Chapter 4: Apology, Trial, And Aftermath

One of the strangest things in this story is that I did, in a sense, receive an apology.

Corporate disputes are supposed to move in a line: complaint, denial, lawsuit, judgment, end. Mine never did. A chairman intervened. A settlement was reached. A trial loomed. An apology arrived. More than once it looked as though the matter might settle into some intelligible shape. More than once it slipped away again.

Sir John Jennings was central to several of those turnings. During the 1995 AGM in London, my father Alfred stood up on behalf of the Shell Corporate Conscience Pressure Group and put the point plainly. Shell, he said, had all the money in the world. Smaller businesses could not afford to fight it. There ought to be some fairer mechanism for resolving disputes. At the end of his question he asked whether Jennings would meet us afterwards. Jennings did meet us, and when we spoke he said, it takes two to tango. He could not have been kinder. He said that Shell people he had spoken to about me had all made favourable comments, and he even slapped my father on the back in a warm, friendly way. That small gesture has stayed with me because it made the whole encounter feel human rather than staged. To me, Jennings was the one person at Shell who seemed genuinely prepared to stand by the company's Statement of General Business Principles and act on it. For a time we felt we had found someone at the very top of Shell who was sympathetic, interested in the facts, and willing to help. When he intervened, he did so in a spectacular way. He promised to step in, and a few days later Dr Chris Fay's secretary telephoned inviting me to a meeting.

That intervention led to one of the strangest breakfast meetings of my life. I met Chris Fay privately at Shell Mex House in the Strand. The meeting lasted about an hour and three quarters. Breakfast was served by a uniformed butler, which did rather underline the difference in resources between Shell and me. Fay was a very different character from Jennings: less friendly, more bothered, and deeply frustrated, though not necessarily because of my dispute. This was the Brent Spar period and he seemed to pour his heart out about the pounding Shell had taken from Greenpeace. I kept trying to explain why our claim was valid. Fay, for his part, kept returning to precedent. He told me, in effect, that he could not even offer me GBP10, because if Shell made an offer to me it would strengthen the hand of others with grievances against the company. After an hour and three quarters he asked why I had not told him how much I wanted to settle the claim for. I replied that there was no point doing so if he had already said he would not offer even GBP10. I left that meeting with mixed feelings: sympathy for the man, disappointment in the position, and determination to keep going. He did at least walk me to the front door and thank me for coming.

Soon afterwards, on a bank-holiday morning when we were protesting outside Shell Mex House, Fay sent his secretary down asking whether my father and I would go up and meet him again. I had to buy Alfred a tie so he would look smarter. We went in. One other Shell figure present was David Pirret, Shell's retail manager, who had been the subject of many complaints reaching us from petrol-station operators. My father, who was usually calm, persuasive and beautifully controlled in such situations, said to him in embarrassment-inducing fashion that he did not seem nearly as evil as he had been described. It was completely out of character, and for that reason unforgettable. More importantly, Fay told us that he had been ordered by Jennings to make an offer: Shell would pay our past and future legal costs up to a court hearing. We had never heard of a giant corporation funding the legal costs of a company suing it. We accepted on the spot. The feeling afterwards was relief and disbelief.

That arrangement, the Funding Deed, should have changed everything. Instead it became another of those temporary islands in a much longer storm. I did bump into Jennings again at later AGMs, certainly once at the front door to the building and perhaps twice in all. He was friendly whenever I met him. On one of those occasions he again asked whether I wanted him to intervene, and I told him we seemed to be making some progress with Shell UK Limited and that I would come back to him if there were any problems. Soon afterwards he retired. That was a great pity for Shell and for us. I have long believed the whole history would have been different if he had not retired. As I understand it, once Jennings retired, Shell terminated the arrangement and pushed matters towards mediation instead. The mediation ran for hours into the evening. At some point, as I now recall it, Richard Wiseman asked whether it might help me feel better if there were also a letter of apology. I thought such a letter could be useful, not only to me but to doubting relatives who had begun to wonder whether taking on Shell for so long was brave or merely foolish, and who were understandably troubled by the threats and sinister episodes that had accumulated around the case. Eventually, I am told, Fay had to be pulled away from a dance floor somewhere in London to approve the eventual GBP200,000 settlement.

