Glanville v Mahmoud

I have been engaged this week in a Fact Finding Hearing in relation to Adam Glanville, who was born on 27 July 2017. He is therefore at the moment 6½, going on seven years old. His mother isKarima Gadelrab Elsayed Mahmoud, and the father is Daniel Glanville. The parents cohabited for a short period of time, and they separated, and they managed to resolve the financial matters in relation to Adam by way of an agreed schedule 1 order.

Poor Adam has been the subject of litigation for a very great deal of his short life. The first application that was made in these proceedings was in January 2020. At that time, Adam was only 2½ years old. It is shocking that this little boy has been the subject of a war between his parents, and I have been able to form a very clear view during the course of the hearing this week whose fault that is. Rarely do I in children’s proceedings find that I can blame just one of the parents almost entirely for what has happened.

The matter was listed before me this week for three days for a Fact Find Hearing in relation to a Scott Schedule of allegations that occupied 22 pages. When I looked at this case last week, I immediately asked my clerk to send a message to Counsel, saying that it was completely impossible for any judge to deal with 22 pages of allegations, and to navigate their way through a bundle of 1,619 pages in the three days allowed. My reading time over the weekend before this case was about three hours. We started more or less on time on Monday morning, although Counsel had asked for extra time which of course I was willing to give them.

We had the additional difficulty, this is not in any way of course a compliant, it is just a fact that the mother was to give her evidence through an interpreter, and that of course always takes longer. In fact, it is obvious that the mother speaks really fairly good English. I completely accept though that it was appropriate and necessary for her to have an interpreter because English is not her first language. Her first language is Arabic, and it has only been fair to her that she had the opportunity of giving evidence in her own language and having that translated for her.

I want to pay tribute to the interpreter that we have had in court this week. In my experience, and doubtless that of others, the quality of interpreters that we have in this court varies. I have rarely had one as good as I have had in this case this week, and in difficult circumstances because the mother’s answers tend to be agitated and rambling.

When I debated the matter with Counsel, that is Ms Pink acting for the mother, Ms Papazian acting for the father, and Ms Musgrave acting for the Guardian, Gill Timmis, they all recognised of course that it was not possible for me to deal with the 22 pages of allegations. I had expected when Counsel first came into Court on Monday that probably we were going to have to find ourselves adjourning this case. I have said very often in this Court, and it is obvious that delay is almost always the enemy of justice, particularly in children’s cases.

An adjournment on Monday would have been for many, many months because of the pressure on the judges of this Division at the moment, but the matter was transferred from the Family Court at West London by me, or rather in conjunction with discussion with me as the Family Presider for London because of the international aspects of the case and the very serious allegations which were, among others, threats to kill allegedly by the father to the mother, and of child abduction, allegedly by the mother to various countries. This is obviously a case that was appropriate to be heard by a judge of the Division, and I am going to order that the matter shall continue to be heard by a judge of the Division, reserved to me if available.

Although I plan to retire from full time sitting as a High Court judge of the Family Division at Easter, the President of the Division has agreed that I can return to hear this case, and in fact it seems to me at the moment that the case after this Judgment today is going to be adjourned part heard by me because there are further facts that we may need to deal with, and there will of course be a welfare hearing in this case as well.

It seemed to me that the appropriate thing to do was to look at the serious allegations. The serious allegations were obviously the ones to which I have referred, that is child abduction and threats to kill. I took the view that if at any point it became clear to me that it was not possible properly to deal with those issues in isolation of the many, many other issues in this case, that I would adjourn it. I also made it very clear to Counsel that if any of them thought that the process was going to be unfair for reasons I have just identified, that they would make submissions to me, and I would listen very carefully to whatever it was that they had to say.

No such application was made, and I am completely satisfied that the process this week has been fair, no one has suggested that it has not been, and that I have been able to come to a very clear view on the issues of alleged child abduction and alleged threats to kill.

I heard the evidence of the mother. At times her evidence was given in English, but I encouraged her to use her first language which is Arabic, because I wanted to be sure that I had an exact answer from her, and that there was no complaint from her that there had been some sort of misunderstanding. It is of course obvious that most parents giving evidence in the High Court about their children are going to be anxious. In my judgement, the mother was a lot more than just anxious. She was agitated, she was at terms thoroughly belligerent, and I am afraid I have to say that she was most of the time thoroughly dishonest.

