It seems to me that if the State takes upon itself the right to prosecute individuals, and ultimately to remove their liberty, it ought to at least allow a level playing field – that is, it ought to fund the defence, properly.

My sister, a barrister, is up in arms about it all – as are most of her colleagues, including Toby Potts: so much so that she’s written to The Graun about it.

The upshot, she says, is that outside firms like Serco and, oddly, Eddie Stobart will end up running defence work – and that they will be under commercial pressure to get defendants to plead guilty, as the employed lawyers involved will earn the same fee for the firm for a quick guilty plea hearing as they would for a two-day trial.

The Bar does have an image problem. Everyone thinks that barristers are pompous, overpaid, bewigged windbags, and in the case of my sister they are certainly correct*.

Chris Grayling also blames them for a lot of the delays in court. This idea, says my sis, is

breathtaking, particularly from a Minister who bears ultimate responsibility for the delays occasioned to justice daily. I regularly work until 2am or later when in a trial, to ensure that admissions, legal arguments, and editing of statements and interviews, as well as my preparation for witnesses and speeches are ready. I do not ask judges (nor would expect to receive) time for this at Court. I also am regularly left sitting for hours at court mid-trial, case delayed, if not completely adjourned, or jury dismissed. Why? Because the interpreter has again not turned up, on time or at all, or has been discovered, part way through a four-week trial, not to have been interpreting correctly. Or the defendant has not been put on the prison van, or, if he has, he has been brought to X Crown Court from Y prison fifty miles away, via Z, forty miles in the opposite direction. These are not exaggerations. Last year I defended the rape of a five-year-old child, who was made to wait at court for several days whilst an interpreter was persuaded to attend. No one was held to account for this. I could give example after example from personal experience.

It’s almost like there’s a book in it!

Anyway, if you’re interested in stopping this devastation of a legal system copied around the world, you can sign a petition here.

Meanwhile, The Bookseller is still worried about the future of publishing, and eBooks – the future is all about piracy, self-publishing and library lending, apparently.

*Joke. She’s not pompous, or overpaid. As she says, she regularly works through the night on cases – I’ve been at her house while she’s doing so, and it’s quite boring for visitors. On some cases, depending on how they progress, she can earn a per hour rate not far off the minimum wage, out of which she must pay VAT, chambers rent and tax. She is a windbag, though.

Interestingly, during the lunch it came up that someone called Jed Mercurio, who wrote a BBC show called Line of Duty, had based a lot of it on Gadget and PC Copperfield. This was news to us. World Productions, who made the show, bought the rights to Generation F from us… but not Wasting Police Time or Perverting the Course of Justice. Strange.

Apparently, Victorian people were more intelligent than us. We know this because reaction times – a reliable marker of general intelligence – have declined steadily since the Victorian era from about 183 milliseconds to 250ms in men, and from 187ms to 277ms in women. Obviously, this is all rubbish – but then the median Monday Books score was better than 250 (and worse than 183) so there must be something in it. You can test yourself here.

An amusing review-ish of the new Dan Brown novel, by Steven Poole.

Mark Steyn on Mayor Bloomberg.

And another book due out from us later this year. Pete Ashton was an undercover cop who spent ten years busting major heroin and crack gangs. Along the way, he may have dabbled in drugs himself and certainly changed his views on the rights and wrongs of legalisation. In the wake of the still-rumbling Mark Kennedy scandal, it’s an interesting look at what it’s like to live several lives at once.

Among those available on this platform are A Paramedic’s Diary, Sick Notes and Second Opinion.

For some reason, we have had a lot of requests from people in Australia for our books to be on Kobo – so here you go, cobbers.

Coming soon:

May It Please Your Lordship is the story of Toby Potts’ first days as a young barrister, stumbling and mumbling his way through to the right result – usually. It’s very funny, we think.

Toby Potts is the nom de plume of barrister David Osborne, and the book – the first of several, we hope – is semi-autobiographical. David was called to the Bar in the 1970s, whereas Toby is a thoroughly modern creation.

We’ll post up an extract soon.

The cover (designed as always by Paul Hill) features an illustration by Neil Kerber, of Private Eye‘s Supermodels fame.

Finally, thank you to all those people who called or emailed about our other barrister; he’s showing signs of responding to treatment, and our fingers are firmly crossed.

My brother-in-law has been diagnosed with cancer, at the age of 45, and we’ve spent a lot of time visiting him and my sister, having my niece and nephew to stay, and just thinking and talking about him.

Having been ill for some time, he started chemotherapy the day after he was made a QC in the recent bar elevations.

We had a great day down at the RCJ watching him and all the other new silks bowing and scraping to the Lord Chief Justice; in days gone by, matters would then have disintegrated into a very messy celebration, but he was far too poorly for any of that.

He’s showing early signs of responding to the chemo, but he has embarked on a long and uncertain road. I hadn’t been aware of just how dangerous the treatment is in itself. I knew it made your hair fall out, and caused nausea; I didn’t realise (or at least hadn’t thought much about the obvious fact) that it damages your immune system to the point where you can die from a simple infection.

It all does make you think a bit. It also puts books, publishing and most of the rest of life into some perspective.

Anyway, here’s an interesting piece on publishing and the internet. And here’s a piece in The Bookseller that says ‘Amazon’s quest for industry domination is “scary”‘:

Booksellers Association c.e.o. Tim Godfray (writes) in an exclusive column for today’s London Book Fair Bookseller Daily: ‘Amazon has achieved its phenomenal growth and influence because consumers like what it does, but, in my view, if they continue to threaten large parts of the book trade, this will not only be bad for the industry, but also, in the long run, for the consumer too.’

Amazon owns 18 separate companies that cover book printing and publishing, marketplaces, audio and digital reading, Godfray writes. ‘So the writer goes straight to Amazon. Amazon publishes the author’s work and can then promote the book to targeted users . . . Scary. With such a set-up, they really do have the ability to destroy the book trade as we know it.’

Like most people who read, and all publishers, I love bookshops and regret that so many of them are closing.