The apology letter from Chris Fay was one of those strange milestones. It was not a clerk's note, a lawyer's formula, or some grudging procedural concession. It was an apology from the chairman and chief executive of Shell U.K., dated 21 October 1996. In it Fay wrote that some of Shell's dealings with Don Marketing appeared not to have met the high standards Shell set itself and that our long relationship had led us to expect. He also reflected that had this aspect been focused on more than the strict legal issues, the differences might have been resolved more quickly. I have never forgotten that, and I do not intend to pretend otherwise for the convenience of a cleaner narrative. If one is going to accuse a company of behaving badly over many years, one must also be fair about the moments when someone senior behaved better than the rest.

But apology is not resolution. It may recognise injury without repairing it. In my case it sat beside continuing dispute, later arguments that the slate had been wiped clean, and a clear determination within Shell's legal machine to keep resisting.

That is why I have never accepted the suggestion that the matter was all put right long ago. A thing genuinely resolved does not keep returning under fresh names. If it had been put right, there would have been no new claim arising from the March 1997 promotion, no further argument over what remained morally open, and no looming Smart trial.

By the time the Smart trial approached in June 1999, the dispute had already become much larger than the specific moment that first gave rise to it. It was now about conduct, confidence, attrition, and the ability of a major corporation to insist that matters were closed while I was still living inside their consequences. We had already spent years in and around legal proceedings. We had sold property to keep going. We had gone through the exhausting cycle by which each apparent advance seemed to produce a fresh obstacle rather than an end. By February 1999 I was publicly writing that the claim was set down for a three-week High Court trial in June and inviting Marketing Week to attend if it wanted to judge Shell by deeds rather than words. By then the case had acquired the full solemn apparatus of serious litigation: witness statements, document reviews, trial bundles, and all the paper weight by which a quarrel becomes part of the machinery of the High Court.

The approach of trial sharpens everything. It sharpens fear because the abstractions of litigation suddenly become dates, rooms, names, bundles, witnesses and consequences. It sharpens resolve because after years of preparation, compromise and argument, one begins to feel that at least the matter may now be tested under some public discipline. It also sharpens inequality, because a trial is not merely a moral contest. It is a resource contest, a stamina contest, and a psychological contest. A large company arrives with infrastructure. A smaller party arrives with nerves. I did not even have enough money to stay in London for the duration of the trial. My solicitor, Richard Woodman of Royds Treadwell, kindly arranged for me to use his parents' flat while they were away on holiday. I stayed there throughout and walked to court each morning. What I remember most about those walks is determination.

I remember, too, the pressure around legal aid and the judicial review we had hoped to pursue after the withdrawal of that aid. Even now, the sequence carries a particular bitterness. When your funds are exhausted and you seek the assistance meant to keep justice from becoming the monopoly of the wealthy, you discover how fragile even that route can be. Then the Smart case comes on in the High Court before the judicial review can be heard, and yet again the timetable of the larger struggle seems arranged for someone else's convenience. One does not forget such things. They alter your understanding of the word "process."

On the first day at the Royal Courts of Justice, I arrived alone and was surprised to find a newspaper journalist and cameraman waiting at the entrance. I had no warning they would be there. I think the paper was the East Anglian Daily Times, though that needs checking. The next day, as I remember it, there was a photograph of me entering the building. Inside, I met Richard Woodman and my barristers, Geoffrey Cox and Lindsay Lane. I also remember confusion over when the legal representative for Don Marketing, a young man called Nick Gill, was going to arrive. I was almost certainly carrying a briefcase full of papers. The feelings I remember most clearly at the entrance itself are confusion and nervousness. At the end of each day, walking back to the flat, I was still in fighting mode.

Even amid all that strain, there were odd flashes of humanity. Before the trial we had distributed simple coloured leaflets outside Shell buildings in London, dense with text, usually heavy on accusation and short on glamour. Most people avoided them and walked out of their way rather than take one. A few were curious. Shell security watched but, in our experience, were never a problem; Richard Wiseman later wrote to say the people handing out the leaflets had never been any bother. But once the court case was under way, we stopped the leafleting and protest activity and even put a notice on the website saying so. One of those earlier pink leaflets prompted one of the strangest and most touching episodes of all. Judy Moody-Stuart, wife of Shell's group managing director, wrote to my father after reading it. It was not, prudentially speaking, a wise thing for her to do, but I have always seen it as a genuine act of concern for her husband. Alfred replied in the same spirit, explaining the pressure we were under and the family circumstances in which we were living. A couple of days before the trial, she sent a brief handwritten postcard wishing us luck. That postcard was very touching.