I have taken the view that I cannot believe anything that the mother has told me unless it is supported by independent evidence, that is independently corroborated but the best evidence of course is likely to be contemporaneous written evidence. The father gave evidence. I found him at all times to be courteous, calm, respectful, and I have to say, transparently honest. It is obvious to me that the father has experienced immense pressure from the behaviour of Adam’s mother.

The mother has been, even during the process this week, objectionable, belligerent, and at some times downright abusive. She appears to have little respect for the process, and at one point as I shall turn to later, even said quite clearly in an email that she was going to ignore an order of Williams J given earlier in this case, and that she could secure fake documents to enable her to travel out of the country with Adam within minutes, or was it within hours, but certainly within either minutes or hours, and to have a litigant in this Court being rude and objectionable about an order of a High Court judge is something that I, and I suspect all of my fellow judges of this Division, simply will not tolerate.

I have reminded myself of the words of Leggatt J in a case called Gestmin SGPS SA v Credit Suisse (UK) Ltd [2013] EWHC 3560. At paragraph 18, Leggatt J as he then was said this:

“Memory is especially unreliable when it comes to recalling past beliefs. Our memories of past beliefs are revised to make them more consistent with our present beliefs. Studies have also shown that memory is particularly vulnerable to interference and alteration when a person is presented with new information or suggestions about an event in circumstances where his or her memory of it is already weak due to the passage of time.”

The judge then went on to say at paragraph 22:

“In the light of these considerations, the best approach for a judge to adopt in the trial of a commercial case [and of course that was what that was concerned with, but I suggest that exactly the same should apply in a fact find such as the one I am engaged in] is in my view to place little if any reliance at all on witnesses’ recollection of what was said in meetings and conversations, and to base factual findings on inferences drawn from the documentary evidence and known or probable facts.

This does not mean that a raw testimony serves no useful purpose, though its utility is often disproportionate to its length, but its value lies largely as I see it in the opportunity which cross-examination affords to subject the documentary record to critical scrutiny and to gauge the personality, motivations, and working practice of a witness, rather than in testimony of what the witness recalls of particular conversations and events. Above all, it is important to avoid the fallacy of supposing that because a witness has confidence in his or her recollection and is honest, evidence based on that recollection provides any reliable guide to the truth.”

I take very careful note of the words of that judge, of course now a judge of the Supreme Court.

The proceedings started, as I have said, by the mother applying ex parte for a Non Molestation Order. The parties at a later point agreed that they were not going to resurrect allegations of argument, violence and abuse one to the other, and this order related to matters that predate that agreement of theirs. I plainly make no findings at all on the allegations of abuse that the mother then made against the father, simply because I have not heard evidence about it, it has not been relevant to what I am dealing with today, and in any event, the parties as I have said agreed to put all of that behind them.

In any event, the matter came before the Court again on 20 January 2022. That was an order made by Deputy District Judge Edwards sitting in private at the Family Court in West London. The parties were both represented by Counsel, and Adam then represented as he now is by NYAS, was then represented by Counsel, albeit a different Counsel from Counsel that appears today. The order makes clear that the mother had raised concerns regarding the Guardian, Mr Adedeji, and sought his removal from the proceedings and for a new report to be commissioned.

This was the first of a long line of applications and attempts by the mother to get rid of anything in the case that she did not like or agree with. She has complained about NYAS workers, about district judges, about judges, and about solicitors. None of her complaints have, as far as I am aware, been upheld.

The Court made it clear in paragraph of its order on that date that an earlier order, 8 April 2020, had not been varied. The order of 8 April included these words:

“It is a criminal offence to take a child out of the United Kingdom without the consent of everybody with parental responsibility unless

the Court has given permission.”

I am surprised to see the words “United Kingdom” in that order, and I would respectfully suggest that advocates dealing with these cases think very carefully about what that means. It seems to me to be beyond doubt that United Kingdom means the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Normally in these orders, one expects to see reference to England and Wales. The reason for that is obvious, because first of all Scotland, albeit being part of Great Britain and part of the United Kingdom, has a different legal system.

Northern Ireland, although it shares the legal system of England and Wales, has a border which is effectively open between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and I would respectfully suggest to all the lawyers here that they need to be very careful in other cases and indeed in this case to ensure that the correct words are used. I am not blaming anybody for that, but this order then continues by saying while a Child Arrangements Order is in force in relation to a child, nobody may remove the child from the United Kingdom. I have no doubt that the intention here was to order that the mother should not remove the child from the jurisdiction of England and Wales.

