A senior barrister who represented a disgraced former MP in a family court case has apologised to the Court of Appeal for ‘a significant breach of the confidentiality regime’ by disclosing his client’s skeleton argument to a solicitor friend of his wife.
Richard Clayton QC, called to the bar in 1977, acted for Andrew Griffiths on his appeal against the decision to publish a damning judgment in which the Conservative former MP for Burton was found to have raped and physically abused his estranged wife.
Judge Sue Williscroft found that Griffiths assaulted Kate Griffiths on a number of occasions during their marriage, in a ruling which Mrs Justice Lieven said should be published last July. But after receiving an embargoed draft of the judgment, Clayton ‘discussed the case over dinner with a senior solicitor with expertise in child care law who was known to him as a friend of his wife’, Lord Justice Warby said in a ruling this week.
Clayton did not reveal the parties’ identities or any information about the case, but asked whether any organisations focused on representing the interests of children might be interested in intervening.
The unnamed solicitor told Clayton about the Association of Lawyers for Children (ALC), of which she was a member, and when permission to appeal was granted Clayton asked her to forward an email to the ALC to see if it might wish to intervene.
Clayton sent her Griffiths’ unredacted skeleton argument seeking permission, which the solicitor forwarded unread to the ALC. The Court of Appeal said this may have been a contempt of court, but ruled that the publication of its ruling was ‘a proportionate and sufficient response’.
‘This was a significant breach of the confidentiality regime that exists to safeguard the rights and interests of children in proceedings of this kind,’ Warby said. ‘There should have been no such disclosure without the court’s permission. Mr Clayton should have realised this.’
Clayton made a ‘prompt apology’ to the court and said he ‘genuinely believed that he was able to consult a professional legal adviser about these matters’. He also said that he did not ‘apply his mind’ to section 12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960 or the relevant provisions of the Family Procedure Rules, which he was ‘unintended [and] due to a lack of familiarity with the applicable provisions’.
Warby – sitting with Lady Justice King – said: ‘We consider that a contempt of court “may have been committed” by Mr Clayton when he disclosed the information in the skeleton argument to the ALC.’
But he added: ‘Our decision is that contempt proceedings are not necessary and would be disproportionate. That is because of the limited disclosure, the limited harm, the mitigating factors identified by Mr Clayton and his counsel which serve to reduce his culpability, and the delay that has occurred, which is no fault of Mr Clayton.’
