https://www.thetimes.com/comment/register/article/alistair-mitchell-61-lawyer-whose-calling-was-knocked-into-him-at-a-riot-3cc8rmfmq

Alistair Mitchell, 61: Lawyer whose calling was knocked into him at a riot



Alistair Mitchell with his elder son, Arthur

Saturday March 02 2019, 12.01am GMT, The Times

Private Eye once described Alistair Mitchell as “the only man in British legal history to be convicted of biting a policeman — with someone else’s teeth”. His surreal, tortuous saga began on March 31, 1990. The 32-year-old Alistair, then a director of a wholefoods co-operative, had been asked by Alexandra, his girlfriend, to photograph the poll tax riots for a film she was making. Shinning up a steel bus shelter, Alistair duly did so. He leapt off when a policeman struck the shelter with a baton.

He had been long separated from Alexandra when, at about 6.30pm, Alistair saw a police officer grip a protester by the neck in a chokehold that he had read could prove fatal. “That’s dangerous,” he cried out. “You could kill in eight seconds.”

In response two police officers pinned Alistair against a nearby shop window, broke his right index finger, and gripped his windpipe. One of them shouted: “In six seconds you’ll be dead.” Unable to move, he fainted.

To his surprise, Alistair was subsequently charged with assaulting two police officers. According to The Guardian, when he was summoned before a magistrate to give his account, it tallied exactly with those of two eyewitnesses who were working in the shop against which he had been pressed by the police.

The novelist Maeve Binchy, a family friend, testified that, far from being violent in character, Alistair was “painfully honest” and “gentle”.

A police officer then displayed bite marks on his left hand, saying that Alistair, “snapping like a dog”, had bitten him. The dental expert who had made a mould of Alistair’s teeth deemed this “highly unlikely”. Speculation followed: could the officer have bitten his own hand?

Although the question was left unanswered, Alistair was found guilty, fined £250 and sentenced to prison. When a judge upheld Alistair’s sentence at appeal, a second, six-day incarceration followed at HM Prison Wandsworth.

Unable to sleep in a cell, Alistair found prison “strange and frightening”. Nonetheless, it produced an unexpected consequence: he was asked to assist in founding a group offering legal help to some of the 500 protesters arrested during the poll tax riots, an event by then known as “the Battle of Trafalgar Square”.

Assisted by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, Alistair helped to form the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign. He held meetings to collect witness statements, arranged lawyers for defendants, and support for those in prison. Alexandra, meanwhile, logged the television news footage of the day. They developed a system of legal monitoring for use at demonstrations.



Alistair’s conviction for assaulting two police officers during the poll tax riots in 1990 was quashed

GETTY IMAGES

In 1993 the High Court quashed Alistair’s conviction at judicial review. By then, his spare time being consumed by legal matters, Alistair decided to begin a law degree at South Bank (now London South Bank) University. The £40,000 Alistair won in 1997 in a civil action against the police would later pay for his studies for the Bar. As a barrister he initially specialised in family and criminal cases, later expanding into civil, immigration and commercial law. Whatever the lawsuit, the gentle Alistair was always happy to work with police officers.

Alistair Stephen Fabian Mitchell was born in June 1957 in Oxford, to Adrian Mitchell, a writer and journalist, and his wife, Maureen (née Bush).

When Alistair was four, his brother Danny 18 months old and their sister Briony a baby, Adrian left the family. To survive, Maureen, still in her twenties, took in lodgers and worked as a secretary.

The kindness of her neighbours in Barnes — including the Russell family and the Rev Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans — ensured her children never went hungry. Meanwhile, Alistair’s godfather, Gordon Snell, a BBC producer and children’s author, became a father figure.

Keen to rebuild contact with Adrian, who had remarried and won renown as a pacifist poet, Alistair would attend the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rallies where his father spoke.

At 14 Alistair left Sheen Grammar School with one A-grade O level in English. Twelve months later he moved to Wales. On leaving Wales as a 20-year-old, Alistair, who was always generous, gave the small house he had bought for a few hundred pounds to a homeless family.

Early in the 1980s he joined Wholesome Trucking, a wholefood distribution co-operative that later developed a range of wholefoods to distribute at low prices across England. With friends Alistair also began Livin’ Brix, a housing co-operative in south London, where he was later joined by his girlfriend, Alexandra Preston. In 1996 they had a son, Arthur, and married. After the birth of Robin in 2000 they moved to Shropshire, where Alistair later set up in sole practice at 49 Chambers in Bridgnorth.

Excelling at sensitive family cases, Alistair was often asked to represent people who claimed to be victims of a miscarriage of justice. With his cockney accent and aversion to golf, Alistair did not perhaps fit stereotypical images of the wealthy barrister. Off-duty he enjoyed football, reading Private Eye, and occasionally sporting a T-shirt with a cartoon that depicted his arrest.

In 2012 Alistair was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer, for which he received two stem cell transplants. Last year Alistair’s consultant warned of his impending death. Supremely happy as a father, Alistair was desperate to survive a further 12 months until Arthur had finished his degree, and Robin his A levels.

With Alexandra, Alistair researched treatments not available on the NHS. The high cost of his anti-cancer drug was partly met by his godfather, sister and brother-in-law. Alistair continued to work on legal cases until a week before his death on February 10 — even from his hospital bed he answered the legal queries of nurses and fellow patients.