Again, I do not normally see those words in orders, it normally says from England and Wales, and indeed I am going to speak with the Designated Family Judge for the West London Family Court to ask her to ensure that her court staff use the correct phraseology. As I say, I am not blaming anybody, least of all the DFJ for the West London Court who probably does not know anything at all about this case anyway because she has not been involved with it.

There is then an order at paragraph 23 that:

“Neither party shall remove Adam from the United Kingdom without the express written consent of the other, or order of the Court.”

There is then another problem it seems to me with this order. The standard rubric in these orders, unless there is an injunction against removal, says this:

“However this does not prevent the removal of the child for a period of less than one month by a person named in the Child Arrangements Order as a person with whom the child should live.”

And then it refers to the relevant sections of the Children Act.

In my judgement, it is manifestly absurd to have that rubric at the bottom of an order which contains an injunction preventing the removal of the child from the United Kingdom, and again, and I blame nobody who is involved in this case now because they were not there, but it does seem to me that in every case Counsel ought to ensure, or the solicitors ought to ensure that that rubric which is standard in many orders does not appear on the bottom of an order containing an injunction to prevent the removal of the child from the country, because the same order says a) you cannot do it, and b) you can do it, and I have some sympathy with the mother when she says that she was a bit confused about that.

I will return to that later, but what is made clear in the order of 20 October is that it was confirmed that these paragraphs that I have just referred to of this April order remained in force. The mother tried to appeal the order of 20 October 2022. Eight days later, she left the United Kingdom for Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Given her keen determination to appeal the order of 20 October, I am not in any doubt at all that the mother knew perfectly well when she took Adam on a plane out of the United Kingdom that she was breaking this order and she did so with every intention of breaking it.

The mother tells me that she intended to go to Egypt but that there were difficulties with the airport in Cairo, and that she flew instead to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. I have briefly looked online to see if there is information about this. There are some things from YouTube about it, but I am not going to rely, it seems to me it would be wrong for a judge in a case like this simply to do a quick search, find something on YouTube, and I am prepared to accept the mother’s evidence on the balance of probabilities, that the plane could not go to Cairo and went instead to Saudi Arabia. I really do not think actually for the purposes of the hearing in front of me today it makes any difference at all.

What is clear from the mother’s own evidence and from the evidence of her passport, is that on 13 November, that is three days after she arrived in Saudi, the mother went to Oman, and she stayed there for six weeks. Even on her own best case which is that she was confused by the order which said she could go out of the country for four weeks, she broke that anyway. She apparently went to stay with her parents who have a place in Oman.

I am bound to say as a footnote that the mother’s capacity for travel to expensive destinations such as Oman and Paris is somewhat inconsistent with her being entitled to legal aid. These are private law proceedings and I anticipate that the mother’s legal aid certificate is referenced or is available because of her complaints of domestic abuse and/or violence. As a judge of this Division I am one of the very first people to support the grant of legal aid to people who have been abused in that way, but it seems to me that following the judgment which I am giving today, I would invite the mother’s solicitors to reflect very carefully on whether the mother’s legal aid certificate should continue going forwards.

The father does not have legal aid and is paying his own costs of these proceedings. If I had my way, legal aid would be available to everybody in these sorts of cases, but I do not make those rules. It does seem to me at the moment on what I have seen that it is extremely unfair that the father is paying his own costs and the mother is not, when so far as I am concerned at the moment, most of the allegations that the mother has made seem to me to be without foundation, but as I have said, I have not made any judgment or heard any evidence about the early domestic violence and domestic abuse allegations that the mother makes.

On 14 November, the mother wrote to the father in these terms.

“14 November 2022. Daniel Glanville. Over the last three years you’ve given dozens of thousands of pounds to your phoney and liar lawyer Catherine Silwal to lie and forge official documents to discredit me by lying in Court to deceive and mislead the judge to get what you want, and finally bribe the caseworker to change and misrepresent all the information that the professionals shared with him to get a Arrangement Order that suits you only, and the accidents and dangers that occurred to Adam under your care were overlooked.

Because I did not find justice or protection for me and my son in light of what your immoral lawyer and bribery caseworker did, I have decided my son and I return to our home country until this case is over and the final court order is issued. Because Adam and I hold Egyptian citizenship, the Egyptian Family Court will be competent to hear cases of contact between you and Adam. Just so you know that the Egyptian Family Court will not recognise or approve any court order by the British Family Court, and will issue separate and different orders based on the applicable Egyptian family laws. This decision I was [sic] should have made years ago when you and your parents started violence of all kinds against me.”

