Met Police, Essex Police and Judicial Review proceedings at Royal Courts of Justice. Mr Justice Swift in 2021 re the Met Police. Mr Justice Poole in 2023 re the Essex Police. Misconduct in Public Office claims.

Greetings, friends and foes. It is Sunday 3 March 2024 and I am Farid El Diwany – a retired Lincoln's Inn Solicitor. And very much the scourge of the English judiciary who are mighty upset at my post-retirement whistleblowing books and websites exposing rampant bigotry and sleight of hand in the judiciary and regulatory branches of the legal profession. My main website is farideldiwany.com and my books are available on Amazon. Just to say, that I am a white man ... and I was born in London to a pure white German mother, herself brought up in the Lutheran faith and an Egyptian Muslim father, a doctor. I went to a Church of England Primary School. I am a Tottenham Hotspur fan and a lover of rock music and have, in particular, been going to Uriah Heep concerts since 1976 – indeed my closest friend Russell Gilbrook has been the drummer in Uriah Heep since 2006. Heep will be on tour with Judas Priest and Saxon from mid-March in Britain and Europe followed by an American tour with Saxon. Russell and I went to the same school in Hornchurch. So, apart from my name I have a thorough British pedigree.

Today I will be talking about the treatment three High Court judges administered to a couple of unique Judicial Review applications I brought at the Royal Courts of Justice. Focusing on the sleight of hand expertly employed by High Court judges Mrs Justice McGowan, Mr Justice Swift in 2021 and Mr Justice Poole in November 2023 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Nigel Poole, a Bradford man. In the second part of my book ‘Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett – Did YOU know?’, details the way Mr Justice Poole’s chicanery covers up gross misconduct by the staff working for his boss, the Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett, recently retired and replaced by Sue Carr, the Lady Chief Justice who last week rejected the appeal of Shamima Begum have her U.K citizenship restored to enable her to return to this country. The first part of the book deals with the subtle protection Mr Justice Swift gave a couple of years earlier to the Office of the Lord Chief Justice. The Cambridge University Pressbook ‘Judges on Trial’ is the only text book around dealing with the subject of judicial misconduct. An extremely useful book co-written by Shimon Shetreet of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Let me first draw your attention to the November 2022 Manchester University Report entitled ‘Racial Bias and the Bench’. This Report alleges ‘institutional racism’ in the judiciary, which includes aspects of Islamophobic prejudice. Two professors and Keir Monteith K.C of Garden Court Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields were among those who compiled the report. There are, of course, no full-time black or full-time Muslim judges sitting at the Royal Courts of Justice. I myself experienced some incomprehensible Islamophobic behaviour in 2011 from Mrs Justice Sharp, now Lady Justice Sharp – who, as President of the King’s Bench Division, sat this week on the Julian Assange extradition appeal - and also similar disgraceful behaviour from Lord Justice Popplewell who BOTH refused in the same set of proceedings 12 years apart to condemn me being told in emails from Norway to ‘Go fuck Allah, the Camel’ and told that the Prophet Muhammad was ‘a confused paedophile’ and told ‘Muslims are the root of all evil’ and told ‘Going to fuck your mother. She likes white man’ and told that my ‘semen was only fit for a pig’ and asked if I ‘licked the arseholes of pigs clean before eating them’. For Lady Justice Sharp and Lord Justice Popplewell not to have the common humanity to condemn that filth just goes to show how dreadfully Islamophobic they are - these elite members of the judiciary can go to hell. Those emails were declared a hate-crime by the Essex Police and referred to Interpol Norway and were the direct catalyst for my libel litigation which lasted 14 years at the Royal Courts of Justice. A trio of truly mad judges at the Court of Appeal on 31 August 2023 – Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lady Justice Macur and Lady Justice Falk declared that they didn’t think it ‘fell to be decided’ that Sharp J or Popplewell L J needed to condemn that language and therefore there was no misconduct when neglecting to condemn it as the judiciary must be free to decide things as they see fit. Talk about covering up for the perversity of colleagues, the Court of Appeal coming up with an ex-post facto reason over a decade later to justify why there was no need to condemn a recorded hate- crime. It most certainly was imperative for the sake of good relations with the Muslim community in the U.K that the judiciary condemn language which was abhorrent in the extreme, besides which the receipt by me of those hate-emails was inextricably connected to my libel litigation at the High Court in 2010-11 as it was the Defendant, Police Sergeant Torill Sorte from Norway, whose fabricated and preposterous allegations to a national newspaper in Norway caused those vile emails to be sent to me and were the direct prelude to my litigation. The British elite can be such complete bastards at times, totally lacking in integrity.

The Met Police sided with me when T/Inspector Jeff Cook at Charing Cross Police Station thought it was misconduct in public office for Lord Justice Popplewell to refuse in 2021 and 2023 to condemn those Norwegian hate-emails and proclaim in his Order of 2023, when dismissing my appeal from Mrs Justice Sharp’s iniquitous 2011 judgment, that he was ‘not Islamophobic’ which led Inspector Jeff Cook to seek a face-to-face meeting with the Crown Prosecution Service, last I heard. Indeed, my former M.P and government minister Eric, now Lord, Pickles asked Lord Chancellor Chris Grayling in 2015 for a meeting to discuss the need for a change in the Judicial Conduct Rules to make it an offence of misconduct for a judge to refuse to condemn blatant abuse which features in a Court case and which insults/upsets a religious community. Chris Grayling wasn’t interested. Nor was Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland Q.C in 2019 when my next M.P in my new home town, Will Quince, wrote to him to see this time round if he would entertain a change in the Judicial Conduct Rules. These refusals were in spite of a letter written in 1994 by the Lord Chancellor to the Lord Chief Justice expressing the view that it could amount to misconduct if a judge behaved in such a way as to cause offence to a religious community. The Office for the Investigation of Judicial Complaints took the view in 2012 that for Mrs Justice Sharp to decide not to condemn those hate- emails was simply a matter of, and I quote “case management” and “Judicial discretion” and could never amount to misconduct, even if the failure to condemn me being told to, say, “Go fuck Allah, the camel” along with a dozen more with similar sentiments, gave me the distinct impression that Mrs Justice Sharp did not like Muslims. It really shocked me to have Sharp J not express a word of regret in Court or in her judgment at such appalling Islamophobic, sexualised language. She herself was Jewish and she knew my grandfather fought for Adolf Hitler and died in Stalingrad. She must have truly hated me.