The most dramatic courtroom moment came later, at the climax of my cross-examination by Geoffrey Hobbs QC, which as I remember it stretched over three days. Hobbs put it to me that I had forged correspondence between myself and Sainsbury's about a game proposal I had put to Shell. My immediate feeling was disbelief. I denied it at once. Then I heard whispering between Hobbs and Shell's lawyers. The judge said he could hear what was being said and was intrigued. I could make out enough to understand the gist: a motorbike messenger was supposedly on the way to court with documents that would prove my guilt. The judge adjourned for lunch to give this melodramatic evidence time to arrive. Nothing arrived. The next morning, instead, I travelled back to Bury St Edmunds with a court team while they searched the house thoroughly. They found nothing. It was a dreadful episode, not least because I then had to try to explain to my mother, already suffering from dementia, what on earth was happening in her home. She died within months of the trial's end.

The scientific evidence did not bear out some simple story of forgery. In her report of 28 June 1999, prepared for Royds Treadwell, the forensic document examiner Dr Audrey Giles said the questioned 24 July 1990 letters were consistent with correspondence produced at Don Marketing in July 1990. She also made the limits of her report clear. She had seen photocopies, not originals, and did not exclude the possibility of later manufacture if the right materials were available. Even so, her report makes plain that later manufacture would have required the appropriate 1990 style and materials. That is a long way from saying the letters had been proved fraudulent. They had not.

One short transcript extract now in the papers catches something of the atmosphere at the end. In it, amid disorder over witnesses and surrounding events, Mr Justice Laddie says to Hobbs: It may come as a surprise to you, but I am not running this case. That is very apparent. I do not need to improve on that line. It speaks for itself. Whatever else one says about the trial, it was not proceeding in a calm or tidy way by then.

Soon after that, DJ Freeman put forward what really did amount to a peace treaty. We now have both the draft language from 25 June 1999 and the executed 5 July 1999 deed. The draft was presented as a way of promoting peace, drawing a line under the disputes, and achieving a clean break with the past. The final package was tougher than that soothing language suggests. It included a complete propriety clause, a reference to future conduct framed through the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, and a final press statement much less balanced than the earlier draft. All this happened in the closing phase of the trial, at what I remember as the climax of the cross-examination of AJL. My solicitor negotiated a settlement under which Shell paid my legal fees and I received a sum that was useful, but far lower than I might have held out for in happier circumstances. By then I feared the judge was against me. My own legal team thought I was wrong and expected him to find in my favour. I did not share their confidence. If I lost, I feared Shell could bankrupt me and force the sale of the house while my mother was still alive. So I accepted the situation as it was, not as I might have wished it to be.

What deepened my bitterness was what I learned later about the way the settlement was presented to the judge. In a 17 June 2008 email, Richard Wiseman referred to Shell's payment of my legal expenses as the information which did not go to the judge. I can say this plainly: I was the sole person bringing the action, and I certainly did not instruct Richard Woodman to hold back any settlement information from the judge or agree to such a course. That does not prove exactly who gave the instruction, but it narrows the field sharply. We also now know that the final deed required the parties to stop representing that anyone involved had acted with anything other than complete propriety in relation to the disputed matters. The final press release said I had abandoned the Smart and libel claims, acknowledged they were without foundation and should not have been brought, and withdrew my allegations of impropriety. Shell, for its part, acknowledged that the proceedings had been brought in good faith and withdrew allegations of impropriety made in the course of them. The settlement package also included a separate deed between Shell, my solicitors Royds Treadwell, and me, under which Shell agreed to pay GBP107,000 in reduced fees, with confidentiality obligations and the charge over Maplebank still hanging over the arrangement. That separate deed now looks to me like a serious candidate for the settlement-related document later said to have been withheld from the judge. My own view is that, if it was not withheld on my instructions, the obvious inference is that the withholding came from Shell's side or the lawyers acting for Shell. For the purposes of this book, though, I must still present that as an inference unless a document says so directly.