And it continued with similar abusive language. In the course of this letter, the mother achieved the following. She accused a lawyer called Catherine Silwal of lying, of forgery, and of deliberately misleading the Court. That is an extremely serious allegation to make against a solicitor of the Supreme Court, and I invite the mother within the next seven days either to make good that allegation or to withdraw it and apologise. I am not compelling her to do that, but I am inviting her to do that.

I am not prepared to have officers of this Court abused and described in that way by litigants, unless of course it is true, in which case bring a case and prove it, but I am very clear that I assume that all of this is untrue until it is proved. Then there is a suggestion that the father has bribed the caseworker, by which that means the NYAS caseworker, and so now an allegation is being made by definition that a NYAS caseworker accepted a bribe, which is an offence of course under the Bribery Act and probably other statutes as well.

Then in the third paragraph the mother advertises the fact that she is breaking the orders of this Court by taking her son to live in Egypt until this case is over. This father must have been beside himself at the thought that Egypt, and I am very careful not ever to discredit any other legal system, but it is reasonable for me I think to say that Egypt has been a country with a troubled history recently. It is a country with very different laws from our own, and a country from which my experience, and I know the experience of the advocates in this Court, is a very difficult country from which to secure the return of children, and the father must have been beside himself at the thought of the fact that his young son was now to be detained by the mother in Egypt.

It was, I find, a completely disgraceful for the mother to have sent. I make allowances in this Court all of the time for people who are troubled, who are anxious about their children, and I recognise that some of the time people say things that they do not really mean. It is clear to me that the mother meant every single word of this, because this

Recently, giving a public judgment in this Court, I described child abduction as a scourge on the children who are subject to it. It is abuse of a cruel kind to abduct a child away from its home to a country which is unfamiliar both in language and custom, and to remove that child from the other parent. It is a disgrace, again.

The mother and Adam in fact came back to the United Kingdom on 26 December 2022, that is Boxing Day. I suspect that the father might have felt that he would quite like to have seen his son at least at some point over the Christmas period, but the mother, it seems to me, gave no thought for the father’s situation at all, but it is actually Adam that I am concerned with here. She gave no thought to his wellbeing when she did what she did.

It was in this context that the mother gave a statement that the father had threatened to kill her. I agreed that I would hear evidence in this Court about such threats, partly because of course they are so serious. A threat to kill is an extremely serious criminal offence which if somebody was convicted, would go to prison for a substantial number of years. I agreed that I would hear evidence about that also because it was part of the mother’s defence, I had to take Adam away from this country because of the abuse that he would be subjected to by his father, and the abuse that I would be subjected to by his father, she will say.

I reject completely the allegation that the father has ever threatened to kill the mother. I have seen no evidence to support it at all, and I am not prepared to accept a single word that the mother says unless it is independently corroborated. The mother, in an email to the father dated 10 September 2023, alleged a number of further serious things against the father. She made allegations about a partner that she says the father has, I have not had to deal with any of the evidence in relation to the partner, and that is not anything that I am concerned with today.

The mother said such things as:

“Be stingy with your son and do not buy him any toys, do not buy him a birthday gift or even send him something for Christmas.”

How dare she say that when she had abducted him to Egypt where he spent his Christmas without the consent of the father. She then accused him of having secret communication with professionals working with Adam.

The point that offends me as far as that is concerned is not the allegation against the father but the implied acceptance that the professionals were prepared to engage in secret communications with the father. If anybody from NYAS or other children’s organisations such as Cafcass did that, I should think they would be summarily dismissed from their post, and so they should be, and I reject out of hand any suggestion that anyone from NYAS has engaged in any inappropriate conduct or inappropriate correspondence or discussions with the father.

The mother continues in this abusive email with allegations of bribery and corruption.

She also that day purchased tickets to take Adam to Paris, apparently to stay in a hotel for three nights I think she said. Again, where did the money come from? She says she was given money by her family to pay for these things. I have to accept that that is true, but again I make the point that she is very happy to rely on legal aid and also happy to spend money on going to Saudi Arabia, Oman and Paris.

Catherine Silwal, the solicitor acting for the father, to whom I have already made reference, engaged in correspondence with the High Court tipstaff. The High Court tipstaff, in their very efficient way, were able to assist in the recovery of Adam. There is an email from Catherine Silwal to Michelle Sharp of the High Court tipstaff team which reads as follows:

“The police had asked her not to attend at the airport, [her of course being the mother] but then you said on the telephone that she had done so and had been turned away by the people on the desk (which they were told to do by the airport police). You mentioned that the tipstaff had not been involved and so the passport seizure had to be done later, when I think your colleagues must have attended at Ms Mahmoud’s home, later in the night of the 11^th.”

and so the trip to Paris was apprehended.