Judicial Review is a legal remedy made available for members of the public and others who believe that a public body like the Police or a government ministry or official has made a wholly perverse or irrational or unlawful decision that adversely affects them or a section of society in general, for which redress is available in the Administrative Court forcing the public body to reconsider their decision. The textbooks on the subject are many and varied and overall, the scope for assessing when a decision is completely wrong or obviously unreasonable or totally unreasonable or just silly or just plain stupid or a bit out of the ordinary or completely perverse depends entirely on the attitude of the judge on the day. The judiciary are supposed to be impartial and fair in all their dealings with litigants. Wrongs are there be righted by the judges, with no appearance of bias. But when it comes to trying to hold to account those corrupt staff who worked for the Lord Chief Justice and did everything they could to defeat my brave quest to overcome Islamophobia in the judiciary, believe me, that is a different matter. I was to discover that the Metropolitan Police in 2021 and the Essex Police in 2023 were the biggest arse-lickers on God’s green earth when it came to protecting the staff working in the Private Office of the Lord Chief Justice and covering up their fantastical administrative criminality when dealing with my request to further a change in the Judicial Conduct Rules. My only remedy was to take the Met Police, followed by the Essex Police, to the Administrative Court to try to get redress for their failure to interview and hopefully charge the three civil servants who worked in Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett’s Private Office and who had behaved so atrociously.

At the Administrative Court as Claimant, I was faced with three major obstacles: first, three lying bastard scum-bags - conniving civil servants working for the Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett. They were Alice Rose (née Alice Gilbert) as an executive assistant, Michele Souris who was Sir Ian Burnett’s P.A and Ben Yallop who was Sir Ian’s Private Secretary; second, the Metropolitan Police who used every trick in the book to get out of interviewing and charging those three corrupt staff-members working for Sir Ian Burnett; and third the judges at the Administrative Court appointed to sit on my case, desperately trying to protect their boss Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett and the reputation of his Office. Those judges simply would not countenance a situation where Sir Ian Burnett was found to have been unable to control his own staff. Ditto for my complaint and Administrative Court claim against the Essex Police when they too refused to bring to account and interview and charge Sir Ian’s staff on a different matter, but part of the same smear campaign.

Sir Ian Burnett’s staff engaged in this smear campaign from 2019 to 2023 with the full connivance of the British Civil Service.

I acted for myself in my two Administrative Court claims as I knew the procedure and besides which, I did not have a penny to spare to fund my cases, let alone the sum of £10,000 that would be needed to pay a Solicitor and barrister to act for me in each action. For the 2021 claim the Met Police had all the money in the world and had their own firm of outside Solicitors working for them called Weightmans in Liverpool, who appointed a barrister to speak at the Administrative Court. A Solicitor at the Government Legal Department at the Ministry of Justice acted separately for Sir Ian Burnett who I had named as the ‘Interested Party’ in the litigation – he was responsible for the actions of his staff and therefore I had the right to include him in my claim as he was directly affected. Not that Sir Ian Burnett had the foggiest idea what was going on ... it seems. For when I asked his appointed barrister, Mr Dixey, in Court if he had actually spoken to Sir Ian Burnett and whether Sir Ian actually knew of these proceedings, Mr Dixey replied that my questions could not be answered and that no information in this regard would be forthcoming. How pathetic was that! The same answer came from the Solicitor at the Government Legal Department acting for the Judicial Office of the Lord Chief Justice, the ‘Interested Party’ – he refused to tell me who was instructing him as it was covered by ‘legal privilege’.

One must remember that cases such as these are bread and butter and water off a duck’s back for the Police Forces involved as well as the lawyers defending the Police. They have a well-tested formula for getting themselves off the hook with total impunity every time, which is to give as a reason for not investigating a member of the public’s complaint of third-party criminality, a superficially plausible explanation for taking no further action. 99 times out of a hundred that explanation will be enough for the Administrative Court judge who uses case law from 2009 citing Lord Bingham who declared that only in - and I quote: “highly exceptional cases” will the Court disturb the decision of an independent prosecutor or investigator - and so will dismiss the Judicial Review application. The lawyers acting for the ‘Interested Party’ are part of the charade and go along with it, usually saying as little as possible in their written submissions to the court and keeping their remarks to a minimum at the actual Administrative Court hearing. Cross-examination of the opposing parties’ evidence is forbidden at the important initial right-to- review hearing.

It sickened me that I was having to take the trouble to litigate to bring deliberate criminal behaviour in the establishment echelons out into the open and to make the perpetrators accountable. It began like this. On 11 October 2019 I wrote to Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett at the Royal Courts of Justice with a request that he consider a change in the Judicial Conduct Rules regarding members of the judiciary who refused to condemn blatant religious abuse directed at a litigant – and I informed Sir Ian of my humiliating experience before Mrs Justice Sharp. It was the role of the Lord Chief Justice to monitor and if necessary, change the Judicial Conduct Rules. I also included with my letter to Sir Ian Burnett the correspondence between Government Minister Lord Pickles and Chris Grayling from 2014 to indicate that there was high- level government support for a change in the rules governing the conduct of the judiciary. I also sent Sir Ian copies of all the hate-emails I had received from Norway which were all read out to Mrs Justice Sharp on 16 March 2011 at the High Court - without a word of condemnation from her. I had written a book on my Norway saga with Mrs Justice Sharp under my pen-name of Frederick Delaware entitled ‘Betrayal and Treachery – Lady Justice Sharp’ with a big picture of her on the front cover. Available on Amazon. I sent a copy of that book to Sir Ian Burnett at the Royal Courts of Justice a few weeks before posting my letter to him of 11 October 2019. I also had a website called ‘LadyJusticeSharp-Coverup.com’. Sir Ian’s staff knew this.

