He hadn’t forgotten the cartridges which Mr Thomas had found and which were still in the glove box of his car.  He hadn’t mentioned them to anybody.

The initial euphoria at getting the building work underway had now worn off.  There really wasn’t very much for him to do on the site anymore.  Max was well in control.  Even Simon Bristow had taken a back seat as all the construction work was finished.  Now there was a small army working on the finishing.  The decorators had started in some areas and Clive was trying to focus on marketing.  He’d had a series of meetings with estate agents, all of whom were eager for his business, all of whom had sent along their most attractive female negotiators in their smartest business suits to try and convince him.  He was none the wiser and really couldn’t decide between a local agent and the sort of prestige international outfit that also sold country estates and private Caribbean islands.

This morning then, with DS Evans gone and the rifle safely locked away, he was rattling around in his own modest, rather grubby little flat near Battersea Park.  He was bored.

Life was no longer a struggle.  His new bank had taken an entirely different view of his circumstances.  Once they’d seen the cash deposit of £150,000, a manager had been sent to visit him at the development and had then updated his file and credit status.  Although Clive didn’t know it, the bank now saw him as a high net worth individual and he had a notional limit of £50,000 against his name.  He could ask for any type of borrowing up to that level and it would be granted immediately without any further question.  In fact, on paper he was probably now worth around £5 million so he didn’t need to worry about paying his bills anymore.

What the hell!  He was going to enjoy this morning.  It was a beautiful day.  Strong sunlight was dappled through the leafy trees in the park.  It was half-term so there were kids and their scantily clad mothers everywhere.  He sauntered along the Albert Bridge Road enjoying the sunshine and wondering whether perhaps he should invite Mark for lunch at Vermont – or somewhere else.  His money was good anywhere.

Next thing there he was on Albert Bridge – again.  How long ago was it now since that evening before he’d first met Mark?  It was just a matter of weeks.  How things had changed since then.

******

Another morning at the library was over and Sir Damian was enjoying the very much more relaxed lifestyle of a worker. After being let back onto the wing he was free to wander around and chat until lunch was served.  Then he was expected to go back to his cell and push his own door shut for the lunchtime lockdown.

There was loads of noise coming from the servery but they clearly weren’t ready to start yet so he went back to his cell.   There was one letter and a slip of paper that had been pushed under the door.  He knew straightaway that the letter was from Barnaby Evans.

He ripped it open and scanned the contents quickly.  His appeal against sentence was to be heard in two weeks time.   The slip of paper told him that he was to be transferred to Ford prison in a week.

He was elated and angry, surprised and shocked, relieved and frustrated.  He almost shouted out aloud.

He barely noticed lunch although he ate it hungrily.  He didn’t want to leave Brixton now.  Why would they move him just when his appeal was coming up?  He was just a few miles from the Court here.  In Ford he would be half a day’s travelling away.  He started to write an application requesting that his transfer be cancelled.  Everything in prison is accomplished by “app”.  He’d learned that very quickly and it helped to be literate although it was best to word everything in very simple and direct language.  The officers themselves weren’t the most highly educated of people.

As he was drafting he realised that the prison probably didn’t even know about his appeal.  Even if the governor’s office had been informed he recognised that usually one hand didn’t know what the other was doing.  Everything happens behind closed doors in prison.  The administrative and management methods were like something out of the 19^th century with an unhealthy dollop of union demarcation rules thrown in.  He decided to mention his job in the library as another reason he should not be moved.

The spectre of Andrew de Boer fluttered briefly across his mind but he dismissed it.  He knew now that he could cope with a couple of years.  He’d be out and rebuilding his life sooner than he’d expected.  The last thing he needed to get involved in was any sort of escape plan.  That was an absurd idea.

…read more here.

Once the response  to this FOI request is received the existence of the Home Affairs select committee in 1983 will be proven.  At that time I shall be commencing legal action against a number of individuals.  Unless full, contrite and public apologies are made together with appropriate financial settlements, I shall identify those who have sufficient assets to meet such a claim and I shall issue proceedings in the High Court.

After deduction of my costs, I shall donate all financial settlements received to CLEAR party funds.

Whether the response to this FOI request will be able to provide any further information about the select committee’s work in 1983 remains to be seen.  However, I shall be swearing an affidavit to the effect that I did write and submit the report I have published.  I shall also be obtaining affidavits in support from my ex-wife and my mother, both of whom had first hand knowledge of the report.  I shall further seek to locate one or more ex-colleagues from that time who will also be able to give sworn first hand evidence to the same effect.