The mother sent an email in typically abusive terms so far as she is concerned on 24 November 2023, where she wrote to Ms Silwal and to the father suggesting that they had both deliberately provided Williams J with misleading information. There is absolutely no substance at all in what she said, but here she is again accusing an officer of the High Court, Ms Silwal, of deliberately misleading a judge of the Family Division.

If I thought that a solicitor was deliberately misleading me I would certainly be reporting that solicitor to the office that investigates the conduct of solicitors, and I dismiss out of hand any suggestion at all that Ms Silwal did anything wrong or in any way mislead this Court, and I very much hope that my Judgment in relation to that will be conveyed to her almost as soon as this hearing is over.

Ms Silwal and court tipstaff worked hard to prevent Adam being taken out of this country to Paris, and I would also ask the mother to reflect on the cost to the taxpayer of that kind of event; court tipstaff and solicitors working at public expense at 6 o’clock in the morning to prevent a child being abducted out of this country to another.

The mother, in this email, also accused the father of endless lies and endless false information for the purpose of deliberately misleading the judge. I see nothing at all to support the suggestion by the mother that the father has deliberately misled any judge in these proceedings. On 11 September, of course that is the same day as the Paris situation, Adam was made a ward of Court, and forbidden from leaving England and Wales, and the passports of Adam and the mother were removed. As I have said, the tipstaff managed to prevent Adam from boarding the plane on 11 September.

The mother sent a text to the father on 12 September 2023, which started:

“Since last month I have been aware that you’re planning something evil against me, and this is why I told you that there is no need for all

of this and I would agree to anything you want.”

The text continued by referring to the father’s evil lawyer, and it asks the father to:

“Let your son live in peace with his mother. I am very worried that what you are doing will result in Adam being taken from both of us. Please stop that immediately, and I will do what you want.”

Of course, what was in fact happening here, was that the mother was accusing the father of conduct for which she was herself responsible, and I have seen nothing to suggest that Father has done anything inappropriate or wrong so far as Adam’s care is concerned. As a slight tangent to that, the mother has made very serious allegations about the father’s failure to look after Adam properly, nearly caused him to be hurt in a road accident, and yet the mother at the same time was agreeable to the father having Adam to stay with him for a day or two every now and again, and if the father is incompetent to look after Adam even when it comes to traffic, then of course he should not have him at all.

I do not know whether an incident happened or not, but terrible accidents can happen, and I see nothing to support the suggestion that the father had done anything wrong. On 14 September, Williams J’s order contained these words, paragraph 5:

“The Court was satisfied on a provisional basis on the basis of the evidence filed, and after an extempore judgment that:

a)

The mother had wrongfully removed Adam on 10 November 2022, thereafter retained him in Egypt until his return on 26 December 2023. That removal was also in breach of a Prohibited Steps Order, of a Child Arrangements Order made with the consent of both parents on 8 April 2020.”

The judge then made an order in these terms at paragraph 8:

“The mother must not remove or cause the removal of the child from England and Wales, and must not remove or cause the removal of the child from his current address or from the child’s current school at the Vineyard, [etc]. A penal notice is attached to this part of the order.”

This order, unsurprisingly coming from the High Court, did not make reference to the United Kingdom but to England and Wales, and whatever the mother may have thought the United Kingdom meant, one thing is clear, because it will become relevant in a minute, is that she could not possibly have thought that Northern Ireland was part of England and Wales. Northern Ireland is of course part of the United Kingdom, but this order was very specifically now referring to England and Wales. The order also did not have the confusing rubric at the bottom saying that she was allowed to take, or that anyone was allowed to take Adam out of the country for 28 days. The order of Williams J could not have been clearer.

We now know that on 20 October the mother and Adam travelled without their passports, because of course they had by this time been confiscated, travelled to Northern Ireland. How they got there it seems was a taxi to Watford junction. I can see that that might be sensible in the sense that it is possibly quicker to go round the M25 and up to Watford than to go into London to pick up the train from Euston, and then the mother and Adam and the cat took a train to Liverpool Lime Street. They then went to the docks at Liverpool, and they got a Stena ferry over to Northern Ireland where they arrived at about 6 o’clock in the morning the next day.