On the 25 October 2019 in the mid-morning, I called Sir Ian’s Private Office simply to ask, with not a word more, if they had received my letter of 11 October. I was then told: “Alice is dealing with the matter, but is away from her desk for 10 minutes. Please call back”. When I called back half an hour later to speak to Alice, I was told that she was in a meeting. So, I said I’d call back later. Not long afterwards, I get a call from a lady immediately asking me: “Is that the switchboard?” I said: “No, it’s Farid El Diwany. You spoke to me a few minutes ago regarding my request to speak to Alice”. To which I got: “Oh, sorry. Goodbye.” When I called the Private Office of Sir Ian Burnett again at just after 2 p.m. I was told by a lady that it was the Switchboard at the Royal Courts of Justice and that the message from Sir Ian’s Office was: “Alice has your letter and will respond”. I said: “Thank you” and rang off. At about 5:30 p.m. that same day, 25 October 2019, I hear a loud knock at my front door in Essex. When I open the door, I am confronted by two Essex Police Officers, one of whom said: “You know why we’re here don’t you?” I replied: “No, I don’t. What’s the problem?” The Policemen asked to come in and proceeded to tell me that they were here to perform a welfare check on me as they had received a call from the Met Police who in turn were contacted by the Royal Courts of Justice saying that I had called the Court “threatening to commit suicide”. They asked if I still intended to take my life. Shocked to the core and feeling thoroughly humiliated I told the two police officers that this allegation was a complete fabrication, a lie and asked who was it that had made this allegation. “Sorry sir. We cannot tell you. Data protection”, one of the officers replied. It immediately occurred to me that this was a malicious smear made out of spite by someone working for Sir Ian Burnett to make me out to be an unstable nut-case and to teach me a lesson for my book and website on Lady Justice Sharp and I told the Policemen exactly this in some detail. They then left. Within minutes I emailed my local M.P Will Quince with the whole story. He repeatedly refused my requests to write to Sir Ian Burnett on my behalf, saying it was solely a matter between Sir Ian and me. The next day I wrote to Sir Ian Burnett asking him to divulge the name of the ‘toe-rag’ who had lied so preposterously to the Met Police. I never heard back from Sir Ian, in spite of re-sending the same letter a further six times over the next four years. My initial several letters were never given to him, it soon emerged. Nor were the subsequent ones. I kept asking my M.P. Will Quince to write to Sir Ian telling him that I was getting nowhere with my own efforts to get a response from Sir Ian. Will Quince M.P then gave me a false excuse, saying he couldn’t interfere with the independence of the judiciary by writing to Sir Ian. It turned out that it was the civil servant Alice - who was supposed to be dealing with my letter addressed to her boss Sir Ian Burnett – who had made a 999-call to the Met Police to report that it was her colleague who told her that I had telephoned their office half an hour earlier “threatening to commit suicide” and that she, the 999-caller was ‘concerned’ for my safety. But her supposed ‘concern’ - when time is of the essence in these situations - did not even extend to calling me back quickly to try to persuade me not to commit suicide.

I issued the Met Police with a Letter before Claim followed by Judicial Review proceedings regarding their decision not to prosecute the maker of that hoax-999 call - Alice and her colleague - for wasting Police time under Section 5(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1967. The Met Police used a firm of Solicitors in Liverpool to represent them called Weightmans and one year after the event, on 12 November 2020, they sent me a copy of the transcript of the 999-telephone call that Alice made on 25 October 2019 to the Met Police. Except that Alice’s full name was redacted every time from the transcript, that is: blacked out. The name of her colleague who I had allegedly told I was going to commit suicide was not mentioned by Alice at all. All she told the Met Police was that I had told her ‘colleagues’ (plural) that I will be committing suicide. I knew it was Alice who made the 999-call from her admission in that transcript that it was she who was dealing with my letter addressed to Sir Ian – and of course I was told at the time of my call to them on 25 October 2019 that it was ‘Alice’ who was in possession of my letter. Alice in fact gave it to Lady Justice Sharp, which was ridiculous as my complaint was about Victoria Sharp! Sharp never wrote back. So, even a year later by way of my formal legal proceedings the Met Police would not reveal the names of these conspiring cheats - Alice and her informer - two wretched deceivers working for the highest judge in the land. What became apparent from my reading that lengthy transcript of the 999-telephone call made by Alice was the complete absence of any context from Alice for why I allegedly had threatened to commit suicide. Threats to kill oneself are never made in a vacuum. Anyone threatening to commit suicide will always give a reason to the person on the receiving end of the threat. The Met Police did not even ask Alice the most obvious point of interest: ‘Why does Mr El Diwany want to commit suicide. He must have said what was bothering him enough to want to commit suicide. Did you ask your colleague?’ Such was the lack of foresight from Alice that yes, she did not even have the intelligence to ask her informant the most basic of questions: ‘Why was it that Mr El Diwany expressed his desire to kill himself? What was troubling him?’ It was blatant harassment of myself right under the nose of the Lord Chief Justice by a jackass of a civil servant in Alice who was either totally incompetent or completely insincere in her dealings with the Met Police. The whole transcript is reproduced in my book here. I was staggered at the gall one or both of Alice and her informant had to perpetrate this supreme act of misconduct in public office. Even the mobile phone number that was noted in the 999-call transcript which Alice gave to the Met Police was certainly not mine. When I rang that number, it was dead. Were Sir Ian’s staff operating on their own in initiating this act of criminality or did someone put them up to it? That was the 64-million-dollar question.