Charlie Higson sums up thus:

My position is that Amazon is convenient and cheap, but at the expense of traditional bookshops that have to pay the full tax rate. How can anyone else possibly hope to compete? There has to be a level playing field. I would be bereft if we lost all our bookshops and all book sales were in the hands of one single retailer that sells books for next to nothing. For a company to barge in, hoover up all sales of everything online and not pay UK tax appears to be bordering on the criminal. And for the government to have let them set up in this way is also bordering on the criminal, it’s certainly very stupid, but then what do I know about EU tax laws?

That’s a good question. What does he know about EU tax laws? Because that seems to be the crucial point. We surely can’t pay taxes based on what Mr Higson (or anyone else) thinks is ‘fair’, or ‘moral’, or ‘in the spirit of the law’ (if we can, I vote for 75% on TV stars who are also best-selling authors). We have to work with the law – don’t we? And, as far as I can ascertain, it does seem as though Amazon is ‘paying the full tax rate’ due. It is obeying the law, and the ‘bordering on criminal’ politicians who wrote the law and ‘let them set up in this way’ are fully aware of what is happening. It is the will of Parliament – mad maybe, not that that should surprise anyone – and Amazon isn’t ‘dodging’ anything. Lobby for a change in the law by all means, but at least tell the truth.

It also appears, if you have a look at Amazon’s accounts, that another reason it doesn’t pay a lot of tax is that it really is not making much profit. Here’s Alex Hern in The New Statesman:

The company has revenues of the same magnitude as Apple, but profits at the same magnitude as Games Workshop. It has managed to convince an entire class of investors to give it money and not ask for anything back save continued growth… What Amazon’s strategy amounts to in the short-term is a massive transfer of wealth from its investors to its customers.’

As Matthew Yglesias says, I think only partly tongue-in-cheek, in Slate:

Amazon… is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.

The key phrase there is ‘for the benefit of consumers’. Bookshops can’t be run for the benefit of publishers and bookshop owners; they have to be run for customers. What Charlie Higson is really arguing against is a wide range of books, sold cheap. For a lot of people, getting a book for £4 instead of £14 is very important. I know a lot of publishers might not like that – I’m one of them, insignificant as I am – but it’s a fact.

Amazon’s real financial advantage is nothing to do with tax – it’s in lower staff costs, better discounts, and not having to pay town centre rents and business rates etc.

Coupled with that, it can stock every book ever published – and I don’t need to spend two hours travelling and £3 in petrol to get to it, and another £2 to park, to buy a copy of whatever it is I’m after (and then find that actually that they don’t have it after all, and that the salesperson I spoke to on the phone made a mistake).

Welcome to the internet.

Higson also suggests – as does Hern in the New Statesman – that Amazon could eventually kill everyone else off and then hike its prices to cash in on the monopoly it has created. Is this possible? I don’t see how it can; social media now allows the dissemination of information so quickly that online competitors would quickly spring up. How could it not?

These are the watchmen who watch the watchmen (though I understand there is an ongoing debate within the ranks of the thin blue line as to who watches the watchmen who watch the watchmen. From talking to a lot of police officers over recent years, it seems that, in many cases, they have some very interesting issues of their own. But that’s for another day.)

A number of people have contacted us – including members of the media – to ask whether Gadget has been busted by his* own side.

As I said yesterday, the answer is no.

It will disappoint certain people, who simply cannot stand the fact that Gadget had a voice listened to across the world, while their own was ignored even in their own street. To choose a subset entirely at random, monomaniacal lunatics from Huddersfield, say.

But the fact is, Gadget has quit entirely on his* own terms, at a time of his* own choosing. After seven years, enough is enough. Let someone else have a go.

So: to the concerned, I say: don’t worry about him* and if you haven’t read the book, here’s a free extract, and here’s a link (and, at the bottom, given today is booze day on the BBC, is another segment from the book).

To Melvin T Rumpelstiltskin, I say: keep on stamping those little feet!

*Or her

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE

WE HEAR a lot about ‘booze Britain’ these days, but it’s not the booze which is the problem, it’s the people.

Most of us like a drink now and then. As a younger man, particularly when I was in the Army, I had a few beers and rolled back home drunk more than once, but I never smashed all the car mirrors off in the streets on the way back, or attacked anyone with a baseball bat, or told the police to fuck off. I still enjoy a pint from time to time, but I don’t get absolutely slaughtered and I don’t go out and smack people in the face and puke all over the pavement. I don’t drink-drive and I don’t beat up my wife or kids or neighbours. I don’t smash shop windows, or urinate in doorways, or use foul language at the top of my voice.

I’m nothing special: there are millions of people who don’t do any of these things, and you’re probably among them.

The problem is, there are also quite a lot of Britons who don’t feel like they’ve had a decent night out until they’ve ticked several of the above boxes, and had a kebab/KFC.

Of course, their behaviour is often appalling when they’re sober, but it’s far worse when they’re drunk, as whatever inhibitions or social polish they might have had are swept away on a tide of Stella Artois and blue, vodka-based pop.

There are people who say that it was ever thus, and point to Hogarth’s Gin Lane and the back streets of our port cities where sailors would get tanked up and fighting drunk after months at sea. But this new phenomenon is happening on our High Streets, at least three or four nights a week.

The protagonists are often young, and they have a lot of disposable income: they can’t afford to buy houses anymore so they all live with their parents way beyond when they used to. With no responsibilities, and with discount drink far cheaper than it ever was, why not go out and get hammered every night?

Into this poisonous cocktail the Government recently threw another ingredient – 24 hour licensing.

Not many places are open 24 hours, it’s true, but lots are now open much later than they were. I don’t care what the figures say, this has caused us huge problems.

When the nightclubs used to shut at the same time, we could gear everything to that point. We would have a flurry of issues – the town centre fights, the robbing or bilking of taxi drivers, the drink-driving accidents, the people falling over and smacking their heads on the concrete etc – but at about 2.30am it would all start to die off.

