By evening the installation of the closed-circuit TV cameras in the lobby appears to be complete. There is no sign of any corresponding monitor screens at the reception desk; they must be elsewhere.

October 28, 2005 (Friday)
London (England)

AS I leave the building I see three workmen have begun installing close-circuit television cameras inside the lobby. First I knew of it.

From Palm Beach, Florida, the owner of our new apartment (below) has instructed Foxtons not to accept rental payments from us. How nice.

At nine a.m., by taxi to Old Bailey for the inspection of my surviving files at the offices of Baker Tilly, the government-appointed Trustees who seized them on May 23, 2002. The Trustees' staff are very courteous, a nice French girl goes out to get coffee and cookies for me. That's the English way: although they are now defending what is going to prove a (for them) very costly High Court action for the wrongful removal of my papers, it's all smiles and biscuits for the time being.

It takes me all morning to go through the room full of tattered boxes into which everything has been stuffed, and even then I have no time to do more than lift the lids on the sixty boxes of legal files and the boxes housing the remains of my research library. What I find is quite shocking. Every single item of non-paper chattels is missing (furniture, equipment, lamps etc); and toward the end of the inspection it becomes finally, grimly clear that all the main historical archives are missing -- the Viking-brand boxes, each containing three file boxes, on whose listing, labelling, numbering, and inventorying I spent two years of hard work during the meticulous Discovery period before the Lipstadt Trial.

Their importance to me? Immense. I recall that for the purposes of his neutral expert evidence, for which he was paid half a million dollars by the Lipstadt team, the Cambridge conformist historian Prof Richard "Skunky" Evans called my research worthless (but that when her experts then got their hands on the seized archives they were astounded, and called the unknown collections inside them, like Field Marshal's Keitel's papers, very valuable indeed).

I take ten photos and two movie strips of the collection to document the damage to books and the wrongfully seized items, like scores of 16mm family films, clearly labelled as such, etc., before everything goes back into store (as they cannot be released to me until the High Court rules on my claim). But the archives? They seem to be permanently gone: e.g., no trace of the two big boxes of my collection, labelled Judenfrage I and II, (which the thieving Lipstadt expert sent to examine the warehouse cache labelled as being of particular value). Not a sign of two big boxes of my correspondence with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth. Snaffled, looted, purloined, call it what you will. The Brighton warehouse seems to have sprung a leak.

Did Baker Tilly sell off these research files after all? Half a million pounds' worth or more, of archival and personal papers? They will come to regret it. No doubt they hoped I might carelessly give a clean bill to them today and say that all have been safely returned. What has happened? These items were there at the time that Lipstadt's experts inspected last year. It no longer seems outlandish that my lawyers have talked to me of a claim against the Trustee for high six figure compensation: but it is the papers that I need, to complete the remaining books. Forty years of research!

I ask for a further search to be made at the Brighton warehouse where all my papers have been held for the last three years since they were illegally seized while I was away in Seattle, but I am not optimistic about the outcome. As Lipstadt wrote in one letter to her lawyers, after she first demanded (in vain) that all my archives should be turned over to her, my archives and library must never, ever, be returned to me.

BACK home at Queen Anne's Gate at one pm. There is disquiet here now in consequence of the owner's apparent attempts to get us out. We have only been here a month, and have not even had time to unpack all our boxes, pending the arrival of furniture; we have met all our obligations and more, but from Palm Beach, Florida, he has sent a string of emails to Foxton's, the agency, who are in consequence very tight-lipped.

What is the problem? Foxton's know the law, as do we: if there is further harassment, we shall act. We may well find there is a case for aggravated damages if there is an underlying racial element involved.

A quiet afternoon. I drive Benté up to Shepard's Market, where she takes Jessica for a haircut.

I SEND an email to my attorneys: "I today carried out the detailed inspection at Baker Tilly and a full report with pictures follows by mail. They had produced about 120 boxes for inspection. No file cabinets, shelves etc, just documents and books. Of great concern to me is that the backbone of my collection, around 80 'Viking'-brand archive boxes each containing three file-boxes, of historical source documents, was not produced for inspection, nor were the historical tape-recorded interviews I had conducted. DLA's Paul Allen told me this was all they had in store, and I asked him to check again. This would be a highly damaging loss. Baker Tilly the Trustees may actually have sold off the boxes, as Lipstadt's 'expert' described the contents of some as of great historical interest when he inspected them. Now they are missing."

By evening the installation of the closed-circuit TV cameras appears to be complete. There is no sign of any corresponding monitor screens at the reception desk; they must be elsewhere.

I suppose we should feel safer, but somehow we don't. It's the same with all Mr Sanctimonious Blair's policemen patrolling in pairs around the streets outside, cradling their sub-machine guns. They don't make me feel one tithe as safe as I was as a child, in an Essex village patrolled by Pc Davies on his bicycle in the 1940s.