The subsequent Met Police response was also cowardly and totally contrived, opportunistic and false. In my submissions to Weightmans, the Solicitors acting for the Met Police, I made it perfectly clear that as I had not threatened to commit suicide or even joked about it then someone was lying big-time and I spelt out in detail my view that surely revenge was uppermost in the minds of Sir Ian’s staff because of website on and my book on Lady Justice Sharp – the book was first seen of course by these staff members who would have opened the package in the first instance when I sent it to Sir Ian - as well as Sir Ian’s P.A, Michele Souris, telling me on 13 January 2020, in a call I made sure I recorded, that my letters to Sir Ian regarding the Judicial Conduct Rules were not being passed on to him and then putting the phone down on me when I asked her for the name of the person who made the hoax-999 call. At that time, I thought the person who made that malicious 999-call to the Met Police was the same person I had spoken to on 25 October 2019. Once I received the transcript of that 999-call I knew it was Alice’s informant I had spoken to, whose fabricated information Alice was relying on.

After seeing my representations, Detective Inspector Jones of the Met Police then did a review of his previous assessment of my complaint. His review concluded that Alice's 999-call to the Met Police was - and I quote: ‘completely transparent and credible’ and that: ‘The call is lengthy, comprehensive and professional’ and therefore implies that Alice showed no intention to deceive and - importantly for DI Jones - that the Met Police did not have the time to waste ‘limited and precious resources’ on investigating my complaint with all the serious crime they had to deal with in London every day and therefore it was - and again I quote: ‘not in the public interest’ to interview or prosecute Alice as, and I quote: ‘I have now heard the rationale of the caller recorded at the time, and can therefore know what she would say if later interviewed’. DI Jones’s opinion was that – and I quote: the ‘crime was not solvable’. BUT remarkably DI Jones did not even bother to tell Alice my view – which was that Alice’s informant was a total liar nor did DI Jones even want to interview the informant. Why did the person I actually spoke that 25 October day not herself make the 999-call or put in a Witness Statement to the Police? Crucially why did DI Jones not mention or conclude that Alice had maybe been duped by her informant? It was the informant who was the key person to interview, as well DI Jones must have realised. The whole episode stank of cover-up and protection by the Met Police for not just the staff working for the highest judge in the land, but for Sir Ian himself. What DI Jones did concede in his review Report was that, after all, a crime would now be recorded against an ‘unnamed person’ under the Malicious Communications Act, but that: ‘A Named Suspect will not be recorded in this case. At this time the caller amounts to a Person of Interest and not someone who needs to be interviewed under caution.’ The trouble with that assessment from DI Jones was, and I repeat, his omission to comment on and account for the behaviour of the informant of Alice. It was the informant who surely had to be interviewed under caution and asked about the background to this saga and whether she had, in truth, made up her allegation that I called in ‘threatening to commit suicide’, in revenge for my book and website on L J Sharp. What mattered in practice was, in any criminal prosecution of the informant of Alice at the Magistrates Court or Crown Court which would involve a thorough cross-examination of Alice herself and Ben Yallop, was that I fully expected the Magistrate - or at the Crown Court the jury - to believe me. I was supremely confident, in particular, that any jury would believe me.

In response to the Administrative Court in my Judicial Review application I argued that it was essential that the Met Police investigate criminality in the Office of the most important law officer in England, the Lord Chief Justice - which Office as a unit had to be seen to be whiter than white and beyond reproach at all costs. That not to properly investigate Alice and more importantly interview her informant was perverse and irrational, given the grotesque enormity of the fantastical fabrication that had been thrust upon me. Even my earlier letter to Sir Terence Etherton, Master of the Rolls asking him to walk down the corridor and inform Sir Ian Burnett what was going on was met with the cowardly response from Sir Terence, via his secretary Andrew Caton, that he ‘did not want to get involved’. What had befallen me was a fundamental perversion and no-one at the Royal Courts of Justice could give a damn. Even when going up there by train a dozen times asking to speak to Alice or Sir Ian’s P.A. Michele Souris or Sir Ian’s Private Secretary Ben Yallop or anyone else, nobody had the integrity or courage to come down to the reception to face me and explain what the hell was going on. On one visit, Ben Yallop, the cheeky bastard, told the receptionist at the Royal Courts of Justice, Mr Clark, to tell me to “write in”. I had been writing in for weeks. My numerous letters were ignored and not given to Sir Ian, even when marked ‘Strictly Private and Confidential’ and delivered by hand or sent by registered post. On one occasion in April 2020, at the height of Covid, I took the train from Essex to Chancery Lane Underground wearing my mask and I arrived at Court no.4 at the Royal Courts of Justice at 10:15 a.m. just prior to Sir Ian Burnett coming in to Court to deliver two judgments. I went up to the Court clerk dressed in his wig, told him who I was and the nature of my complaint and gave him a large brown envelope with my papers with the message that it should be given to Sir Ian only - and as soon as the judgments had been delivered in open court. Then Sir Ian came in, delivered the two judgments and after 10 minutes departed. I never heard back. It took until September 2023 for me to be told in a 2021 Witness Statement submitted to the Essex Police by Ben Yallop - Sir Ian’s Private Secretary – and sent to me by the Solicitors acting for the Essex Police, that he, Ben Yallop, knew I had turned up at Court no. 4 and delivered my complaint. But not a word on whether it was actually given to Sir Ian or whether he knew what was going on.

It was Mrs Justice McGowan, looking at the papers submitted to her by me and the barrister acting for the Met Police, one Adam Clemens, who decided by way of her Order dated 9 February 2021 that my application for permission to apply for Judicial Review was refused on the following grounds:

‘1. The Defendant [the Met Police] has given an explanation for not instituting a prosecution in the review by DI Jones, which does provide adequate reasons for the decision. 2. There is nothing irrational in the reason provided for the decision sought to be challenged. 3. A transcript of the call on 25 October 2019 has been provided. 4. The Claimant has other remedies and appears to be seeking the opportunity to cross-examine the maker of the call to the Police. Judicial Review would not involve the calling of evidence.

