Retired Judge Michael Argyle and Felix Dennis will switch places in a
libel re-run of the Oz trial. Twenty four years ago Felix was a young
co-defendant in the controversial case and today he is a
multi-millionaire publisher determined to clear his name, as Roger
Hutchinson reports
IN THE sultry early afternoon of Thursday, August 5, 1971, the
56-year-old High Court Judge, Michael Victor Argyle, peered over the
rims of his half-moon spectacles in Court Number Two of the Central
Criminal Courts at the Old Bailey, and passed his sentences on the last
of the three editors of the underground magazine Oz.
''You are younger than the other two,'' pronounced Argyle to a
24-year-old Londoner named Felix Dennis, ''and very much less
intelligent. Nine months.''
''I am very sorry you had to do that,'' said Dennis as they led him
away.
What does it mean in Westerns, when the reluctant gunslinger utters
those words? It means: ''This may take some time, but watch out.''
Last month the papers were finally served. The street-selling hippie
who disappeared from Justice Argyle's sight 24 years ago, who was hauled
off by uniformed officers to serve a jail sentence which Argyle said he
felt he had to impose because the defendant could not possibly afford to
pay a fine, re-emerged into the retired judge's life.
Having spent the intervening years amassing, through publishing, a
personal fortune of #155m, the 48-year-old Felix Dennis engaged the most
expensive and successful libel lawyer in the country and issued a High
Court writ against the 80-year-old Michael Victor Argyle. It conjured a
gorgeous, improbable analogy: like some latter-day lost Dickensian hero,
Felix Dennis had burst back into the drawing room to avenge his family's
name, do down the erstwhile persecutor of his friends, and claim his
inheritance.
It has been a long haul. Three years after the trial Oz closed down,
and Felix Dennis began to lay the foundations of his own independent
publishing empire.
He started with a poster-magazine based on the popularity of the film
star Bruce Lee. Kung Fu Monthly enabled its publisher to branch out into
the vulnerable young world of personal-computer magazines, and to
establish himself in New York. By 1983 he had sold his first title, and
had become a millionaire. By 1991 Paddy Ashdown was presenting him with
a UK Magazine Publisher of The Year award, and by 1995 he was allegedly
the 56th richest British citizen.
He has a condominium in New York, a mansion and 450 acres near
Stratford-on-Avon, an apartment in the West End of London, a large chunk
of the Caribbean island of Mustique, and a helicopter and Rolls-Royce to
get about in. Felix Dennis has played the money game on both sides of
the Atlantic, and won.
It has become a popular received wisdom that Dennis was prompted to a
single-minded pursuit of wealth by Justice Michael Argyle's unpleasant
dismissal of his intelligence back in 1971.
But Dennis was a natural businessman. When he started hand-selling Oz
on London's King's Road its sales rocketed; when he progressed to
selling advertising for the magazine, Oz found itself with money in the
bank. Those streetwise qualities, coupled with the crash-course facility
in hands-on publishing which the underground press gave most of its
graduates, was enough to make his millions. No gratuitous insults,
however publicly announced, were needed to make this man rich.
And since becoming rich . . . well, he has had a busy life to lead.
There are plenty of stories about Felix Dennis late at night, but none
of them involves him sitting around obsessively swearing vengeance on
the judge. The legal papers which have just been served on Michael
Victor Argyle are, rather, the retired judge's own doing.
After the Appeal Court judges had quashed the Oz convictions
(''because of the serious and substantial misdirection of the jury by
Michael Argyle,'' said Lord Chief Justice Widgery), Argyle continued on
his kenspeckle way. The Scottish adjective is appropriate: Michael
Argyle claims direct descent from a member of Charles Edward Stuart's
Jacobite army who was supposedly marooned in the English Midlands in the
winter of 1745. This ancestor and his kin, says the retired judge, went
on to become highwaymen . . .
He has survived more than one scrape with the libertarians of the
national press, raised minor furores for freeing rapists and issuing
racist comments, but they were comparatively small beer. There would
never again be an event so suited to Justice Argyle's temperament as the
Oz trial. Michael Argyle had peaked early. And he has spent the
subsequent years fine-tuning, in after-dinner talks and lectures to
public schoolboys, his own instructively idiosyncratic version of what
was happening at the Old Bailey in the summer of 1971.
