Donald Trump 'courtroom drama' and judge's Botley Road anger

The indictment of Donald Trump in New York last week on 34 counts of falsifying business records, relating to ‘hush money’ allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, was a reminder of two things.

First, no one is above the law. Second, there’s a reason why the phrase ‘courtroom drama’ exists.

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I’ve only covered one ‘political’ case in my career: the prosecution of a former Conservative Party police and crime commissioner candidate for allegedly lying on his nomination forms.

He had in fact won the election in Wiltshire in 2021, before it was noticed that he had a conviction for drink driving in the early 1990s – disqualifying him from the role.

The election had to be re-run at the cost of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds.

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The CPS eventually dropped the case against him.

I had rather been looking forward to the trial; we’d have found out a lot about how political parties’ internal election structures work.

As it was, I learned an important lesson: if you’re interviewing a police and crime commissioner candidate remember to ask whether or not they’ve got criminal convictions.

Botley Road

It’s easy to forget that judges are people who exist outside a courtroom.

They too have to commute to work, pay their television licences and wrestle with the frustration of pencil leads that break as soon as you’ve sharpened them.

READ MORE: Botley Road closure in Oxford - What drivers need to know

Luckily for jurors at Oxford Crown Court, they got a reminder that judges do not live in the court building and exist outside work.

Judge Gledhill’s frustrations with the city’s traffic is long-standing.

And with the long-planned closure of the Botley Road under the railway line this week, he told the court of his concern that Oxford’s road network would be plunged into ‘chaos’.

(I pause here to share the thoughts of a former colleague of mine.

On the newspaper where I then worked, whenever someone suggested that traffic gridlock had left the roads in ‘chaos’ the politics reporter would shout in his wonderful Welsh brogue ‘STASIS, IT’S B****Y STASIS. NOT CHAOS. NO ONE'S MOVING.’).

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But on Tuesday he acknowledged that the feared-for chaos (‘B****Y STASIS’) had failed to materialise.

He told the jury that he’d deliberately driven into Oxford via the north.

“The last time I saw it so clear was on Sunday morning at six o’clock. I don’t know why; schools aren’t there at the moment, are they?” he said.

Any pessimists on the jury need not have worried, however.

Judge Gledhill lifted his eyebrows in the direction of his wig line and noted in an aside that he’d heard about significant tailbacks on the A420.