Now it carries on all the way through to 6am. Ask any front line cop, and they’ll tell you: broad daylight on a Sunday morning, getting towards the end of the shift, and they are still going to fights in the High Street. What’s going on?

The Government calls it the ‘Night Time Economy’ (NTE). This Orwellian phrase refers to those bars, clubs and other such venues operating at night in town centres. It is a nightmare of vomit, urine, chips and police officers being punched in the face, but that doesn’t square with the official vision of longer licensing and the NTE – where everyone meets up in cafés to share polenta and vine-ripened tomatoes, sips their five units of alcohol and chats about the issues of the day.

Again, I may have missed it but I don’t think any minister has gone on telly and admitted that the NTE licensing experiment has been a disaster. They don’t like to admit they’re wrong about much, do they? Instead, the pressure is on the police to find ways to deal with NTE crime and anti-social behaviour.

Launching an advertising campaign recently, Jacqui Smith [the then Home Secretary] said, ‘I am not prepared to tolerate alcohol-fuelled crime and disorder on our streets and this new campaign will challenge people to think twice about the serious consequences of losing control. It reinforces Government action already underway to deal with excessive drinking, including tougher sanctions for licensees who sell to young people, new powers for the police to disperse disruptive drinkers and better education and information for everyone.’

The Government’s input, then, is an advert, some ‘better education and information’ and the wildly misguided hope that the lunatics we arrest each weekend will somehow start to ‘think twice about the serious consequences of losing control’.

As for actually sorting it out, that’s down to us. Luckily, they are legislating to give us ‘new powers’.

The problem with politicians these days is that very few of them have actually ever done anything in the real world. They go from university, to jobs as MPs’ research assistants, to themselves becoming MPs and then Ministers. Being law-abiding types themselves (save for the odd run-in with cannabis), they actually believe that a ton of extra verbage on the statute books is all it takes.

If only it were that simple.

The Government says irresponsible landlords who serve drunk people should be prosecuted, and that we should also identify the bar staff who served these idiots their booze. Which sounds great when you announce it at the despatch box in the House of Commons, or on Richard and Judy’s sofa, or in an exclusive interview with some newspaper political editor. It’s not so easy at midnight in our towns, when the streets are full of paralytically drunk yobs who are kicking off, smashing windows and fighting with us.

We don’t have the time or the personnel to start checking CCTV to find out where they just came out of. Even if we did, and we went to speak to the manager of the venue, what’s he going to say? He’s going to say, no, we didn’t serve them, they came in pissed so we kicked them back out. So we spend however many hours reviewing the tapes to find all the previous venues they went to, and the managers there say, no, we didn’t serve them either, they were pissed when they came in here, too.

OK, so we grill the bar staff instead. We push our way into a club we think a given bozo has come from. There are 300 people in there, the ‘music’ is at about 140 decibels, the five barmaids are all Polish and hardly speak a word of English. Shouting to be heard, we’re trying to ask them if they served a man in a striped shirt with tattooed forearms and a gold earring, in a club containing about 200 men in striped shirts with tattooed forearms and gold earrings. Back on the street, meanwhile, a whole different group of drunks is now kicking the living shit out of my officers.

This is the stuff of fantasy. It is ludicrous. It is dreamed up by people sitting in air conditioned rooms whose experience of modern drinking, I can only think, must be limited to nights out in country inns in the Cotswolds or metropolitan bars in London. In a trendy pub in Islington, there might be three dozen people sitting listening to jazz all night and if one of them later goes mad outside the 24 hour Tesco possibly you can pin something on the people who served him his last quart of pinot grigio. But these are not the places from which the trouble emanates.

The police can shut problem pubs, says the Government. Yep, we can. But it’s not quite as easy as it sounds when you say it to Andrew Marr and he’s nodding in agreement. I have shut a pub down. Once. But it was a really difficult thing to do, it took days of police time and it wasn’t easy to get it through at court. The licensees don’t just roll over, they put up a vigorous defence because it’s their livelihood you’re taking away. Plus, all it does is displace the problem. People don’t stop drinking and brawling just because their favourite bar has closed, after all.

I don’t know the full answer to the problem. I suspect no-one does. It probably involves all sorts of things, from improving attitudes to civility and behaviour from a very young age, to changing our drinking culture, to making booze harder and more expensive to buy (though this would penalise non-problem drinkers), to tougher enforcement of the basic laws against public drunkenness and violence.

This latter element of a wider solution is the one thing the police actually could do something about – after all, Ms Smith says that she has given us new powers to ‘disperse disruptive drinkers’. But this is another one straight from the la-la land school of public order: ‘Excuse me sir, can you put that bottle down and stop trying to blind that other man? We have new powers to disperse you, you see.’

Disperse them with who, Jacqui?

I know the Home Secretary says we have more police than ever, but how many of them are working Response? I know, too, that we have PCSOs now, and that they look a bit like police, but very few of them work beyond 9pm because it’s too dangerous (it’s not too dangerous for the public, note, but it is too dangerous for PCSOs, despite their stab vests and their radios). In the first few months of 24 hour licensing, we were given enormous amounts of centrally-funded extra money to put more bodies on the street – the overtime was great for the Sergeants and PCs. As a result, everywhere you turned there were police. Once that dried up, we were back to normal – and we really don’t have the numbers to do much more than control things to a just-about acceptable level.

So, what if we could do something to the figures, to make it look like things are better? If it’s not within our gift to stop the nations’ youth getting drunk and fighting, and it’s not, the only place left for us to go to, to get the reductions we need, is our bureaucrats.

If we arrest lots of people for relatively minor things, so we get lots of ‘detections’, we at least have some ammunition to use in our defence when people start squealing about NTE crime. Or if police statisticians start to look at definitions of crime, maybe we can shift things that would have been counted into areas that wouldn’t be?

For instance, someone is being aggressive and drunk in the street. We have two options. We can arrest him for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ or for one of the offences under the Public Order Act 1986 – sections 3, 4 and 5 of which are more commonly known as ‘Affray’, ‘Threatening Behaviour’ and ‘Disorderly Conduct’.