Yet the judge still insisted on making what were called judge's comments at the end of the trial. We now have a surviving typed copy dated Tuesday 6 July 1999, and even the recoverable text is enough to show the seriousness of what was being alleged: perjury, forgery, and conspiracy / pervert justice all appear in it. That does not settle every detail of the sequence, and I would still like a cleaner transcript copy. But it does confirm that my memory of the comments as grave and explosive was no embellishment. In those comments, as I later read them, the judge praised AJL and accused me of very serious misconduct. Geoffrey Cox responded furiously in open court. Shell, by my recollection, kept largely out of the clash and said hardly a word. I knew nothing of any of this at the time because my lawyers thought it best not to tell me. Only later did I grasp how heated it had become. It felt less like justice than like a club of professionals quarrelling over terms to which I was not fully admitted.

That is why I did not come away from the Smart trial feeling that I had survived some stern but honourable process. I came away feeling I had been cheated out of justice. The settlement did pay the lawyers, which mattered because I had given them a charge over the house and they must have been relieved. But the money was not enough to save us as I had hoped. It kept me afloat for a while, no more. The house went. My mother died while it was on the market. It had been her favourite house, and the last one she would live in. We moved into rented accommodation in Colchester. I carried with me not triumph, and not even simple relief, but a mixture of relief, frustration, exhaustion and disappointment, with one conclusion above all: the matter was not truly over.

What I had wanted from the Smart trial was not only vindication. I wanted the matter to stop mutating. I wanted to endure the thing and at least know the shape of the battlefield. Instead I learned what so many long corporate disputes teach the weaker party: a major event can be absorbed into a larger pattern of non-closure.

That is the peculiar exhaustion of it. A trial that ought to settle matters becomes another episode. An apology that ought to repair matters becomes one more exhibit in the argument. A settlement that ought to close the file becomes the basis for a later claim that everything had already been wiped clean. Those moments mattered enormously because they altered real finances, real family decisions and real lives. But with hindsight they also reveal something darker: a big company does not always have to win cleanly. Often it only has to prevent a smaller opponent from ever reaching a truly finished state.

That, to my mind, is what makes the story so morally corrosive. If Shell had simply said no at the beginning and remained brutally consistent, the terms of battle would at least have been clear. Instead there were gestures, interventions, partial recognitions, denials, settlements, further disputes, and the endless suggestion that the matter had somehow already been dealt with. It is hard to build peace on top of that kind of instability. It is hard to be told both that one has been wronged and that one has no remaining moral ground on which to stand.

There were people within Shell who behaved more decently than others. I have said so already and I will say it again. Sir John Jennings, in particular, seems to me to have acted more fairly than many others did. I say that because this book ought to be truthful, not merely angry. But it is equally truthful to say that the company as a whole never translated those better moments into a final, durable act of repair.

That failure is one of the reasons the dispute escaped its original bounds. If the apology, the settlements and the trial period had led to a genuine end, there might never have been the websites in the form they later took, never mind the leaks, the archive, the later campaigns and the bot wars. The afterlife of the dispute was not an accident. It was created by the absence of convincing closure.

I sometimes think this is the point at which my life divided into two versions. In one version, the apology is followed by proper redress, sensible conclusion and an eventual return to ordinary ambition. In the other, which is the version I actually lived, apology becomes one more document in a much larger archive, and the archive becomes a second life.

The tragedy of that second life is that it contained real energy, real skill and even, at times, real public value. It exposed things. It helped others. It embarrassed a powerful company. But it was not the life I had intended to build. That is why I resist any romantic reading of my persistence. Persistence can be admirable. It can also be the shape imposed on a man when institutions will not do the obvious thing and bring a wrong to an honest end.

By the close of the 1990s, I had learned a bitter lesson: even when a large company appears to concede something, apologise for something, or engage with something, that does not mean it has accepted the deeper obligation to put matters right. It may only mean the story has entered a new phase.

The next phase, for me, was the long shadow world of surveillance, leaks, inside information and public record: the stage at which the dispute stopped being just a legal fight and became an archive.