The sophisticated client?

Show me the sophisticated client, and I’ll show you the opportunity to make some more money. As I wasn’t there, perhaps it is unfair to criticise, but I remain unhappy at the continuing pressure to widen the conflict rules, ostensibly to allow the sophisticated client to make the choice to instruct the lawyer who would otherwise be conflicted. Thus, from The Lawyer.com today

Clifford Chance general counsel and chairman of the City of London Law Society rules and regulation committee Chris Perrin has called for significant widening of client conflict rules at The Lawyer’s Strategic Risk Management Conference. The City of London Law Society has made proposals, which would effectively allow clients to consent to all conflicts of interest. Perrin said: “We’ve been talking about this possible change for some time. It gives sophisticated clients who know what they’re doing freedom.”

Ethics are ethics: except it seems when money is involved. It is a slippery slope.

Trouble ahead

Another win for Obama, this time in Mississippi, but the real news is the increasing bitterness in the contest for the nomination. In a year when there is everything to play for, and a great deal to lose, the Democrats seem hell bent on tearing themselves apart. An excellent analysis of the current stae of play in Economist.com, looking at why the scrap is getting uglier, and what the future may hold,

A campaign that degenerates into name-calling and mud-slinging will hurt Mr Obama more than it does Mrs Clinton. He has campaigned on messages of “change” and “hope” so he faces an unenviable choice in the long run-up to Pennsylvania. If he lets the Clinton team fling the brickbats without retaliation she may set the tone of the campaign. But respond in kind and his message of a new politics is tarnished. Even though he is behind there in the polls, Pennsylvania cannot come soon enough for Mr Obama.

For Clinton, what is at stake is no less than the redemption of Bill’s presidency, and her campaign is his by proxy. In part this is why Obama is so attractive, as he offers a real break from the tarnished past. All this however is mere gaming; the real battle will be with McCain.

Tiptoing through Hillaryland

I caught the report of Barack Obama’s response to the ludicrous play by the Clintons (for it is now clear that there are most certainly two of them in this nomination race) that Obama should join the Clinton ticket as the junior partner. Whether it is Hillaryland or Wonderland, who knows. Obama’s point, that he is currently ahead on delegates, was well made, but the race for the nomination is getting nastier by the day. James Forsyth in Coffee House just one of many posts on this today. Even better, Mary Fitzgerald in First Drafts yesterday

Andrew Sullivan’s lead piece in the Sunday Times yesterday — “The Clintons, a horror film that never ends” —picked up on an idea that has gained swift currency in the past week: that Hillary Clinton is not just cold, calculating and impersonal, but she is in fact a creature of the Undead.

Amen to that.

Come in number 9, your time is up

There is a delightful irony in the fall from grace of the mythic Eliot Spitzer. As James Forsyth noted this afternoon in his Coffee House post , Spitzer’s done,

The problem for Spitzer is not just that he has been caught in a sex scandal but that he has based his political career on his own integrity; without it, he is nothing.

It has the makings of Greek tragedy, or possibly high farce. And in case you missed it, here is the New York Observer:

On the afternoon of March 10, 2008, The New York Times published a story positing a link between New York governor Eliot Spitzer and an ongoing investigation of a prostitution ring.

It was later confirmed that affidavits referring to one of the prostitute’s clients, Client No. 9, were referring to the Governor.

Within a couple of hours, Gov. Spitzer appeared with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, at his Manhattan offices and, without specifying what he’d done wrong, admitted that he had been very, very bad and needed to regain the trust of his family. Reporters expected him to resign during his speech, but he didn’t.

It just brought that nursery rhyme to mind: “And when he was good, he was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid”.

Great Crested Grebes

One of the discoveries this past year has been the writing of Mark Cocker. In the 1970s I never missed Harry Griffin’s Country Diary in The Guardian, and walking in the Lake District in the early autumn of 2005, Caroline bought me A Lifetime of Mountains, Martin Wainwright’s selection of Harry Griffin’s best columns. It was reading those that persuaded me to begin these Dartmoor Letters. But it was not until I bought Caroline A Tiger in the Sand, in anticipation of our birding week in North Norfolk in late January, that I realised that Mark Cocker has been a regular Country Diary columnist for nearly twenty years. It shows how long it has been since I read The Guardian (and is almost enough to make me change the daily paper).

In his Introduction, Cocker speaks of the “emotional charge of the encounter, the deep fulfilment that flows from our engagement with our fellow creatures”. As we walked up at the Hennock reservoirs this morning, I thought of the piece I had just read, and in particular

“Nothing we do to capture our encounters can quite match up to the living reality. It will always evade and exceed our imaginations, whether it is a tiger in the jungle or a blackbird in the garden. This is where I believe writing on nature, in its various forms, is wholly distinct from a particular kind of wildlife television. Moving images of wildlife often far exceed, in terms of dramatic content and physical closeness, our own modest experiences of nature. They leave nothing unspoken, nor hint at any wider experience and, in a way, seek to replace our experience of the genuine article and become a substitute satisfaction.”

Last Sunday we had also been at Hennock but then in late afternoon. As well as seeing six plus Bullfinches, we also saw Crossbills in the treetops in the plantation alongside Tottiford Reservoir. This was a first for us at the Reservoirs. Hoping to see the Crossbills again, we drove this morning to Trenchford. As it turned out, no Bullfinches and no Crossbills. But instead we watched a pair of Great Crested Grebes, close to the bridge over the Trenchford stream, beginning their courtship. At one moment necks intertwined, at another synchronised diving; water weed offered by one to the other and then returned. It was quite magical.