What’s the difference? The difference is that ‘drunk and disorderly’ is not a recordable crime. You are found in that state by a police officer, arrested and bound over to keep the peace at court the next day (or, more often, given a Penalty Notice for Disorder and sent on your way). It doesn’t show up on our figures. S5 POA is recordable, and does.

There is widespread anecdotal evidence of PCs being put under pressure to arrest for drunk and disorderly. Even if they arrest for S5 POA, it can later be changed to d&d – this is perfectly legitimate, no-one is doing anything technically wrong or illegal, but it does have the added benefit of making the NTE figures look a lot better than they actually are, doesn’t it?

I don’t even really blame senior officers if they are creating this pressure: the Government has said it wants to see reductions, so we have to provide them.

Whether it actually makes things better… well, who in authority really cares? As long as they aren’t getting stabbed in the kebab house, or having their car walked over at 3am, or being woken up by people fighting in their front garden – and they aren’t – then is there really a problem?

He first started the Police Inspector Blog in 2006 – inspired, as it happens, by another Monday Books author, PC David Copperfield, who wrote Wasting Police Time and created the now-defunct Coppersblog.

Few blogs last anything like that long – certainly not when they’re updated two or three times a week.

As a result of his efforts, he has received nearly 13 million hits.

I remember first meeting him, in a little restaurant not far from Euston Station; he was full of ideas for how the legal system could be changed, and how the poor, weak and elderly on his patch could be protected from the depredations of nasty, recidivist criminals. Few of his ideas have been adopted; common-sense never got anyone a QPM.

We published his book, Perverting the Course of Justice, not long after that first meeting. It has sold well, if not as well as Copperfield’s, but sales – for the sake of sales – were never Gadget’s main motivation, and I have never paid a penny to him for having written it.

Like WPT and PC E E Bloggs’ Diary of an On-Call Girl, the idea was to get politicians and voters to wake up to the realities of life on Britain’s worst housing estates, in an era when many senior coppers were becoming more adept at spin than in catching serious criminals.

He has written on a number of occasions for the national press and has spoken a fair bit to the BBC. It’s hard to exaggerate the risk he was taking in doing this. In the police, speaking out can cost you your job.

He’s been traduced by people like Nick ‘he is not an Inspector’ Herbert, and is a figure of hate for others.

I’m not sure why this is, when what he does as a day job is to recover dead children from car accidents, cut suicides down from tree branches or goalposts in the park, and try to catch distraction burglars who suck the wedding rings from the fingers of elderly widows. (The spit helps the rings to slide off more easily.)

I know from talking to him that it has become harder and harder to say something new on his blog.

I didn’t agree with him on everything, though on policing matters I deferred to his experience and knowledge. He let me win on publishing, northern soul and cricket. Beer and rugby were a draw.

He is and will remain a very good friend.

Vale, Gadget.

*Or hers.

NOTE: COMMENTS NOW CLOSED. WE HAVE PUBLISHED ALL COMMENTS RECEIVED (AS THE LAST-BUT-ONE SUGGESTS), APART FROM ONE WHICH ORIGINATED IN HUDDERSFIELD.

A large number of young Iraqi men and boys died after they ambushed a British Army patrol and the gloves came off. Many of the dead were disintegrated by rounds from 30mm cannon; some people have claimed that the state of the bodies means that they were tortured. Having spoken to people who were there, and to a large number of British soldiers over the years, I would be surprised if that were the case.

I suspect the lawyers will pocket a couple of hundred million, some Iraqi families will be compensated, and ‘lessons will be learned’.

Sgt Chris ‘Stick’ Broome won the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross – the award immediately below the Victoria Cross – in part for his actions that day. Here is his side of the story, as told to me in In Foreign Fields.

Danny Boy was a permanent VCP (vehicle checkpoint) we set up on a bend in the dual carriageway running south to MAK (Majar al Kabir), which was where the six Redcaps had been killed the previous June. The idea was to show the Iraqi Police how a proper VCP should be run, and what it could achieve. At that stage, their VCPs were a few bollards and sandbags, often set up at points where you’d have to ask yourself, ‘Why?’

MAK was a bit of a no-go area – it was hard getting Warriors and Challengers in, so we’d only go there if we had to. Risk-versus-reward. On May 14, one of our patrols was contacted on the outskirts and it started a bit of an uprising in the area. Down in Abu Naji, we were quite unaware of it. We were getting mortared – nothing unusual there. The mosques were singing away – again, nothing unusual there, though it turned out that the message coming out was, ‘This is an uprising, kill them!’

I was part of the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) that day, and when it all started I was told to go to a place called Red One, a bridge I’d been to loads of times, to put in a VCP. So me and Joe Tagica paired up [in Warrior armoured vehicles] and went down there, got to the bridge and just sat there, looking for anything coming in or out that day.

All of a sudden, Major Griffiths came down in a shitty old Land Rover with some of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He was quite shaken up, and his vehicle was so full of bullet holes it was like something out of a cartoon – how no-one had been hit I don’t know. He pulled up, showed me his map and gave me QBO (Quick Battle Orders). There was a platoon somewhere south of Danny Boy, under Lieutenant Passmore, the Ops officer, which had been pinned down by 70 or 80 militants. Maj Griffiths had been with them, and had managed to drive out of the ambush, but the guys were still in heavy contact. The plan was that Joe and I would get down to Danny Boy and hold there while we tried to establish their exact location, and another two Warriors – Sergeants Dave ‘Peter’ Perfect and John Green – would chase me down. We’d extract casualties and give fire support.

We could hear on the net that the platoon on the ground had taken casualties and as we got to Danny Boy, we were ourselves ambushed from the right hand side. Pete and John Green just carried on through, and that was the last we saw of them – they got involved in their own personal battles, and finally met up with the call sign on the ground about half an hour later before assisting in their extraction in some very heavy fighting of their own.

