MR JUSTICE TREACY, QC

In the '90s the wife of Colman Treacy, QC, Laura Treacy, then a probation officer,  was one of many West Midlands POs bedded and in return promoted by the  then Chief Officer, Eric Morrell, who ran this public service - charged, inter alia, with the oversight  of child welfare, custody and access matters in the courts - as a private harem and was very happy to disrupt the marriages and childhoods of his staff and their families. At an employment tribunal, enquiring into Service racism, one bold officer brought Morrel's conduct to the attention of the tribunal.

Although his abuse of his position was widely known in the West Midlands, few, and none of his senior colleagues,  were willing   to challenge, much less expose him. He was a vain little thing, always combing his hair, surrounded by a coterie of promotion-hungry, clever boys and girls, many, like him, Cantabrians and he was well thought of at the Home Office, destined for greater things and probably an even more metropolitan  female workforce to exploit and abuse.

The upshot of the revelations of his fuckery was that the tribunal was slammed shut, a deal was done to ensure that he retained his lavish pension and he resigned without penalty or repentance and the person who brought the original complaint had one of her ten claims upheld.

It was a little, local version of the Monica Lewinsky affair, powerful man trades favours and positions for pussy, disadvantaging more suitable candidates and yet when exposed is deemed victim, at worst, of a temptress, or in Morrel's case, dozens of temptresses.

A few  years later, Colman Treacy, now divorced from Senior Probation Officer, Laura, was still exceedingly bitter and angry  the sort of Pull Yourself Together, Man advice which he had routinely pressed on his divorcing male clients buttered no parsnips in his customarily powerful bullies'  world.  Bitter doesn't do it justice, so to speak.

Colman is, these days,  the policeman's darling, regularly locking people away for over thirty years yet, as these people go, Colman Treacy was, as a young lawyer, fairly bright, a tiny bit unconventional but Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Fucking Dear, yesterday, in the first probably of many such trials he banged-up a quartet of men for a very long time, having sat alone and heard the evidence without a jury, hasn't happened in over three hundred and fifty years and it'll be down to the zealous, reforming nature of NewLabour, some career  fascist prick like Jack Straw or Blind Boy Blunkett will have deemed that it's ok, really, for their fellow citizens to be locked away in some shithole for twenty years, denied the scrutiny, the judgement of their peers.

The reason for this extraordinary  procedure was that those accused  of the armed Heathrow robbery were also suspected of jury nobbling;  the Met, happy to shoot us down on the street, to baton-whip our women in order to protect us from the swarming Jihadists or the IRA - now the government of Ulster - is apparently unable to protect a  mere dozen civilians from a handful of armed robbers.  Laughable, really, were it not so Brave New Wordly terrifying.

It doesn't matter, of course, that Mr Justice Treacy was famously and publicly cuckolded, mocked in the sour fraternity of the Courts;  that among the knowing whispers and secret handhakes,  his name provoked mirth, scorn; judges are flawed, damaged, fucked-up, just like everybody else, what matters, though, is that,   yesterday, he helped move us a little deeper into the most Northerly banana republic in the world. Shame on him. If he has remarried she should run off with the first man who asks.