My London adventure

No reader could possibly be more bored with the subject of my late legal travails than I. It is difficult to retain one's effervescence through nine years of public investigation and defamation, endless trials and appeals, and three years in U.S. federal prisons. We so eviscerated the case that my opponents cling like drowning men to the risible claim that I am a "convicted criminal," and my often rather acerbic rebuttals tax the patience even of some of my supporters. No Canadian or British court would have entertained such a flimsy prosecution, much less returned a guilty verdict. (The sponsors of the prosecution have agreed to the largest libel settlement in Canadian history for me.)

As I launched my 2011 book A Matter of Principle in Britain last week, that country's appallingly lazy and destructive press corps were well in arrears of their Canadian and American analogues in realizing what unutterable rubbish the case against my co-defendants and myself had been, and just how completely it was eviscerated. Though the British generally consider the United States to be a half-mad country, and know that its justice system is a wild and woolly business, I correctly guessed that much of their media would be resistless against the temptation to open with the sighting shot that I was a common criminal and try to advance from there. It did not require a Marshal Foch of infantry tactics (the Dwight D. Eisenhower of the First World War whose equestrian statue greets arriving passengers through the Euro-tunnel at Victoria Station), to conclude that heavy artillery counter-fire would be required, and in this I was, by consensual agreement, an over-achiever.

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