There  will be two principal defendants: the mendacious Sarah McCulloch and the solicitor, Darryl Bickler.  Aside from the lies she has published about my report, McCulloch has set out systematically to defame me to a number of MPs .  The damages I shall seek to recover in this respect will be very substantial.  As for Darryl Bickler, who I had counted as a friend, he has publicly accused me of forgery.  He is a practising solicitor and an officer of the court.  As such he has a duty to uphold the highest standards of probity and honour.   Unless he settles with me appropriately, in addition to legal action I shall also be pursuing a complaint with the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The mob mentality and small-mindedness that prevails  amongst drug reform campaigners is precisely the reason that our arguments have failed so miserably to advance our cause.  Too many are consumed by petty bickering, selfish egos and divisive jealousy.

I stand tall and proud to fight for an end to the prohibition of cannabis , particularly for those who need it as medicine.  I shall not be deflected by these spiteful and false attacks.  The truth about cannabis is CLEAR.

Dear Home Office,

Please provide the following details concerning the Home Affairs select committee in 1983

1. Confirm the existence of the committee in 1983

2. The names of the members of the committee in 1983

3. Any records of the committee’s meetings and subjects discussed, considered or inquired into in 1983.

4. Any discussions, consideration or inquiry into cannabis in 1983 and in the preceding and succeeding years, 1982 and 1984.

5. Any records of any discussions about discussions, requests, press coverage, parliamentary references or any other mention
anywhere at any time about the committee discussing, considering or inquiring into cannabis in 1983.

6. Any record of the receipt by the committee in 1983 of a 30 page report from me entitled “An Unaffordable Prejudice”.

Yours faithfully,

Peter Reynolds

You can track the progress of this FOI request here:  http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/home_affairs_select_committee_re/new

It's Life Jim But Not As We Know It.

This woman is about as unpleasant, bitter and twisted as they come!

She, if you don’t know, has been responsible for the snide, destructive and entirely negative disruption of excellent work done by other campaigners in the past.  She is another one of those egotistical, genetically confused, half werewolf, half woman who thinks that bickering, abuse, divisiveness and misandry is the road to enlightenment.

I skimmed her article about my 1983 report to the Home Affairs select committee and chuckled at the emptiness of her accusations.  Does she think I didn’t write it? Or that I did it for my own amusement with no purpose?  Or that I forged it to deceive people with sad, deluded, heterophobic lives like her? What exactly does she think?  If at all.

Sarah, calm down dear!  Some of us don’t fritter our lives away on sad, so sad meaningless vendettas. Some of us have lives with purpose and joy and happiness! We have lives!

Pathetic and vacuous does not go far enough.

I was surprised at the depth to which Alun wanted to interrogate me, particularly as he had just resigned in a fit of pique and was no longer on the admin team nor even a member. Nevertheless I answered them all, in detail without holding anything back. Even Alun, begrudgingly, said at the time that I had given full answers.  Others said they felt they now knew me even better than their own family members!

I no longer have a copy of those answers but I know Alun does because he’s been niggling and quibbling and indulging in his own unique buffoonery about them all year. Now he’s managed to get his buddies in the anti-Peter Reynolds campaign to open the whole issue up again.  I’m supposed to be “fake”.  I’m supposed to be a BNP voter.  I’m supposed to have participated in an EDL demo in Weymouth.  Perhaps most absurd of all, I’m supposed to have sold fake Nazi memorabilia on a Swansea market stall.  Just today I hear that I’m angling to become an MEP or an AM in the Welsh Assembly.  It’s all news to me!

So here are some facts and evidence.

My CV

Click To Download

1980 Article in “Mind Your Own Business”

Click To Download

1983 Report to Home Affairs select committee

Click To Download

1986 “An Introduction to your Amstrad PC” video

Click To Download

1994 Article in “Marketing”

Click To Download

1997 Column in “The Independent”

Click To Download

Across London the street lights were coming on, burning orange to begin with as they warmed up.  The western sky was also orange as the early spring day came to an end and cooled down.  From Docklands in the east to Hammersmith in the west, the traffic surged to its evening crescendo and then began to fade away as the commuters reached home or dispersed from the main roads onto the M25 and various motorways heading for the home counties and more distant destinations.

The river continued its endless and timeless meander through the capital.  The setting sun reflecting off small wavelets, the spring tide running fast, creating hard work for the dozens of small boats plying up and down, carrying passengers, moving cargo or just messing about.  The lights on Albert Bridge burned brightly as a solitary figure strolled along the pavement and paused to lean over the side and watch the water.

Clive was worrying.  He had hoped that a walk through Battersea Park and along the river would calm him down and prepare him for the meeting.  Staring at the water he told himself that he had done everything that he possibly could.  In his younger days that had been the recipe for a worry free existence.  If you’ve done everything you can then worrying isn’t going to achieve anything more.

