Ruth Wyner and John Brock

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The Cambridge Two

                                The Observer
                                      
                              January 2, 2000
                                      
 WITHOUT PREJUDICE: Jailed for doing her job;
   The sentencing to prison of two charity workers has shocked and
   scandalised Cambridge
   
    Nick Cohen
   
       ON 17 DECEMBER at King's Lynn Crown Court, a representative
   section of the Cambridge intelligentsia was pushed as close as its
   good manners and quiet temperament permitted to riot. Judge Jonathan
   Haworth, a new beak who has been delivering stern sentences from the
   moment his bottom hit the bench, put Ruth Wyner and John Brock on the
   casualty list of the unwinnable war on drugs.
   
   Their punishment was commonplace, but their offence was distinctive.
   No one suggested they were heroin dealers or users. The prosecution
   didn't allege that they were money launderers, racketeers taking
   protection money, or Channel Island bankers wary of inquiring too
   closely about the provenance of the large piles of notes that passed
   through entrepreneurs' accounts. The hapless couple didn't look like
   gangsters; to be frank, no drug baron would have been seen dead in
   their mousy clothes. By the standards of what used to be conventional
   morality, Wyner and Brock were admirable people who had followed the
   instructions of Tony Blair and Louise Casey, his Homelessness Tsarina,
   and got beggars off the streets and in to Wintercomfort, an acclaimed
   network of refuges in Cambridge that supplied hot food, tea, washing
   machines, baths, GPs, advice on finding homes and jobs and, indeed,
   rehabilitation from drug addiction.
   
   Haworth was unimpressed. The jury had found them guilty of allowing
   the sale of heroin at their day centres and they had to be punished
   for their 'deliberately obstructive' behaviour. As he wound himself up
   with ever more chilling descriptions of their 'perverse' refusal to
   show remorse and the 'dreadful circumstances' at Wintercomfort,
   spectators didn't need Mystic Meg to predict the sequel. One fraught
   woman interrupted his harangue with a shout of: 'I was on drugs for 20
   years until Wintercomfort helped me.' She was silenced.
   
   The judge gave Ruth Wyner five years and John Brock four harsher
   punishments than he had imposed on the heroin dealers who had been
   netted in their hostels. They gripped the dock rail. Catcalls and sobs
   filled the courtroom. Wyner's 21-year-old son, Joel, bellowed at the
   judge: 'You scum. You ought to be arrested.' But it was the young man
   who was arrested and ordered to apologise or be sent to join his
   mother in the cells for contempt of court.
   
   The hard-man act over, Haworth made a characteristically modern switch
   from brutalism to sentimentality and cooed his best wishes to the
   charity's appalled volunteers and patrons. 'Finally, I wish to say a
   word to those who so selflessly give of their time and money to aid
   the work of Wintercomfort. I hope they will emerge from this unhappy
   episode strengthened in the knowledge that their purposes are
   laudable.' His Pecksniffery was intolerable. The public in the gallery
   stood up before he was half way through his peroration and walked out.
   Gordon Wyner, Ruth's husband, tried to lunge at a policeman in the
   corridor and had to be held back by his friends. The next night, 100
   people protested outside Parkside police station in Cambridge, where
   Wyner was being held before being transported to Holloway, and picked
   an action committee to organise an appeal.
   
   Peter Bottomley, a Conservative MP with liberal leanings, has put down
   questions in Parliament. The answers should make interesting reading.
   The undercover police operation at Wintercomfort has not only brought
   misfortune to the Wyner and Brock families but shown that the national
   fad for zero tolerance not only encourages the hounding of the
   destitute but also the persecution of those who help them.
   
   In The Observer a few weeks ago, Louise Casey instructed us to
   recognise that the greedy homeless were spongeing off 'well-meaning
   people' whose charity 'perpetuated the problem'. The metropolis, with
   its anodyne culture, tacky domes, cigar bars and beguiling cuisines
   from all over the globe, doesn't like its business disturbed by ragged
   bundles in doorways. The smug orthodoxy of the comfortable is not to
   blame for poverty but the Salvation Army and the Big Issue, which
   pretend to want to clean up the mess.
   
   In many respects, Cambridge has been a better example of the
   theme-park city than the capital. Its medieval architecture blends
   with businesses in the vanguard of the new economy. The wealthier
   students and silicon fenlanders have produced fantastically high house
   prices and an atmosphere of hip propriety. Like London, it has
   attracted tramps, in part because there are generous tourists to tap;
   in part because the poor, like everyone else, prefer pleasant scenery
   to a slum.
   