Joe and I stopped, reversed up and started dealing with the ambush. There were 60 or 70 of them and they had picked at outstanding spot – they were firing at us from the other side of a roadside embankment and a deep, V-shaped drainage ditch, and all we could see was the tops of their heads and the RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) coming down at us.

Within a matter of minutes, my vehicle caught fire with the weight of RPGs we got hit with. Then the engine started stalling. Pte ‘JC’ Fowler, the gunner, was engaging, and all the time I’m thinking, What have they got? When Johnson Beharry’s wagon had been hit in one of the actions which led to his VC, it was by something like our Milan anti-tank weapon. It had gone straight through the centre of his Warrior and caused a big hole and a lot of damage, and all I could think was, This is ideal country for Milan. We were close to stationary, on open ground… if they’d done it to Beharry’s Warrior in a town centre, then, exposed like we were, it didn’t bear thinking about.

It became clear that we were going to have to get the guys out of the back and get them into and across the drainage ditch so they could close with the enemy. I spoke to Corporal Brian Wood and said, ‘Mate, you need to get your dismounts out… I’ll do what I can from here but the wagon’s damaged and you’re pretty much on your own. Fix bayonets, get out and go right, push in to the ditch for cover. Good luck, mate.’

Without a second’s hesitation, he and his lads got going. Brian won the Military Cross for his actions on this day, and it was very well-deserved.

By this time, another Warrior had come in, I think that was Lt Plenge, and the sergeant major was on the net to me, saying, ‘You’ve got a company plus a Challenger en route.’

Brian Wood met up with another set of dismounts led by Cpl Mark ‘Billy’ Byles, and they led their blokes, with bayonets fixed, up the embankment and then down into the drainage ditch. Very brave – they were assaulting a numerically superior enemy in well-prepared positions. I lost sight of them, and then they reappeared at the top of the ditch and started engaging the enemy, with JC using our 30mm cannon to help as best he could.

Just then, my driver, Pte Taylor, said, ‘I’ve got complete power now.’ The engine was working again. And, all credit to him, he said, ‘I reckon I can get across that ditch.’

The angle really didn’t warrant a Warrior crossing, but I said, ‘OK, but don’t get us bogged in or roll us.’ Because then we’d really have been sitting ducks.

Before I knew it, he’d put his foot down and driven the Warrior up the bank. We tipped down into the ditch at a crazy angle, hit the bottom of the ditch and just flew back upwards and out over the top of the bank. He smashed the front of the Warrior, he came down so hard, but we were now on the same side as the Iraqis.

They were using big chest-high wadis [channels in the ground cut out by the heavy rain] as trenches. Brian Wood and Billy Byles got the guys to the right of our Warrior and we started going through the enemy positions, using us as fire support, suppressing them, then taking their positions. It was what we’d always practised for.

By the time we got to the first wadi, I couldn’t depress the Rarden barrel any lower to engage them, so I reversed slightly to get a better angle, but by then Brian and Billy were in there. I couldn’t see what was going on, and for a while no-one reappeared, which was concerning. Plus they were taking a lot of incoming.

Broome realised that the limited number of soldiers on the ground were struggling. His citation says: “He dismounted and, without a personal weapon for his own protection, moved around the battlefield under heavy, accurate enemy fire to take control of the situation. His courageous action and leadership under fire ensured that there was no loss of momentum and undoubtedly prevented friendly casualties.”

I jumped out of the Warrior and ran over to the ditch myself. I found the lads were fine, they’d killed three enemy and taken four prisoners, who were face down in the dirt but not tied up at this point, and were already starting to suppress other positions. I took control of what was going on on the ground, and left my driver and JC to crack on.

I looked around the trench; there was just an armoury of weaponry there. I swear that every man had about two AKs, and there were around six RPGs, too. There were warheads and ammunition everywhere, and water and food. Very well prepared. There were also some very dead people. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone dead – the same with the rest of my guys. The surviving Iraqis – they were only young lads – were very scared, but then so was I. My heart was beating so hard I had to undo my CBA (Combat Body Armour).

I had a bottle of water on my belt kit, and the first thing I tried to do was offer the prisoners a bit of water. Yes, they’d been trying to kill us a few moments before, but I think I wanted to reassure them that we weren’t just going to top them, that we play by the rules. I said, a mix of pidgin Arabic and English and gestures, ‘This is water… I need a bit, yes? You need a bit, yes?’

One took a sip, the others didn’t, they were just in shock. They cannot have expected us to assault their positions so quickly and effectively.

I said, ‘I need to blindfold you, yes? I need to tie your hands behind your back. You need to stay here with me.’

And we cuffed and blindfolded them, using their clothing to cover their eyes, and then separated them from the dead, turning them away while I searched the bodies.

It was all still incredibly loud, you had to shout at someone only a foot or so away. We’re still under fire and, behind us, our lads and the Warrior are firing into other positions. There’s a lot of shouting and screaming, and people talking on the net… ‘You need to push along this ditch this way… You need to cover over there… You need to get fire support on this position…’ It was quite unnerving, because there were a lot of rounds flying around and you didn’t know what was outgoing and what was incoming.

The way I’m saying this, it sounds like it was all really quick and confused. It wasn’t. It was actually all very slow and methodical. Everything seemed to slow right down, it was just how we had rehearsed it so often.

All of a sudden, the driver shouted out, ‘The company battle group is on its way down.’ I picked up an AK47, crawled along the ditch and rolled up and over the big drainage ditch and made my way down to the main road so I could cover the enemy with the AK while Maj Coote and Sgt Maj Falconer pulled in with the rest of the company.

Maj Coote got his Warrior up on the embankment – he was exposed, but it gave him a good overview – and started getting involved, and I led Dave Falconer back to the position I’d just come from. We unloaded the weapons as best we could, and he rechecked the three dead bodies. The Chally had turned up, as promised, and I saw him let off a HESH (High Explosive Squash Head) round. Somewhere in the distance, a Toyota van with an anti-aircraft gun on the back just disappeared in an explosion.