In 1988 Michael Argyle retired from the Old Bailey bench. He continued
to be active in a number of his favoured causes, most notably the
campaign to restore the death penalty. In 1992 he travelled to Australia
to visit some members of his family. Alerted to his arrival, the
Australian press waylaid him at the airport and asked him about one of
their own, Felix Dennis's co-defendant Richard Neville, who was, by
then, settled back in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.
''Richard Neville was a card-carrying communist,'' Argyle told them,
blithely ignorant of the fact that Neville was incapable of joining a
bus queue, ''and the Oz trial was about a dirty little magazine being
peddled to children -- but it was a front for pornographers and drug
barons.''
To those who did not frequent Michael Argyle's social evenings, this
latest departure into the realms of fantasy came as something of a
shock. It had long been realised that the judge had been uncomfortable
with the rude ingredients of Oz magazine. But drug barons? Where did
that come from?
Far from being ''drug barons'' themselves, the editors of Oz had
campaigned against drug barons. Far from being ''card-carrying
communists'', they had argued, in true hippie fashion, that the
established right/left political polarisation was anachronistic.
But Richard Neville had neither the inclination nor the money to take
Argyle to court three years ago, and there the whole, odd story might
have foundered if Neville had not decided to publish his reminiscences.
Last month Hippie Hippie Shake was indulgently reviewed in The Spectator
magazine by the former defence counsel at the Oz trial, John Mortimer.
And this brought Michael Argyle snarling once more from his lair.
In the very next issue of The Spectator he offered his own version of
events. It made sensational, jaw-dropping copy. ''Behind the Oz
magazine,'' offered Argyle, ''was a conspiracy of criminals who were
selling it, together with soft drugs, at the entrance to state schools,
youth clubs and such. The stuff (drugs) was pouring in by ship . . . ''
When, he continued, he had put the Oz editors behind bars, ''the
imports seemed to slacken''. But after the Appeal Court had quashed
their convictions ''the traffic picked up again''.
Felix Dennis promptly hired the #3000-a-day QC, George Carman, and
issued High Court writs for libel against the editor of The Spectator,
Dominic Lawson, against The Spectator itself, and against Michael
Argyle. Carman's reputation is such that -- with the notable recent
exception of Graeme Souness -- his opponents tend to settle quickly and
out of court.
It is said that Dennis has no real interest in taking Argyle all the
way to court, that he is not about to make of the judge a hoary martyr
of the right. After 24 years, it seems that Felix Dennis just wants to
stop all of the nonsense. And sure enough, the latest issue of The
Spectator contains the grovelling apology which Dennis had demanded.
But Michael Argyle is being less than co-operative. He refused an
invitation to attach his name to The Spectator's disclaimer, and told a
photographer that he looked forward to ''taking Felix Dennis'' in a
counter-action ''for five million pounds . . . ''
After all of the threats, the court cases, libels, after-dinner
speeches and pronouncements to the press, there are still outstanding
questions concerning the trial of Oz, which might ironically only be
answered from the witness box if Michael Argyle proceeds with his
counter-action.
Where, for example, was his Apocrypha born? He was obviously under the
impression, in 1971 and ever since, that rather than merely presiding
over the ridiculous prosecution of a harmless and impecunious hippie
magazine, he had been detailed to stamp out a major threat to
civilisation in Britain.
The judge was working to a different agenda from anybody else at the
Old Bailey. He was locking away ''communist drug barons'' and ''a
conspiracy of criminals''. He was, by his own admission, trying and
sentencing the three men not for the mild offences of which, after his
misdirection of the jury, they had been found guilty, but for other
rumoured activities of which they had never been accused or charged.
That was in itself a disturbing interpretation of the judicial
process, and it begs further questions. Did he invent those fantastical
activities of the three Oz editors all on his own? Or was he briefed
about them? If it was the latter, who whispered such extraordinary lies
into his receptive ear, and why? If this latest retrial of Oz magazine
collapses after an apology in The Spectator, Michael Victor Argyle may
take the fascinating answers to those questions with him to the grave.
'It has become a popular received wisdom that Dennis was prompted to a
single-minded pursuit of wealth by Justice Michael Argyle's unpleasant
dismissal of his intelligence back in 1971'
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