That philosophy, or perhaps it was just a mind game, didn’t seem to work anymore though.  Not since the long and painful break up from Kim.  That experience had wounded him deeply, perhaps more than any other.  He had tried to – no, he had – acted with integrity throughout.  He had been ready to break away himself but her tears and her pitiful begging had reeled him back in and he had re-committed to her more deeply and profoundly than ever before.  Her betrayals had hit him hard and it had taken too long for him to see the truth that was actually staring him in the face.  She had pleaded to move back in with him and he had found a delightful cottage in Sussex that she had enthused about and seemed to be the perfect solution.  Within days of moving in though she had disappeared.  She went straight back to her former ways.  She’d go out to the shops and three or four days later would surface “at her sister’s” or “visiting her mum and dad”.   Clive had to come to terms with the fact that the woman he was doing his best to love was a liar and a cheat.  It hurt.

He’d spent a year looking at the bottom of a bottle.  At first it had been to dull the pain and the worry, a way to sleep.  Later it had become a problem.  He’d stopped working and would go to the pub for a couple of pints at lunchtime then spend the afternoon and evening getting through a bottle of scotch and watching old black and white movies.  Along the way, he had to deal with his father’s death and with three or four passionate reunions with Kim, each occasion causing him more pain and demonstrating the depth of her insincerity.

Tonight was to be the end of all this.  No, he’d already put all that behind him.  Tonight was the start of his new life.  He’d done everything he could.  There was no point in worrying.

He turned away from the river and started back towards the park.  He had an hour now to get home, get changed, into his car, back up through Chelsea, Kensington and Holland Park to the restaurant.  The walk had done him good.  He felt calmer and stronger.  Howard would be introducing a new man to Mark de Boer this evening.

******

The early evening rush for Mo was well underway.  His business phone was ringing almost constantly and he was making an endless and impossible series of promises to be at various different locations in west London“in 10 minutes”.

Mo knew the Range Rover was far too conspicuous but it was the one thing he was unable to resist.  He lived his life in a constant state of fear, always watching over his shoulder, checking every car behind him, trusting to his instinct, avoiding any situation that felt dangerous.  He was always ready to cut and run.  Once, outside a chicken shop on the Harrow Road, he’d been spooked by a van that he was sure he’d seen following him earlier that day.  He was serving a new customer.  He’d seen him before but never on his own, always with a girl that he’d known for some time.  The van had suddenly appeared in the side street.  Mo had turned, walked calmly but briskly away and dropped several hundred pounds worth of gear into the waste bin.  He hadn’t been pulled so on the face of it, it was a false alarm.  Several hours later he’d sent one of his soldiers to check the bin.  Amongst the empty boxes and the greasy bones and skin, he’d recovered more than half of what he’d dumped.

In this constant game of cat and mouse, Mo excused the Range Rover on the basis that the police knew who he was anyway.  If today was to be his day, it wouldn’t make any difference what he was driving.  He gunned the big black beast up to the top of Ladbroke Grove and past the Sainsbury’s roundabout.  Everything was quiet now.  The store had reopened but rumours were rife about exactly what had happened earlier.  He swung right immediately after the roundabout and headed down the back road to Trellech Tower.   There he stopped twice on two corners before completing the loop back down Golborne Roadand onto the Grove again.  He waited opposite the tube station until one of his regulars showed up, jumped in the passenger seat and then he cruised round to Portobello while they negotiated the price of a quarter-ounce in good humour.  “Give ‘em both one for me!”, Mo grinned.  “You’re too greedy for your own good!”.   He barely let the customer out of the car before flooring the throttle again and then, just as quickly, screeching to a halt as he saw Beanie bumbling down the road.  “C’mon, get in.  I need your help”.

Beanie was strung out now but he had the latest news about the stabbing at Sainsbury’s.  “It was that squaddie girl.  Susan something.  She went nuts.  There was a cash van collecting and she tried to jump them but that big fat security guard jumped her.  Y’know the one what nicked Jimmy’s missus.  She shanked him good and proper.  He’s dead”.

…read more here.

Chapter 1

The dark wood-panelled courtroom was quiet and serene.  After weeks of intense argument and dramatic revelations the moment of denouement was just minutes away.  For now, for just a moment more, James Macpherson, the court usher, enjoyed the peace, the heavily pregnant peace that was about to give way to even greater drama as the jury returned to deliver its verdict.

A side door clicked open and Sam, the jury usher, gave James a quick nod before turning back to attend to his charges.  James drew a last deep breath of serenity and turned to his duties: recalling the lawyers, the defendant and the public.  As soon as he opened the main court doors there was a rush of fresh and expectant air and a growing hubub as the throng returned to its seats.

The elegant figure of Sir Damian Fremantle moved reluctantly away from the reassuring cluster of silk surrounding him and climbed the few steps back into the dock.  Perhaps there was just the slightest humility showing now, a little uncertainty perhaps, possibly even fear…but no, it was a fleeting moment.  The chin went up, the lofty nose was looked down and the supreme arrogance of Britain’s wealthiest banker was restored.  It was as if he were waiting for the Judge to return and offer an apology for the great inconvenience that Sir Damian had suffered over the last five weeks.