I thought Mrs Justice McGowan was – effectively – cheating and knew full well that she was protecting the Private Office of the Lord Chief Justice from thorough humiliation if permission had been granted. She was purposely not looking beneath the surface to see the hidden murky world of deceit and denial being exercised by Sir Ian Burnett’s staff which the Met Police, in their cowardice, ignored - with their lawyers pretending that the only feature the judge was entitled to consider was the superficially plausible decision that the Met Police were too busy to spare the time to investigate the actions of the butter-wouldn’t-melt honourable action of Alice [Gilbert] to save me from carrying out my alleged threat to commit suicide. Mrs Justice McGowan had abused the essential humanitarian purpose of the Judicial Review facility.

At this point a Claimant is entitled to have the judge’s decision reconsidered at a hearing in open court. My submissions in Form 86B to the Administrative Court centred on the obvious fact that it was the informant of Alice who had to be interviewed and that DI Jones was incompetent in his handling of my complaint and that there were no other remedies to enable Sir Ian’s staff to be held to account.

One disappointing admission, however, was made to me. In the hope that my three calls to the Royal Courts of Justice on 25 October 2019 had been recorded I had asked the Met Police to find this out. The written reply from the Met Police’s Solicitors was that my calls to the RCJ were not recorded. Oh, what a pity! And how so very convenient for Sir Ian Burnett’s staff.

On 18 March 2021 the most senior judge at the Administrative Court, Mr Justice Swift, sat on my renewed hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice. He was a Southend, Essex man who as a Queen’s Counsel was the Government’s favourite Treasury Department barrister, acting for the Defence Secretary and Home Secretary and the Security Services. In other words, he defended the establishment and government decisions in particular. In 2023, as a High Court judge, he refused Julian Assange’s application not to be extradited to the United States. I made it perfectly clear before Mr Justice Swift that the informant of Alice Gilbert was a stupendous liar when that informant told Alice I had called in on 25 October 2019 ‘threatening to commit suicide’ and that it was essential this informant’s motives were examined by the Met Police under caution and that it was totally irrational and incompetent for DI Jones at the Met Police to simply ignore those fundamental points and still decide not to interview that informant and that for Mrs Justice McGowan to declare that DI Jones had done nothing ‘irrational’ was totally perverse.

Mr Justice Swift ruled that the Met Police had not acted – [and I quote]: ‘unlawfully in the course of the investigation’ and refused my application for Judicial Review. The judge ended by telling me: “I do know simply from my own life experience, sometimes you just need to let things go. I know it is easier said than done”. So much for the Judicial Review remedy supposedly being in place to enable ‘perverse’ or ‘irrational’ decisions from a public body to be challenged and overturned. Swift J., as far as I was concerned, had rendered the Judicial Review facility in my case impotent and illusory. A total waste of time. No wonder so few Judicial Review applications from complainants ever succeed. Public bodies, will be aware of the wholesale protection the judiciary will give them if they just took the simple precaution of giving superficially plausible reasons for their decisions. For the Police the get-out-of-jail card every time will be: ‘We did not have the time to interview or investigate this matter due to lack of resources’. A failure to investigate properly can always be overcome with impunity using this formula. I was lumbered with two sets of costs, which remain unpaid.

That decision from Mr Justice Swift allowed Alice Gilbert, now Alice Rose, to submit a Witness Statement to the Essex Police dated 20 August 2021 repeating her assertion that her colleague – whose name had been redacted from the unsigned copy document sent to me by DAC Beechcroft Solicitors acting for the Essex Police – and who [I quote]: ‘... told me that Mr El Diwany had threatened to commit suicide.’ Alice Rose then related in her statement that she knew I had visited the Royal Courts of Justice to try to speak to her and also that she became aware of my Judicial Review proceedings and my use of the 999-call transcript regarding my – [and I quote]: ‘suicidal thoughts’ ending with: ‘I was also informed that my name appears on a website owned by Mr El Diwany. I feel the current situation to be of concern and feel threatened by Mr El Diwany’s actions to date. I have since left the Private Office and have had no further dealings with Mr El Diwany.’ That Witness Statement was a deliberate attempt by Alice Rose to mislead the Essex Police. She must have known the details of my Judicial Review claim: that it was entirely over her own hoax-999 call to the Met Police on 25 October 2019 regarding the malicious, fabricated smear of her colleague. Yet not a word of contrition in her Witness Statement. What a bitch!

