five hitting Waldorf. It was only when Waldorf was lying handcuffed on the ground and they got a better look that the policemen realised they had shot the wrong man. He was rushed to hospital. Fortunately, despite a fractured skull, damaged liver and severe blood loss, he survived.
David Martin was captured two weeks later after a chase on the London Underground. He received 25 years in prison. Finch and Jardine were subsequently charged with attempted murder.
The most damning evidence against Finch was that he had exceeded his orders. Ness had expected him to walk past the mini and casually glance in to identify Martin. He was under orders not to effect an arrest unless absolutely necessary, but the court heard that he was seen to draw his revolver even before he arrived at the car. Finch claimed he shouted: ‘Armed police!’ but witnesses said they had heard no such warning.
Jardine was also in a tough position. After Finch had shot Waldorf, the victim was lying half out the car with his head touching the pavement yet Jardine shot him again. Finch then hit him three times over the head with his pistol, fracturing Waldorf’s skull, before handcuffing him. That was when Finch noticed that the victim wasn’t Martin.
The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, QC, was prosecuting the case personally, the importance of the events having national repercussions regarding the police, whom, it seemed to the country, had appointed themselves judge, jury and – literally – executioner. He told the court: ‘It does not matter, in fact, whether it was Martin or Waldorf because there was no need, in the submission of the Crown, to take those actions at that stage – either to shoot him, as Jardine did when he was half in and half out of the car, or to fracture his skull with a revolver, as Finch did. Whether Finch was standing or crouching, in order to strike Waldorf hard at least twice, surely he must have been in a position to stop him getting a gun, even if he had a gun to go for. If you are pistol-whipping a man that closely, you must be in a position to restrain him.’
Havers claimed that, after the incident, Jardine had told investigating officers: ‘I intended to totally incapacitate him and the only way to do that with a gun was to kill him.’ In effect, Havers was telling the public that the police were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.
Waldorf told the court that when the shooting began he thought that it was between two other parties and he had just been caught in the cross-fire. Soon, ‘it became pretty apparent I was the target. I was trying to think if I had any enemies. The car windows came in and the bullets kept coming through.’
Finch said he had drawn his weapon in readiness because he was wearing a large jacket and didn’t want to be fumbling for his gun if he needed it. Misinterpreting a movement inside the car, he thought he was about to be shot. The judge told the jury to put themselves in the mind of the officers who truly believed it was Martin and that he might well be armed. They were, he instructed, entitled to shoot first in self-defence.
The two men were acquitted. An internal police inquiry stripped them of their right to carry firearms but they kept their jobs. The victim received £120,000 in compensation.
Waldorf said he wasn’t surprised by the verdict and added: ‘I don’t think I could actually ever forgive them, but I can’t blame them. It’s the system that’s at fault, not them. When you think that they fired 14 shots and only five hit me – and none of them killed me – that had to be luck. It was lucky for me the police were bad shots. At least I think it was luck. I don’t know whether we’re lucky or unlucky when the police are incompetent.’
In the wake of the incident and the resulting public outcry, the Home Office introduced much stricter rules about police use of guns, requiring an officer of Commander rank to sign off on their use, and officers issued with them had to carry a card reminding them that the weapons could only be used as a true last resort. But the public perception of the police was changed irrevocably.
AN OFF-HAND COMMENT – JEFFREY ARCHER SENDS HIMSELF TO PRISON, 1990
In 1990 Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP and semi-literate novelist, hosted a party. One of the guests was his old friend Ted Francis. But Francis was more than a friend: he and Archer had once gone into business together. In 1987 Archer had given Francis, a TV producer, £20,000 to make a film about the children’s author Enid Blyton. But there had been a tragic failure of communication – Archer had considered the money a loan, whereas Francis believed it was an investment and had never repaid it. So, at that fateful dinner party, according to Francis, ‘I was chatting to an actress when Jeffrey sidled up to us and said to her in a very loud voice, “You want to watch this man, you know. I lent him £20,000 once and I’m still waiting to get the money back.” She was dreadfully embarrassed and I was deeply hurt. He humiliated me in front of my peers in the industry and I didn’t understand why.’
It was a mind-bogglingly foolish thing for Archer to do, given that Francis was actually in a position to have Archer sent to prison. And Francis exercised this power, but, being a man who could bear a grudge until the time is right, he waited until 1999 to do so.
It all began in 1986 when Archer, a liar and bankrupt who had been cleared of insider trading, was a rising star in the Tory Party. One day, the Daily Star splashed across its front page the fact that he also liked whores. They had caught him paying off a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, with £2,000 and were in no mood to sit on the story.
Archer resigned from the position of Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and released a statement in which he claimed he had never met Coghlan but that she had phoned him out of the blue to say a newspaper was alleging he had had sex with her. ‘Foolishly, I allowed myself to fall into what I can only call a trap in which a newspaper has played a reprehensible part. In the belief that this woman genuinely wanted to be out of the way of the press and realising that for my part any publicity of this kind would be extremely harmful to me and for which a libel action would be no adequate remedy, I offered to pay her money so that she could go abroad for a short period. For that lack of judgement, and that alone, I have tendered my resignation,’ he explained.
The Star, not a newspaper to back off, then went one step further and alleged Archer and Coghlan had enjoyed a bit of rumpy-pumpy in a dodgy hotel, the Albion, on 9 September 1986.
After this outrage, Archer could take no more and sued for libel. Just before the trial, the newspaper realised it had made an error and amended the date of the romance to 8 September. It also fleshed out Coghlan’s character, pointing out that she specialised in kinky stuff.
During her evidence at the trial, Coghlan described the scene in the Albion: ‘Nothing much was said because it was over so quickly. He commented on my nipples. I had no difficulty seeing his face. I was lying on top of him the whole time.’
But Archer had an alibi for that night. He had, he claimed, had dinner at a restaurant with the editor of his books and his film agent, Terence Baker. And he had gone home after the time that Monica Coghlan claimed they were together.
The trial was notable for the lunacy of the judge, who famously informed the jury that they should trust Archer’s wife, Mary, because she had ‘fragrance’, before summing up Archer: ‘You may think his history is worthy and healthy and sporting. What is always a great attribute of the British is their admiration, besides their enjoyment, of good sports like cricket and athletics. And Jeffrey Archer was president of the Oxford University Athletics Club [Archer always claimed to have gone to Oxford, which was untrue: he had attended a teacher training college affiliated to the university] and ran for his country. Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel, round about a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning?’
The answer, of course, was ‘yes’.
Archer
