[verbatim trial transcripts]
February 10, 2000 (Thursday) London
Up at 7:30 a.m., and to Court at 10 a.m. as usual. Four or five points to submit to the Judge, -- the August 1, 1941 document, the Kinna document, the IMT April 1946 transcript, etc -- then chief defence witness Professor Richard Evans is called -- a small, scowling Welshman who bristles with hostility toward me throughout the day so much that after the lunch adjournment I ask point blank whether he dislikes, loathes, nay even hates me? Had he admitted that he did, I would have submitted a motion to the Court for his removal as an expert witness from this case. Do I detect some signs of panic from the defence benches out of the corner of my eye? Evans rapidly loses the Court's sympathy, in my belief, with his stonewalling of my questions -- demanding to see each document I mention or touch upon before he will answer my questions, etc. The tactic will work initially, and if used sparingly, but if used each time, as Evans prefers to, it rapidly trespasses upon the patience of the Court, which once lost is not easily recovered. Unfortunately Judge Gray will not let me put my Bundle E ("Global") to this witness; in argument, it is decided that I should submit it to the Court later in my submissions on damages, since that is what the material appears to go to. The high points of today include my challenge on the "racist" ditty. Evans sulks, complains to the Court that he does not see why I put this material to him (but he has quoted the ditty himself in his report). Judge Gray explains to him that since Professors Levin and Eatwell are not going into the stand, that leaves Evans in "the hot seat." I therefore, and over the Court's mild protests, ask Evans has he read all of my private diaries. -- "Most of them." -- "That is around 20 or 30 million words? Is that ditty the only such item that you and your staff found in my private diaries." Evans remarks on the speeches, but I bring him back to the diaries: Nineteen words out of 30,000,000 makes only 0.00000063 percent of me "racist", I point out, which means that the remaining 99.99999927 percent is not racist! I rattle out the calculation on a battery powered calculator, to make the point. Judge Gray does not approve, but emphasises helpfully that the point that Mr Irving is making is that if that ditty is indeed the only item in the diaries, that is a very small item indeed to rely upon. With the Judge's permission I then put to a still uncomprehending and irritable Evans the four large photos of my ethnic-minority staff members since 1980 (Wenona, Narinder, Roop, Chitra). Richard Rampton QC mutters something out loud about the irrelevance of the fact that Mr Irving has had "Black servants," a misplaced phrase which I rub his nose in after the lunch adjournment, addressing the Court. I try the same performance on "antisemitism," but the Court will not allow me to put to the witness Evans the several pages of quotations from the unpublished private diaries of Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden and other British notables with their highly unflattering private references to "the Jews," since the Court does not see the relevance to the issues pleaded. Nor will Judge Gray allow me to put to this witness a passage from John Buchan's Thirty Nine Steps -- a book whose antisemitic nature has deeply shocked me; since, as Gray explains, times have now changed. I protest that the First Defendant, Penguin Books Ltd, is still peddling this book even now (we bought it two or three days ago in Oxford Street), and is there not a Bible passage about "casting out the mote from Thine own eye" which occurs to us? The Judge offers "pot calling the kettle black?" but my protest is to no avail. I take Evans through the first fifty or so pages of his Report, and comment on it in general terms. He scowls a lot more, but he is shrewd, and a tough witness to break. Next week however we shall break him, with what we have. The Court rises at 3 p.m. as I have run out of prepared materials for cross-examination (having been denied the use of Bundle E). Rampton wants a proper proof of Dr John Fox's intended evidence on Bletchley Park and the police decodes, which I shall prepare today. I phone Fox on my return to Duke Street, and reschedule him for next week. He tells me has one very nice intercepted document, a Führer order, about which I completely forgot (or never knew). Dinner at the Caledonian Club with [...]. Back at 10:30 p.m., and work until 2 a.m. One belly laugh from Australia. I reported a few days ago that the Melbourne Herald Sun had run a readers' poll on the Holocaust and my position ("Is David Irving right?"). The next day the poll result was -- for the first time in history -- suppressed! Today a reader informs me: I write to add a morsel of information regarding the Herald Sun poll of reader's views on your position on the Holocaust. On the Monday after the poll result failed to appear (it should have appeared either Saturday or the Monday I called), I telephoned the newspaper to ask about the result. I was told that the result wouldn't be published as it would "offend some of our readers". I said, OK, I could understand that publication of such a thing might do that but could a private inquirer such as I be told over the telephone how the poll went? I was told that the phone-in results ran "about 50-50". So, whichever position one takes, it would seem likely that half of Melbourne believes a lie! Please do not quote me as the source of your information. Perhaps
I should have asked for a jury trial after all. |
write
to David Irving