Diary – 27 November 2004

Once a week I put on a suit and go along to the local courthouse, where I am elevated from plain Mister to Your Worship. This wonderfully inappropriate form of address is the only public reward for being one of the country’s 30,000 unpaid lay magistrates who deal with over 95 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales. We are also entitled to put the letters JP after our names, for Justice of the Peace. But this is discouraged by the Lord Chancellor, as Charlie Falconer still titles himself, lest we be thought to be putting on airs.

Sometimes magistrates must do things that stick in the throat a bit. Last week, for example, the bench I was on had to try a man for doing something I didn’t even know was illegal. He had stuck a For Sale notice in his parked car, as thousands do. I had always assumed this was a perfectly innocent practice.