On 1 September 2021 I was arrested by the Essex Police and detained overnight for, amongst other things, frightening Alice Rose who felt ‘threatened’ by my actions – without specifying what exactly in my actions it was that I had done wrong - and sending reprimands in letters addressed to Alice Gilbert’s colleague Ben Yallop over their collective negligence and cover-up for this informant who had lied abominably about me allegedly telling her I was going to commit suicide. My suspected offences, according to the Essex Police, was one of sending ‘malicious communications’ including electronic communications, that is emails, under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 to Ben Yallop and Alice Gilbert and four other people. [All 6 charges were withdrawn by the Crown Prosecution Service in 2022 after I wrote to tell them my communications to the 6 complainants were merely reprimands for their own misconduct with no intention to cause distress or harassment]. I did not know Alice Roses’ email address and so could not sent her any emails, nor had I sent Ben Yallop any emails. I had sent the Office of the Lord Chief Justice letters and emails of reprimand and enquiry over the gross misconduct of Sir Ian Burnett’s staff but never received a single reply, which letters and emails Ben Yallop must have read. I also left a handwritten note for Michele Souris at the Royal Courts of Justice on 11 December 2019 telling her off for not coming down to reception to see me and asking what the hell was going on with this fabricated allegation. No reply ever came. When I called Michele Souris by phone on 13 April 2020, a call that this time I had the foresight to record, she told me my letters to Sir Ian were not being given to him and put the phone down on me the moment I asked her for the name of the 999-caller to the Met Police on 25 October 2019. I was told on my arrest by Detective Constable Trevor Clark of Essex Police that Ben Yallop had sent in a Witness Statement saying he been told that I had been ‘seen’ outside the homes of both Sir Ian Burnett and Lady Justice Sharp. Astonished at this new smear, I told DC Trevor Clark that I had most certainly not been seen outside their homes as I had not been within a million miles of either residence. What’s the evidence for this I asked DC Trevor Clark and who was it that saw me and when? Where are these homes? He had no answers at all for these vital questions. Surely, he would have been dying to know the answers himself and should have asked Ben Yallop for substantiation. The fact is all my electronic equipment – phones and tablets and tape- recording devices - were seized by the Essex Police on my arrest by four Essex Police officers coming to my home and filming me on 1 September 2021, having obtain two search warrants from Westminster Magistrate’s Court in late August from District Judge Ezzat to search my home and car and remove all my electronic equipment to investigate, and I quote: ‘any research and planning on individuals’. Ha! It occurred to me that the Essex Police suspected that, as a Muslim, I may have been planning an Islamist terror attack on the two judges and was casing their respective joints prior to doing so. They were going to look at my email messages and investigate my Google searches and phone calls and text messages. I soon asked DC Trevor Clark to log and record a complaint of criminality against Ben Yallop and crucially his informant who between them were certainly trying to pervert the course of justice, mislead the Essex Police and lay themselves open to a charge of misconduct in public office. I thought this time round I had surely got them. But no! DC Trevor Clark told me to my face twice that there was nothing criminal about Ben Yallop simply relaying or passing on information he had received from his informant [Michele Souris]. I could not believe this very superficial bullshit and for the next 6 months or so told DC Trevor Clark in repeat emails to ask Ben Yallop for dates and times for when I was seen and by whom and to ask searching questions of his informant. As there was never going to be any evidence because I was never there in the first place, then I thought it would be fairly straight-forward for my complaint of criminality to be logged and for Ben Yallop and his informant [Michele Souris] to be interviewed under caution. It intrigued me just how dumb and moronic these two civil servants were. Likewise, DC Trevor Clark, the man in charge of what was called ‘Operation Fagin’, must have been itching to know who saw me and when. Was there any CCTV evidence? How did those who saw at two separate locations me know it was me? Was it Sir Ian Burnett who saw me outside his home? Was it Lady Justice Sharp who saw me outside her home? Had the Essex Police informed them that I had been seen outside their homes? And if so, were Sir Ian and Dame Sharp not insisting on being given the evidence, if it was not they who had seen me? Remarkably, neither DC Trevor Clark nor his commanding officer DS Olney were in the least bit interested in posing these questions to the individuals concerned or undertaking any further investigation. 26 months after my arrest I was finally in November 2023 given Ben Yallop’s Witness Statement by the Solicitors acting for the Essex Police, DAC Beechcroft. Ben Yallop’s informant was in fact Michele Souris whose direct evidence was quoted in his witness Statement, which wording was that I had ‘turned up’ at the homes of Lady Justice Sharp and Sir Ian Burnett, but not a word on who told her this or dates and times of the alleged sightings.

I was perfectly entitled to have a full reply in writing from DC Trevor Clark to my request for my complaint against Yallop and Souris logged with interviews under caution to follow. I needed to know why it was not a criminal offence for Ben Yallop’s informant, in particular, to mislead the Essex Police with the false information that I had ‘turned up’ at these judges’ homes - when I had not - and which information no doubt contributed to my arrest on 1 September 2021. It was the easiest thing in the world for the Essex Police just to ask Michele Souris when I was seen and by whom and how they knew it was me they saw. DC Trevor Clark, I guess, did not put these questions to Michele Souris as he surely realised, I was telling the truth and he did not want to risk having to arrest and charge Michele Souris. It was not much use relying on DC Trevor Clark’s brief word to me on my doorstep and outside his Police Station that all Ben Yallop was doing was relaying information he’d received from Michele Souris. I needed detailed answers to my detailed questions from DC Trevor Clark: why had he not asked Michele Souris for times and dates and substantiation for me being seen outside the judges’ homes. Who in fact saw me in these two different locations? My repeated requests were all ignored by DC Trevor Clark. So, in early May 2023 I sent a Letter before Claim to Essex Police for a Judicial Review claim at the High Court in London to review what is termed in law ‘an ongoing decision’ by Essex Police to ‘continue to refuse’ my requests to log and record my complaint of criminality or wrongdoing against Ben Yallop’s informant with possible collusion by Ben Yallop regarding my having been seen outside the homes of Sharp and Burnett.

I then heard back with at the end of May with a letter from the in-house Essex Police Solicitor Adam Hunt at headquarters in Chelmsford Police Station telling me this: ‘I am instructed that police officers verbally advised you that your complaint against Mr Yallop was not based on material facts and that the police would not be looking to interview him as, following consideration, it had been concluded that there had been no perjury or falsifying of evidence in his Witness Statement. Further it is my view that your allegations against Mr Yallop are simply an attempt to continue your hostile conduct towards the Lord Chief Justice’s office as would an application for Judicial Review. The decision not to record or investigate your allegations against Mr Yallop and those you refer to is neither irrational nor unlawful and therefore you have no grounds to apply for judicial review of the decision. Given the nature of your allegations and the credible evidence to the contrary, in particular the content and purpose of Mr Yallop’s statement, it is apparent that the matters you have reported do not on the balance of probability amount to a crime.’

What Adam Hunt seemed to be saying was that I was lying when I stated that I had never been anywhere remotely near or at the homes of Sir Ian Burnett and Lady Justice Sharp. Why then did not Adam Hunt just provide me with the evidence? Simple enough. The answer is that he would never be given any evidence as I was never there – at the homes of these two judges in the first place. Ben Yallop’s informant was an abject liar on both alleged sightings.

So, I wrote back to Adam Hunt with chapter and verse as to precisely why he was talking utter rubbish. He did not respond until after I issued my Judicial Review Claim when in July 2023, he wrote in paragraphs 10 and 11 of his Summary Grounds for Contesting the Claim as follows:

10. ... [Farid El Diwany] was advised by DC Clark that as Mr Yallop was merely relaying information provided to him from a third party he had not intentionally or maliciously provided false information or falsified an official document and therefore the police would not be looking at Ben Yallop as a suspect of a crime.

