David Hirst - 5RB

With reference to your November 2011 Editorial on this long running Norwegian saga, I cannot get my head round the fact that the barrister David Hirst tried to argue - on no evidence whatsoever -  that a London solicitor is “clearly mentally unstable” for having a website that challenges large scale Norwegian bigotry.  Ironic that - in the light of the fascist Anders Breivik’s killing spree last summer in Norway. Of course, David Hirst was instructed by the Norwegian government and inexplicably adopted the unexplained view of a Norwegian police complaints investigator who decided that the contents of the website norwayuncovered.com, which exposed his country’s failings, could only be seen as the work of a madman.

Shame on David Hirst for betraying basic British principles of fair play.

The case against David Hirst wouldn’t be so damning if, as your editorial indicates, reasons were given by this Norwegian police complaints official as to precisely what it was on the website that made the solicitor mentally unstable. But no reasons were ever given - which in anyone’s book is a fundamental legal pre-requisite for advancing an allegation.

I have looked at the website in every aspect and there is nothing on there at all that indicates mental instability on the part of the website owner. Rather the opposite: the solicitor has carefully compiled an incredibly detailed exposé on Norway. Indeed, I see that he has support from Norwegians.

What makes David Hirst’s position even more unsustainable is that his client, a Norwegian policewoman, is on the record as saying that the London solicitor had spent two years in a mental hospital. Two years! An incredible lie when one acknowledges the incontrovertible evidence from the solicitor’s family doctor stating that he has never been a patient in a mental hospital.

Something really stinks here David Hirst. Call yourself a barrister? More a rent boy, I’d say, selling yourself for easy money.