We then started to move into the enemy’s second and third positions. This was where Brian Wood and Dave Falconer won their MCs. They were outnumbered, but they engaged both positions by themselves, with me and ‘Spud’ Tatawaqa – a big, strong Fijian private, one of many lads I felt privileged to serve with – in pursuit. The Iraqis were hidden in little bends in these channels, and they kept jumping out with their rifles and every time Brian and Dave would put them down. Then another bunch of guys would stand up and the same thing would happen. And gradually, we got the upper hand and it all started to quieten down, until there was just sporadic fire.

We’d been in contact for about four hours and it was getting towards dusk now.

We started a withdrawal. Maj Coote told us to break clean and start to peel back to Abu Naji. We took our four prisoners back to the sergeant major’s Warrior, and then a message came over the net that they wanted the enemy dead brought back, too. The thinking was that they could have been involved in the Redcap murders, and we might be able to identify them, whether from DNA or their faces where possible, back at camp. I think there had been a bit of confusion – I think HQ thought there were only a couple of them. In fact, there were nine just from my position, a couple from another position and about 20 from where Peter Perfect was.

Dave Falconer said. ‘Chris, the bodies need to go in the back of your Warrior.’

This is where it starts to get a bit messy. Me and my team started collecting the dead and loading them into the wagon, as dignified as we could. Still with the odd shot from distance incoming.

It was quite hard, physically. The expression ‘dead weight’ came to me more than once. I wasn’t too keen on picking them up by their hands. I didn’t want to make skin-to-skin contact, I had little cuts and grazes all over me and they were covered in blood and I didn’t want contamination… there’s a lot of hepatitis and other conditions out there. So we’d try to grab their clothes, but some of them were not small, and because their clothing was loose they would just fall out of their clothes… It wasn’t nice work. A couple of them, we had to roll them in ponchos and pick them up that way. They had been hit by my 30mm chain gun and when you get hit by those rounds there’s not a lot left. One poor guy only had half a face, one eye hanging down over his cheek… he’d been clipped with a 30mm. Another was completely shredded. We were picking up body parts.

I’ve heard suggestions that lads laugh about things like this. If I can reassure anyone, no-one laughed or joked about the mess that we made. It was quite horrible, not a laughing matter at all. No-one wanted to kill people, and no-one was happy about it afterwards.

Eventually, we got all the nine dead in the back of my Warrior and returned to base, with my dismounts obviously travelling in other wagons. We pulled up and tried to open the back, but it was jammed. Somehow, one of the corpses inside had shifted and was preventing the doors from opening. It became clear that someone was going to have to go in through the turret and open it from inside. If you think about that for a moment – it’s scorching hot, we’ve got bodies and bits of bodies, which have been in the heat for several hours now. Imagine the smell inside the vehicle. Plus, it’s pitch black, and whoever goes in there is going to be clambering and slipping around over the dead.

Pte Taylor, my driver, volunteered for the job. I think he felt he’d not really got involved, being in the Warrior all the time, but that was wrong, he’d done a brilliant job that day. But anyway, in he went. He was in there for longer than anyone would have wanted, and he finally got the door open a bit, not the whole way, and squeezed out. And unsurprisingly he completely freaked out and just ran off into the distance.

We got the door open; it was a hellish, horrible scene in there. We got the bodies out, all covered in blood and matter ourselves, and they were taken away to see about this ID.

And we stood there, all covered in blood and stuff, soaked through, sweating, filthy, feeling like vomiting. We had to get our kit straight off and burn it, and then all take long, long showers. And then we went for blood tests for hepatitis. They all came back negative, but there was a long period of worrying about it, when I, certainly, got slightly paranoid.

It had been a massive day. It wasn’t just our little area…further south, there were people involved in their own contacts. For example, Billy Byles had gone off to join another fire team…he was also awarded the MC, as was Peter Perfect, which gives you some idea of the scale and ferocity of the fighting.

The whole of Al Majar Al Kabir had basically come to stand its ground.

They outnumbered us, but our weapons, training and tactics saw us through. They didn’t expect us to push through that open ground so quickly. But it’s just what we do in training, in Canada, Poland, Salisbury Plain. There was a lot of chat flying around, saying we’d carried out the first bayonet charge since the Falklands. It’s all very nice, but it wasn’t a bayonet assault. We had bayonets on the rifles because we just do in that situation. You get out of the back of the Warrior in a dismount, you don’t know what’s there, you only know from what someone is telling you in the turret via the net… there might be someone within bayonet range, so you have it on there.

Although undoubtedly a very brave man, Chris Broome later suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

I had no idea about Iraq before I went. My wife Lynsey had a baby daughter on April 6, and I flew out to Iraq on the ninth. I didn’t event want to hang around with them, because I thought I’d be straight back anyway. I thought it was going to be like Kosovo or Ireland… it isn’t that bad, there’s a big lump of soldiers, so they start looking for guys to send home. Who wants to go on a course? Right, we’ll send you home. Whose wife has just had a baby? Me. Right, send you home. I was entitled to paternity leave, and I thought I’d get there and they’d say, ‘Things are alright, not much going on apart from the sun-tanning,’ and I’d be back to UK in a week or two. I’d even packed some weights and some muscle powders and was looking forward to working on my tan.

And all of a sudden, this has all gone off.

I’d gone through 17 years of my Army career at that point and never even cocked a rifle in anger. I’d just done courses. But everyone looked at me and called me ‘Uncle Stick’. I was one of the father figures in the team, and they all relied on me. And when it went lively and noisy, they really did look at me then. And I thought, Blimey, these guys think that just because I’ve done 17 years’ service, I’ve got experience. Which I hadn’t. I’d been on nine tours of Northern Ireland, and never been shot at once. It was hard holding it together. You do it because you have to, you’ve got to be there for your blokes, but then you think, When am I going to get time for myself?

There were quite a few times when I would wander off somewhere, have a little cry, a little grizzle, and think, What was all that about? Then you have to go back and be there for your blokes. You put on a front. Like, ‘I know Johnson’s lost the top of his head and it’s really bad, but we’ve still got a long way to go on this tour.’ I’d play down how I felt.

