Barrister delivers annoying speech. Rival barrister rolls his eyes, turns to his junior and conspiratorially makes the international hand gesture for ‘wanker’. Other lawyers spot gesture and, outraged, complain to the judge. The sort of implausible scene that you might get in BBC drama Silk, but never in real life, right?
Wrong. According to The Independent’s diary column, this actually happened the other day at the Leveson Inquiry, with 11 South Square’s Michael Silverleaf QC playing the role of obscene gesture-maker.
With all those journalists present, I wonder why this juicy little story didn’t make it into any other papers.