   Sooner or later, they heard about Ruth Wyner and Wintercomfort. By
   most accounts, she is an inspirational woman. Alexander Masters, an
   author who helps out at the charity, spoke for many when he said: 'I'm
   absolutely devoted to her, she's marvellous.' Wyner began work with
   the homeless when her brother had a breakdown, took to the streets and
   ended up diving to his death from the top floor of a hostel. Under her
   leadership, it won pounds 400,000 of lottery money for a new shelter.
   Cambridge aca demics the vice chancellor of the University,
   theologians and dons gave their support. She became a celebrity who
   was often in the local press. On one occasion, she warned about the
   spread of drugs after a man had died of a heroin overdose in a
   Wintercomfort bathroom.
   
   For all that, she had her enemies. 'Some saw her as a modern saint,'
   said a Cambridge lawyer. 'To others, she was a middle-class do-gooder
   a pointy head and ageing hippy who had probably tried drugs herself at
   some point and was certainly bringing addicts into the city.' The
   neighbours of the new day centre she wanted to open protested noisily
   and a faction within Cambridgeshire police's criminal investigation
   department decided to go for her.
   
   At first sight, they appeared to have an impossible task. Homelessness
   and drug taking go together (if you need to ask why they search for
   oblivion, you should try to get out more). The simple division between
   drug users and dealers breaks down on the briefest of examinations.
   Many desperate people buy drugs, sell half at a small profit and take
   the rest themselves. They're scarcely Napoleons of crime.
   
   A confusingly named Inspector Constable sat on the charity's advisory
   board but never warned Wyner she faced prosecution. When the police
   told her that drugs were on sale, she banned anyone dealing in or
   suspected of dealing in drugs from the centres. Constable agreed her
   policy was sensible and all appeared well. But Cambridgeshire CID
   wanted her to take zero tolerance a step further by giving them the
   names of the alleged dope peddlers. At this point, Wyner drew the
   line. She had to defend confidentiality. If everyone who took drugs
   thought that they would be shopped, trust would evaporate and her
   lectures on the virtues of detoxification would play to an empty
   auditorium.
   
   Faced with such an unpromising inquiry, the authorities' determination
   to destroy her necessitated weird and expensive tactics. Two officers,
   codenamed Ed and Swampy, posed as derelicts and hung around
   Wintercomfort as agents provocateurs. They asked to buy heroin and
   recorded the transactions on hidden cameras. In all, 300 hours of
   surveillance tape were collected. Buried in the footage were shots of
   pounds 10 packages of heroin being exchanged in handshakes. None of
   the cameras caught Wyner or any other member of the small staff
   nodding approvingly in the background. The case seemed weak and the
   internal politics of the Cambridgeshire force muddle-headed. Wyner and
   Brock's lawyers expected it to be thrown out by the judge as an abuse
   of the judicial process.
   
   But Judge Haworth and the prosecutors said dealers were coming from
   miles to deliver the global smack market to its customers (one crook,
   who turned queen's evidence, claimed to be making pounds 1,000 a week)
   and concluded that Wyner must, somehow, have known what was going on.
   
   The judge was so keen to issue draconian punishments that he allegedly
   boasted at a soiree about the sentences he was preparing to hand down.
   In an affidavit which will be presented to the Court of Appeal, Karim
   Khalil, Wyner's barrister, said he was putting his wig on in the court
   robing room on the day his client was due to be sentenced when he was
   told Haworth, while tucking into his food at a dinner party, had told
   fellow diners that he was going to send the charity workers down.
   
   You might say it is already being said that Wyner and Brock have well
   placed and articulate defenders and the Court of Appeal will surely
   let them out of jail. I wouldn't necessarily be confident that the
   senior judiciary will slap down Haworth, a judge whose empathy with
   the prejudices of these hard times foretells rapid promotion.
   
   Even if they are released, much damage will have been done. Wyner, as
   you would expect, is holding up well in Holloway. In a prison letter
   to her friends, she says she is 'feeling a lot more cheerful'. After a
   'hellish journey' and a 'difficult couple of days', she overcame her
   problems with 'one of the screws' and had 'quickly developed my prison
   defences'.
   
   John Brock is another matter. He was a signwriter who gave up his
   reasonably steady job to work for the charity. He collapsed after his
   arrest. When the chaplain at Bedford jail phoned his wife before
   Christmas, her first thought was that he had killed himself.
   
   Sceptical journalists your correspondent included tend to mock the
   tough love of the Prime Minister and his tsars and tsarinas as mere
   posturing. It's a little too easy to forget that the wretched and the
   few who want to do something about their condition suffer for their
   babble.




Maintained by David J.C. MacKay
Last modified Thu Nov 8 18:41:22 GMT 2001