By the time I got home, a new baby waiting for me… and I didn’t like loud bangs, I didn’t like my daughter’s crying, there were just loads of things I couldn’t tolerate. I couldn’t stand Lynsey twittering on about crap. ‘Look what I’ve seen in the Littlewoods catalogue, aren’t those curtains nice.’

I was like, ‘Curtains?’

Or she’d say she’d had it hard, with the new baby. I’d say, ‘You had six months in England with a kid, that is fuck all really, compared with what we’ve been through.’

I knew I was being selfish – she’s the one who should have been given a medal, for putting up with me and my negative attitude – but I couldn’t help myself. I’d have to get out of the house, and I’d disappear for a week. The only person I felt safe with was myself. You try and phone up your mates who were there with you, and they’re going through their own thought processes. Some of them were OK, and wanted to spend time with their wives and families, others wanted to talk.

I was never an emotional guy, but I dwelled on having killed people and I felt bad about it. Really bad. And you feel like you can’t talk about it. My wife is always saying, ‘You don’t talk to me.’ Well, I can’t explain it to you, because you probably won’t understand, and there are probably things I am going to mention that I don’t want you dwelling on, or lying in bed thinking, I’m married to a jellyhead, here. Do you want to sit and listen to how I piled nine bodies in the back of a Warrior?

Likewise, I can’t go to the pub and say, ‘Look at the tits on her… and, by the way, I killed a load of people in Iraq.’

You stand there with your civvie mates, or your dad, or your brother. And they’re like, ‘How was Iraq?’

You go, ‘It was alright. I was involved in contact, and took a fair bit of incoming, got someone in my sights and had to put them down.’

They go, ‘That’s good. Did you hear about David Beckham? And what about Rooney?’

You think, Hang on, I’m struggling here. You’ve asked me and I want to get it off my chest.

‘How’s that mate of yours, Lewy?’ [A close friend who was badly burned when a petrol bomb was dropped on him in an earlier incident.]

‘Well, not great.’

‘He’ll get better. Anyway, what about West Ham?’

And I’d think, You’ve just asked me how my mate is, he was on bloody fire. At least let me have the chance to finish what I was saying. I want you to understand about pain, about someone being on fire. They don’t understand, and they don’t want to know.

But then, at that time, even some of the British Army in Iraq didn’t understand. When I was a casualty in Basra, where the environment was pretty friendly, there were people in shorts and t-shirts having parties. They had a bar party with a Hawaiian theme. That was hard for me to see. I was like, ‘I’ve just come from Al Amarah. Have you any idea? We’re fighting for our lives down there. Food and water is an issue. Ask Justin Featherstone [a PWRR Major who won the MC for his part in the defence of Cimic House, a British Army outpost], we have to deliver it to him.’

You have to live with the consequences of what you did for the rest of your life. You have to ask yourself, With hindsight, could I have done anything differently? The answer is actually No, because we were ambushed and you have to fight your way out. But when you see the damage that our weapons systems can do to people, when you have to put the body parts into ponchos to bring them back, it does play on your mind.

The good thing is the Army now understands the possible effects, and I did see the doctors to talk things through, which was very helpful. And you look at blokes who fought in the Second World War, you look at what they did, where they took a lot of casualties, as well as inflicted them… and you think, How did they deal with it?

And how does it affect the Iraqis? I did feel sorry for them. Some of them are poorly educated. You put $50 in front of them and they grab a rifle and try and take you on without realising the fire power you have. The guys in the Danny Boy incident, they were just bewildered when we got to them. The four we arrested, they all went to court and I think they got five years each. Two of them were farmers. I think the youngest was only 17.

Broome’s PTSD later manifested itself in angry outbursts.

I got back and was posted to Winchester as a trainer. It was a case of the Army being good to me and thinking I needed a bit of time and space, and to be nearer my family while the rest of the battalion went to Germany… an easy posting, really. But it made things worse because I wasn’t with my own guys. No-one there believed what had gone on during Telic 4. Nowadays, everyone knows it’s like that all the time. If someone came into the mess now and started to talk about what he’d done in Afghanistan, you’d believe him but, back then, people thought I was exaggerating. They were like, ‘Yeah… I’ve been to Iraq, mate.’ And they had, but they’d been to Basra before it all kicked off and although the papers back home were doing a good job telling people what was going on, it still hadn’t become common knowledge, even in the Army. I felt like I was in the minority, trying to convince the majority. I was like, ‘I’ll make you believe me, get your kit on, let’s get down to Al Majar al Kabir and let’s see how hard you are. See it for yourself.’ I wished they could have seen what I’d seen. I got into a few fights about it, to be honest. I remember being dumped on my arse in a pub by some students one night.

The only time that anyone ever believed me, and stood up and took notice, was when I went to visit the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Then they started phoning me up and saying, ‘Alright mate? Want to go out for a beer? Want to go out for a chat?’

‘Well, no, I don’t.’

I carried that attitude through to training. Lads would arrive late on parade, or with an empty water bottle. They’d say, ‘It’s only water.’ So I’d go off on one and start shouting, ‘Only water? What about if you’re mate’s on fire next to you? What if you’re on fire?’ I was too aggressive with them, but wanted to make sure they understood the importance of the drills. I didn’t want them coming home in body bags. I wanted them to understand that a rifle is only used for one thing, and it makes a mess. I didn’t care whether they wanted to be a dog handler or a medic, they would be a soldier first. In the end, I was court-martialled for hitting a recruit over the head with my pace stick. I shouldn’t have done it, it was totally wrong and I bitterly regret it.

The court martial found Broome guilty and fined him £1,000, but did not reduce him in rank. Colonel Matt Maer, OC 1PWRR, told the hearing, ‘This is a man who repeatedly, in the face of mortal danger, put his life before that of his soldiers. If I was to command Colour Sgt Broome again, I would consider it an honour.’

That was a big wake up call for me. I’d been having flashbacks and things and I needed help, basically. And I did get it and I’m fully fit, now. I went back out to Iraq on Telic 8, as the CO’s gunner. I remember the first time we drove past Danny Boy… it was quite emotional. But then, I’m a human being, and this sort of thing does change your life.