11. The decision made on behalf of [the Essex Police] not to record or investigate [Mr El Diwany’s] allegations against Mr Yallop is reasonable and lawful. In particular, the view of the officer/s acting (on behalf of [the Essex Police]) that the statement by Mr Yallop was not malicious or provided falsified information was appropriate and reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The officers could also have viewed the allegations by [Farid El Diwany] as simply malicious counter allegations and a continuation of his abusive conduct towards Court staff.

In his paragraph 7 Adam Hunt revealed who Ben Yallop’s informant was. It was Michele Souris, his colleague. The relevant words from Ben Yallop were: ‘Michele Souris observes “It is a little worrying and I know that he has turned up at the homes of Dame Victoria and Lord Burnett but I am concerned that if I ask the Police [to get] involved it will only [add] fuel to the fire.

Ridiculously, there was not a word from Adam Hunt regarding my main complaint in my Judicial Review claim which was that the informant of Ben Yallop, Michele Souris, who told him I had been seen outside the homes of Lady Justice Sharp and Sir Ian Burnett simply had to interviewed and made to provide the evidence for these very serious allegations. From paragraph 11 Adam Hunt was telling me, effectively, that it was true that I had been seen outside these judges’ homes and for me to deny it, only went to show that I was a liar - trying simply to harass and abuse the Lord Chief Justice’s staff. This bullshit sickened me as I had not been within a million miles of the judges’ homes and no evidence would ever be found to prove that I was, as I was never there in the first place. Adam Hunt, Solicitor for the Essex Police lacked all integrity. He totally ignored the fact that his own Chief Constable wrote to me in 2019 to tell me to contact Sir Ian Burnett myself after I complained to the Chief Constable about Alice Rose’s hoax-999 call to the Met Police. He, of course, was used to defending the Police in these situations and naturally came up with the usual get-out-of-jail cards by introducing the binding decisions of Lord Bingham in R (Corner House Research) v Director of the SFO [2008] UKHL 60; [2009] AC 756 at [30] who ruled that ... ‘only in highly exceptional cases will the court disturb the decisions of an independent prosecutor and investigator’ coupled with a very recent 2022 case where the court declared that the Police must be left entirely to their own devices with ‘a very broad discretion to judge whether an allegation that an offence has or may have been committed warrants investigation ... and it is they [Police Officers] - and not the courts – who have the constitutional responsibility and the practical competence to decide what weight to give to those factors’ followed by: ‘Given the nature of this discretion, a decision taken by a police officer to close a criminal investigation is seldom susceptible to legal challenge. Many cases confirm this ...’

All this bluster from Adam Hunt simply because Detective Constable Trevor Clark could not be bothered to simply ask Michele Souris to substantiate her statement that I had ‘turned up’ at the homes of Sir Ian Burnett and Lady Justice Sharp. As DC Trevor Clark was one very short step away from establishing that Michele Souris’ Statement was a complete pack of lies, I would have thought any reasonable judge would have ruled that it was highly likely that an offence had been committed and that my complaint certainly warranted further investigation.

Now I arrive at the decision of Mr Justice Poole who sat on the case. First, he declared that: ‘This is not the case of a continuing refusal [by the Essex Police to log my complaint and ask Michele Souris to substantiate her claim] but rather repeated requests and refusals.’ And therefore, the judge ruled that my claim was out of time as I should have issued my claim within 3 months of DC Clark first telling me verbally that Ben Yallop was only relaying what he’d been told by Michele Souris. In other words, there was no requirement for the Police to put in writing the full reasons for their refusal to log my complaint alongside a fully itemised account of my complaint to enable full transparency to be on the record and all the facts understood by both parties on such a serious matter. A quick word delivered face to face by D C Trevor Clark was enough as far as the honourable judge was concerned. As per paragraph 4a of his Order dated 16 November 2023, Mr Justice Poole ruled that my claim was in any case ‘totally without merit’ because of the decision by Lord Bingham that ‘only in exceptional cases will the court disturb a decision of an independent prosecutor or investigator.’ In his paragraph 4b Mr Justice Poole ruled that ‘it was manifestly reasonable for the [Essex Police] to regard the information given by Mr Yallop, and those who had provided the information to him, as, on the balance of probabilities, not constituting a crime as defined by law.’ In his paragraph 4c the judge declared: ‘The material substance of the evidence of Ben Yallop to the police and the reasons the police decided not to record, investigate or prosecute the Claimant’s complaint against Ben Yallop and others is known to the Defendant and so his complaint that adequate reasons for the decision have not been given has no substance.’ Finally in his paragraph 4d Mr Justice Poole said: ‘The decision of the Defendant [Essex Police] is not irrational. The Claimant claims that the motive of the Defendant is [to] conceal a vital truth and to “protect the elite from embarrassment” but no grounds or evidence for such allegations is disclosed by the Claimant.’

Finally, Mr Justice Poole, dishonestly, rejected my argument that the covert Islamophobia of Ben Yallop and his staff - when refusing to pass on my letters with Lord Pickles letters to Sir Ian Burnett to let him decide if it should be a matter of judicial misconduct for a judge to refuse to condemn seriously abusive hate language likely to upset a religious community – was the motive for Mr Yallop and Michele Souris not having the integrity to provide the least bit of evidence or substantiation that I had turned up at the homes of Sir Ian Burnett and Lady Justice Sharp. Indeed, Mr Justice Poole completely forgot - to put it politely - that I had most certainly given him a full account in my papers of these Islamophobic machinations performed over a prolonged period by Sir Ian Burnett’s staff.

This was sleight of hand and a cover-up of major proportions by Mr Justice Poole. He was a cheat. He had copious evidence before him in my written submissions as to why the Essex Police were ‘protecting the elite’ – that is the reputation of the high office of the Lord Chief Justice, the top judge in the land. Mr Justice Poole must have been dying to know for himself how the heck Michele Souris knew I had ‘turned up’ at the homes of Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett and Lady Justice Sharp, when reading my evidence that I had never been ‘within a million miles’ of their homes. I was a retired Solicitor with no record whatsoever of any dishonesty, not a con-artist who was basically chancing his luck for the fun of it.