The mother said that Adam was interested in ships. Good. It is very curious thing to go from Richmond to Liverpool if you want to look at ships. I should have thought anybody wanting to see the ships on the sea living in Richmond might think it be more sensible to get a train down to Southampton or Portsmouth. Portsmouth after all has two of the largest aircraft carriers in the world docked there, the sort of thing I should have thought a little boy of his age might want to look at.

I find that the mother’s case about this is a complete fabrication in my judgement. She got the ferry over to Belfast where she got off there at six in the morning, and her plan she says was to stay there one or two nights and then come back the next day. The travelling for a five year old boy from Richmond to Watford in the cab, Watford to Liverpool Lime Street in a train, Liverpool Lime Street to the docks, the docks over to Belfast on a ferry, an exhausting journey for a child.

In fact, if the mother’s case is actually that she thought that that was a good day out or a good couple of days out for her son, it would bring very clearly into question in my mind her ability to care properly for her son. The only conclusion I can reach, on the balance of probabilities which is the applicable test, is that the mother’s purpose in going to Northern Ireland was to cross the open border from the north to the south to the Republic of Ireland where she would then be outside the jurisdiction of this Court.

Of course, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain have all sorts of enforcement arrangements as you would expect from two countries which in spite of their sometimes troubled history remain in all real purposes rooted in each other, and respective of each other’s jurisdictions. I do not need to prove to the criminal standard, beyond reasonable doubt, that this was the mother’s plan, but I find it impossible to think of any other reason why the mother could have wanted to go in late October when it was dark and getting cold, why she would want to spend all that time travelling to go to Northern Ireland.

Delightful place as it is, Belfast is not the sort of place I would suggest that you travel to for that length of time just for one night with a five year old child. I have not even heard evidence that she took him to the Titanic museum which would have at least fed his “interest in shipping”. I am satisfied that the mother’s plans were altogether less worthy than a nice couple of days out, and I am sure that the mother cannot spend any unsupervised time with Adam at the moment.

I am not prepared to increase by one minute the amount of time that the current order says that the mother should spend with Adam. That contact must be supervised. I find as a fact that the mother has, on three separate occasions, attempted to take Adam out of this jurisdiction illegally, and in the light of her own promise, her statement in documents in an email that she wants to take Adam away from this Court and into Egypt which will not respect the orders of this country. I am not prepared to take the

I think it is essential that anybody working with this family on this case have a copy of this Judgment. I am going to order that a transcript should be obtained and it is to be a legitimate charge on the legal aid certificate, and I do not think it would be fair for me to ask NYAS to share in that cost. I am going to say, I will hear representations on this if Counsel want to persuade me, but my feeling at the moment is that the transcript should be a charge on the mother’s legal aid certificate with the father having to pay the other half I am afraid from his own costs.

In the overall scheme of things, transcripts are not all that expensive, but as I say, I will hear representations on that if anybody wants to persuade me that I am wrong.

I should add, when dealing with the other parts of the chronology in this case, that HHJ Parker, sitting as a deputy High Court judge in this building on 24 November 2023, made preliminary findings that the mother was in breach of various orders that I have referred to, and that judge then made an order transferring Adam’s residence to the father where Adam will remain.

This case is going to need quite a lot of case management now. It is already 5.05 and I do not think it is fair to expect my Court staff, and indeed I have a professional appointment anyway that I am already running late for, to stay later this evening, and so I will of course hear submissions about the form that the order were to take, but it may very well be that what is going to have to happen is that Counsel will liaise and then send in the agreed draft order to me at some point during the next couple of days.

If there are any matters between Counsel that cannot be resolved, then I can probably resolve them by just looking at the competing drafts in different typeface or whatever to alert me to what the issues are, but I hope now it will be clear what the issues are.

I want to end with this. The mother has been excellently represented today by Ms Pink. She has had, if I may say so, one of the most difficult briefs that I have seen in this Court for quite a long time, because Counsel walks on a very difficult tightrope sometimes between their duty to the Court and their duty to the client. I am completely satisfied that Ms Pink has carried out both of those duties extremely well, and I want the mother to hear me say that I think that Ms Pink has said everything on the mother’s behalf that could possibly have been said, in case the mother decides to add Ms Pink to the long list of people against whom she makes complaints.

I am also very grateful to the expert handling of this case in cross-examination by Ms Papazianfor the father, and similarly by Ms Musgrave for the Guardian. They have been able to introduce a great deal of clarity to this case and to help us to steer through what should have been a five day listing in only three days.