All the citation and the medal and everything is very nice, and I am grateful, but I’m no hero, I’m just an NCO who did the best he could in difficult circumstances, the same as anyone else would have. I did no more and no less than anyone else, it’s just that you have got a report there which is all about me, me, me. It is not about me, it’s about the blokes. There are too many of them to mention, but my hat goes off to all my team. They worked hard and gave 100% effort…there are guys who’ve since slipped back in to civvie street, and all they have is their memories of what they did and nothing to show for what they went through or stood for. They are the real heroes, to me. Getting on with it, under fire, with no questions. If they’re reading this, I’d like to say, Lads, be proud, you’re my heroes.

I’m proud of what the battalion achieved. We went through something and came out of the other end and we had a hard time. We’ll watch the TV one day, and there will be peace and there will be pictures of people shaking hands and drinking tea, as though nothing has ever happened. Shame we can’t we do that now. So the medal… I said to Lynsey, when I leave the Army eventually I’ll probably sell it and give the money to some needy organisation, maybe burns victims or something like that.

We sent a contract to an author. This author is very keen for us to publish his book.

Now, we’re not (total) idiots – we know that he is keen for us to publish it because Harper Collins and Penguin aren’t returning his calls. That’s fine, we understand.

The author sent his contract on to the Society of Authors, as we advised him to; even though we had a fair idea what their response might be, it’s always a good idea to get a second opinion on any legal document.

The SoA came back with a variety of issues. They have done so on numerous occasions, often saying that some of the terms we offer are weighted unfairly in our favour. (I don’t mind anyone knowing this because I think our terms are perfectly fair, and that the Society doesn’t have a Scooby about the real world.)

To take just a couple of clauses, 14(c) and 14(d), we offered 50% on the sale of the rights to the Work in any territories or languages outside the Home Market, and 20% of publisher’s net on eBooks.

According to the Society of Authors, 80% and 25% would be fairer, and these are the ‘industry standard’.

One of the things I love about running a (very) small publishing business is that it really is, at least in terms of the relationship between us and the author, a pretty much free market.

There’s no government-mandated minimum royalty fee, no union with which to negotiate, and industry standard means zilch.

We offer terms; the author is free to accept them, in which case all well and good, or to reject them and try elsewhere.

Those terms are based on a calculation of risk: it’s going to cost £xx,000 to get a book onto the shelves (and onto Kindle etc); what are the odds that that money will come back, together with a contribution to our overheads, and some profit? Given that the odds are lengthening by the day, or certainly by the year, it’s remarkable that our terms have stayed pretty much constant over the last five or more years.

And in some cases we offer much higher terms.

For instance, as a child I absolutely loved the James Herriot books. My children love them now. I happened to notice that they were not (then) available as eBooks, so I wrote to the son of the late Alf ‘James Herriot’ Wight offering 90% – yes, ninety per cent – of eBook royalties for the electronic rights to the books.

Mr Wight Jnr wrote back very nicely, saying he had passed the letter on to his dad’s agent. The agent rejected us, out of hand.

She didn’t even ask whether we’d have offered an advance – which we would, I would have paid tens of thousands of pounds for those rights. My starting gambit was going to be £30,000 but I’d have gone a lot higher.

Was that the right decision for the agent to make? I don’t think it was, unless the eventual publisher offered something like 75% – at any rate, something a lot more than the ‘industry standard’ 25% (and maybe they did).

I can’t see how, in the current set-up, there is much difference, where the books and the author are already well-known and demand exists, between us and a major publisher?

We can get It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet onto Kindle and iTunes as easily and effectively as, say, John Murray. (To an extent, the same is true for books-proper, too; we can print 50,000 copies of It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet and sell them in forever to Waterstone’s and Amazon, safe in the knowledge that they will sell on forever.*)

But they made their decision, I’m sure – no sarcasm – that they had perfectly respectable reasons, and I hope it works out for them.

Of course, it might have been crazy for me to make the offer I was making. Currently, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet is not selling particularly well. I still think, in long-run pension terms, I’d have been OK. But it’s not a straightforward thing.

The rather obvious point is that industry standard means nothing. A well-known and much-loved author is worth a lot more than a first-time writer, no matter how good he is (and this author has a very interesting story to tell).

This particular author has treated the SoA advice as interesting but irrelevant and is signing with us anyway. This is because he understands the risks involved. I don’t think the Society of Authors does – and if they think I’m wrong, why don’t they start their own publishing house? It’s very easy, and apparently you can make a bomb offering industry standard terms.

*The truth is, in my opinion, that the Wight estate doesn’t need a publisher at all. Which was why I offered 90%.

EDIT: My brother emails me to point out that not everyone agrees with me. I should probably add, I’m not particularly anti the SoA – I’m sure they’re nice, well-motivated and intelligent people doing the best they can. I just don’t think they are always realistic.

But the overall impression of Barnes & Noble’s situation in the book industry is not nearly as positive as its owners and investors would like to portray. Publisher’s Weekly reported last week that Barnes & Noble is in the midst of contentious negotiations over terms with Simon & Schuster. “Although the exact nature of the disagreement is not yet clear,” Publisher’s Weekly reported, “Barnes &Noble has significantly reduced its orders from S&S. The main reason for the cutback seems to be, according to sources, Barnes & Noble’s lack of support from S&S.” (One way or another, this means a dispute over the size of discounts and advertising.) …There was an initial belief that Borders’ bankruptcy would bring a substantial portion of its in-store business to Barnes & Noble, but that has not turned out to be the case.

“Barnes & Noble is the last bookstore chain standing,” Wharton management professor Steve Kobrin, who is also the publisher of Wharton Digital Press, told the Knowledge@Wharton newsletter. “There’s still a niche there, but it may go to small independent bookstores.”

Goodbye, too, to Reg Presley. Highly recommended, Spiritualized’s version of Any Way That You Want Me, and this: