He hadn't, of course, toed the party line - "but I don't think you should do that in local politics," he says wryly. He went to the High Court and won, and the local Tories were left with a pounds 5,000 bill. So the caucus of Conservative councillors tried to have him thrown out of the Tory Party Morris wasn't having any of that. John Morris's first interest as a Tory councillor was in public rights of way and land deals, for which he put himself through a crash course in planning and local government law. His first essay into the courts was against the council, on behalf of500 Clevedon citizens who were losing a public footpath. Thinking he was doing something for the public good, he took the matter to a judicial review in London and actually found he was in the wrong court: "I should have been in a county court." Still, he was proved right, and the council had to pay costs Little did he appreciate the consequences. The story of the Stantons and the Joneses shows that an unbending sense of private moral correctness, pursued in litigation, will lead to public ruin.

Between those poles of madness lies one of the jewels of our civilisation. The high fronds of litigiousness that hedge around English life may be among our less attractive features; but they also nobly soften our gaze against the ugly reality beyond. His death, just before Christmas 1990, cast a pall of mourning over the Inns of Court.The litigant careers of Maxwell and Hammer show that a bottomless supply of silver can comprehensively pervert the justice system. He has fought four separate litigations, one of which continues, and he has appeared in the Court of Appeal as a litigant in person.

A price for doing good John Morris, who is in his early seventies, is a local councillor and former sub-postmaster in Clevedon, Wiltshire. For 70 years, beginning in 1919, Hammer issued an almost unbroken stream of writs in the courts of America and London. He would call in his battalions of lawyers if any line were published about him that seemed to question his divinity. Even in the last months and weeks of his 92 years, when he was lost in senile dementia, Hammer was briefing silks in Britain, where he was going to sue the author and publishers of an anodyne biography in what was predicted to be the longest libel action ever heard.