“Rat-a-tat-tat!” The loudest, most peremptory sound allowed in the Court was the warning of the Judge’s entry.  “All rise!” came next and as defendant, lawyers, jury and public rose to their feet, Mr Justice Weatherspoon assumed his seat, all sat, a few routine nods were exchanged and James rose to perform his final duty.

“Guilty”.  The verdict resounded around the Court.  Sir Damian looked disbelieving, outraged as his legal team slumped in their chairs, the youngest, female junior, her head in her hands, realising those flirtatious promises her client had made really would now come to nothing.

Sir Damian appeared to rally, a touch of cockiness returning to his posture but then slowly he slumped, his shoulders dropped, his world seemed to spin and he fell insensible to the floor.  Now the collective gasp that had been building since the jury foreman spoke reached a crescendo. There were muted cheers.  The doors slammed as journalists left, mobiles already at their ears.  There was a general sense of relief and excitement as the Judge banged his gavel just once and said “Sentencing will take place in the morning.  I need no reports.  Bail is denied”.

Within seconds the Court was empty.  Outside the “Bash The Bankers” demo had become a party.  There was literally dancing in the streets.  Pandemonium erupted.  Strangers embraced each other. London had seen nothing like it since VE day when the last great threat to civilisation was finally defeated.

This was the final chapter in bringing to heel the avarice that had been allowed to run wild in the City. A year ago the first chill winds of reality had swept through boardrooms when Sir Jim Malouse had been extradited from Scotland to the US.  Within a few weeks he had to stand in a tiny Alabama courtroom in a prison boiler suit, manacled at hands and feet, to hear his sentence described as 160 years without possibility of parole. Of course the appeals were in hand but meanwhile Sir Jim languished in a maximum security state prison, his massive lifetime pension of no comfort at all.  His only friends the cockroaches that crawled in from the stinking mangrove swamp on which the prison was built.

A few senior civil servants had followed both in Europe and US but then the politicians had started to fall.  Any British MP who had had any connection with the City, the Treasury or the financial system was ruined. From former Chancellors to junior ministers of state, more than 20 MPs, 12 senators and fifteen congressmen were convicted on criminal charges ranging from false accounting and conspiracy to straightforward theft.  Ultimately Silvio Berlusconi was at last kicked out of office, not with his trousers round his ankles but with his secret dividend income statements from a raft of European banks.

Now with the conviction of Sir Damian, the night of the long knives was fast approaching dawn.  In Britainthe destruction of the old financial system had created a massive new industry. Out of the very disaster itself had come the creation of thousands of new jobs in local financial councils, co-operative banks and the Regulator, the nationwide authority, part of the International Finance Treaty of 2011.  A new optimism was in force throughout the country.  People were back in work.  A new culture of transparency and fairness had swept aside the old institutions.

Fremantle’s world was in ruins.  As the unthinkable reality pulsed through his body he regained some sort of consciousness and found himself in a cold, slightly damp cell, a massive steel door being the only feature of note.

Before the horror of imprisonment could overwhelm him the door opened and there stood Bart James, his QC, despondency written all over him, his juniors almost hiding behind him.

“I’m so sorry Damian.  We’ll start working on the appeal immediately.  Believe me, whatever tomorrow brings you can count on us putting together the best possible arguments”

Fremantle looked directly at James, his face bemused, dull, incomprehending.  Then, without the slightest acknowledgement, he turned away and lay down on the concrete shelf that served for a bed, his face to the wall.

…read more here.

London Games, my novel set in the spring and summer of 2012, is now on sale at Amazon.

It concerns an Afghanistan veteran suffering from combat stress, a disgraced ex-banker sent to jail amidst scandal and public outrage, a cocaine dealer with customers at the very top and the very bottom of society, a property developer on the cusp of making his fortune and a restauranteur starting to make his name as a celebrity chef.  The story culminates as the games open at the Olympic stadium.

Please go to Amazon to buy it, enjoy and let me know what you think!

Mischievous forces which oppose me have sought to blacken my character by twisting, misrepresenting and in some cases, falsifying my words.

I am fully aware that these snide individuals have a full copy of my site and will continue to harass and abuse me over it.  That is the sad life that they lead.

For now, my only plan is to keep my site down for a year.  I will decide what to do then.  Whether I will add any new posts here remains to be seen.

Thank you to those who have followed my writing for so long.  I will be back.  I will continue to campaign and fight against all forms of prejudice, bigotry and hate, precisely the forces that have been targeted against me.

Have a great 2012.

peter@peter-reynolds.co.uk