The Essex Police had cheated too and were unworthy of their victory. And not for the first time with me.

In 2017 I had made a Judicial Review claim against the Essex Police for their refusal to similarly obtain corroborating evidence regarding preposterous allegations and a complaint to the Police from as far back as 2011. Three years earlier in July 2014 the Essex Police knocked on my front door and read out a Harassment Warning which came from a simple-minded local delinquent girl taken on, I believe, as a foster-child who lived 5 minutes’ walk from me. I was not given a written copy of the warning and so had to write the main points down as soon as the Policeman left. The Police refused to put anything in writing. The girl had complained to the Essex Police that although the ‘harassment’ had ‘now stopped’, she wanted me to be put on notice that I had ‘harassed’ her three years previously by ‘following’ her all the way to London and engaging in ‘idle chit-chat’ and had offered her a job - when she was 17, followed by, on the next alleged meeting also in far-away London in August just gone, talking to her at a Wireless Festival in London, followed by ‘staring at her’ from the street when she worked in a nursery and stopping outside her home and ‘staring’ at her. I did not know the girl at all but drove past her house every day on my way home. I may have said hello once when going for my daily run. Another allegation also came my way - which I suspect was from the same woman but made known to me only years later after I made a freedom of information request of the Essex Police in 2019 for all the data they held on me. The Essex Police wrote to tell me that on an unspecified occasion some years before I went into a shop in London and advised a girl on the best places to shop-lift in the area followed by a complaint of harassment by the girl. Utter rubbish! Another preposterous allegation. The girl obviously knew me and where I lived otherwise, I would not have received the warning. I never bothered to ask the Police who made this allegation, but I suspected it was the same girl who alleged I had followed her up to London on two separate occasions. All these allegations were total fabrications. For the first two allegations, I went back to the Essex Police and told them to ask the girl on what day, month and year I had met the girl in London to engage in ‘idle chit-chat’, what I was wearing and what job I offered her and likewise for corroboration for my meeting her at a Wireless Festival in August, as well as full details of just where her nursery was and the day I was seen and the time and whether this alleged sighting could be confirmed by anyone else. I knew there would be no information forthcoming for any of these alleged meetings/sightings as it was all a total load of bollocks, coming from a complete nutter, who had ulterior motives for trying to pervert the course of justice. Why the heck would I want to follow a girl all the way to London on two separate occasions when I could simply talk to her comfortably on the train on my way into London. Besides which, I was in no position to offer her a job as there were no vacancies in my small law firm for any role. If dates and times for these events of harassment were to be given by the girl, I would easily be able to prove I was elsewhere. The Essex Police refused to undertake the simplest of tasks of interviewing her on these details, telling me the girl was ‘vulnerable’ - but not why she was vulnerable. Her step-mother made the local press for being a convicted benefits cheat and was sentenced to 100 hours community service and fined. This refusal to co- operate by the Essex Police infuriated me. They even told me that the Harassment Notice did not necessarily mean the girl’s allegations were true. They eventually went round to see her again but refused to tell me what they discussed, writing to tell me they will not disclose what the ‘victim’ told their officers. I wanted those false allegations to come off the Police record. The IPCC, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, ruled in my favour that it was wrong of the Essex Police to continuously refuse to supply me with a detailed written breakdown of the constituent elements of the several acts of harassment I was alleged to have committed. That ruling still did not persuade the Essex Police to go and get this information from the girl, being details of time and place etc.

So, after three years of getting nowhere I issued a Letter before Claim to the Essex Police for Judicial Review of their perverse decision not to interview this girl to ascertain if she was trying to pervert the course of justice. When I sent the girl a copy of my letter and enclosures as I was obliged to do under the Civil Procedure Rules in her role as an ‘Interested Party’ - being one who would be affected by my claim and therefore was entitled to know what was going on - I was visited at 6 p.m. one evening and handed another Harassment Notice for upsetting the girl with my Court papers, which had ‘distressed’ her. The Essex Police told me I must in future use a Solicitor. I told them as they left that I was a Solicitor. With no progress in obtaining the substantive details from the Essex Police for my alleged offences, I issued my Judicial Review Claim form on the Essex Police and sent a copy to the girl, as I was obliged to do under the Civil Procedure Rules. Next, I was arrested at midnight by the Essex Police for ‘harassment’ as my Judicial Review Claim form had caused ’upset and distress’ to the girl and detained overnight for questioning. The Essex Police told me I should have used a Solicitor to serve my claim. I told the Essex Police again that I was a Solicitor quite capable of handling the matter on my own. I was interviewed under caution and had some first-class assistance from a local Solicitor who gave the Essex Police short shrift. They even told me they would call the High Court to ask if it was standard practice for a claim to be served on an ‘Interested Party’. The Essex Police then drove me home at 5:30 a.m. My mother had just died too. It was a truly traumatic time.

I was now determined to press on with my Judicial Review claim against the Essex Police and it was Adam Hunt who wrote to me and defended the Essex Police against my claim. His main argument to the Administrative Court was how unworthy I was for accusing the girl of being a liar and a cheat. She WAS a liar and a cheat and was certainly harassing me for reasons I have never been able to ascertain. Adam Hunt lacked all integrity. Then he told me I risked going to prison for harassment for proceeding with my Judicial Review claim having included the girl as an ‘Interested Party’ on the claim form and additionally made it clear that I faced a huge costs bill if my claim was dismissed. This threat to have me imprisoned was below the belt and it really unnerved me, as a result of which I employed a local firm of Solicitors to successfully negotiate an honourable withdrawal for me with no costs penalty. I was worried sick and I never forgave Adam Hunt and the despicable conduct of the semi-educated attack dogs working for the Essex Police. I hope they all burn in hell. The #MeToo movement had certainly taken a firm hold on the Force: any allegation of harassment by a woman in these times of rampant misogyny and rape and pillage by the male population must be believed and dealt with robustly by the Police.

Farid El Diwany
3 March 2024.