the status quo is very good business for lawyers and journalists alike.

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