My Lords, there is no need to take any time to establish that all of the members of the Joint Committee believe in the importance of trial by jury. That was not the issue. The issue was whether jury trial was appropriate in defamation cases. Most of us went into the committee being unsighted, and the evidence was very quick and almost unanimous: judges had in effect already decided that jury trials were probably not the way to go in defamation cases. A number of witnesses told us that there had not been a jury trial for defamation or libel in the past 18 months to two years; the practice had largely ceased. We were moving to a position of saying that we endorsed the present situation.
Then we got evidence from the editor of the Guardian. In his evidence, he said something which caused us all to perk up. He referred back to the case of the Guardian against Jonathan Aitken. He said that he and his newspaper had wished that that trial had been conducted in front of a jury. He made the case that occasionally, perhaps even exceptionally, people in public life needed to be tried in front of their peers simply because of the public perception and ramifications of someone in high office being in that position. He specifically mentioned judges, Members of Parliament and, if my memory is right, very senior people in the Armed Forces, where the credibility of the public and the individual were such that they needed to be tried in those circumstances. However, other than that, he said that what the judges had already established was the way to go. All I have sought to do in this amendment is accurately to reflect our evidence. I hope that I have done so faithfully. I beg to move.