A spokesman was reluctant to confirm that it included the option of creating new mental health authorities but psychiatrists and

A spokesman was reluctant to confirm that it included the option of creating new mental health authorities but psychiatrists and managers whom the department’s review team consulted have confirmed that the idea is under consideration.John Bowis, the Health Minister, has visited Kirklees where the health and local authority social services have already created a separate fund run by a joint management board to buy “seamless” care for the mentally ill – an approach Mr Bowis has been commending to others. Lord Meston QC, representing the Queen’s Proctor, told the judge the decrees nisi and absolute, granted to Lord Moynihan by Tunbridge Wells County Court in 1990, were void.It follows that Lord Moynihan’s marriage to his fifth wife, former belly- dancer Jinna, was also void because it was bigamous, and their son, Daniel, aged five, is illegitimate and has no claim to the title.It is also known, however, that DNA tests on Editha’s son, Andrew, and samples left by the late lord, show that he could not have been the father.If both the sons of Lord Moynihan’s oriental wives are ruled out, Mr Colin Moynihan will become the Fourth Lord Moynihan of Leeds and will have to set his political sights on a career in the House of Lords.Lord Moynihan’s fortune in the Philippines (he left Britain with virtually nothing) will not be settled at this hearing, but is expected to go to one of the battling wives in Manila.Details of the High Court battle will have to wait until Sir Stephen Brown gives his judgment at the end of the hearing which is expected to last 10 days.Although the judge ruled the case came under the Judicial Proceedings Act, the Attorney General’s office later agreed that details of the opening could be published. Two boys, aged seven and five, whose Filipino mothers claim they were Lord Moynihan’s fourth and fifth wives, are laying claim to the title.
Colin Moynihan, 40, the former Conservative sports minister, also has an interest in the outcome of the hearing, because as the half brother of the late lord, he also has a claim. Mr Moynihan wants to stand as an MP again, having lost his Lewisham seat in the 1992 General Election, but cannot offer himself as a candidate for any seat because, if he does become the Fourth Baron Moynihan, he will be elevated to the House of Lords and there would have to be a by-election.The case had promised an insight into the colourful antics of Anthony Patrick Andrew Cairnes Berkeley Moynihan, Third Baron Moynihan of Leeds, who fled to Manila in 1970 to evade a string of arrest warrants over gambling debts and assorted fraud allegations.It was known he lived life to the full, building up a pounds 3m fortune from his involvement in the sex industry, and earning himself the nickname of the “Ermine Pimpernel”.But the Queen’s Proctor has stepped into the case to challenge the legality of Lord Moynihan’s divorce from his fourth wife, Editha, 35, who claims that her signatures on the court papers were forgeries.This means that the hearing becomes, in effect, a contested divorce case, and Sir Stephen Brown, President of the Family Division, ruled that the Judicial Proceedings Act must apply, and that reporting is strictly limited to names and charges until the judge gives his ruling at the end of the hearing. At the end of the day’s business, 4.30pm, Imran, Botham, Jemima, Sir Louis and Alan Bell streamed out of the Royal Courts into the sunlight.In the cloistered calm left behind, it would have been fitting for a line of monks to file out for Evensong.. The colourful life and nefarious times of the late Third Baron Moynihan will remain shielded from the public eye after a High Court judge yesterday invoked a 1926 Act designed to protect the populace from moral outrage. The ruling was made at the opening of a hearing to settle competing claims to the title of the peer, who died from a stroke in 1991 while running a string of lucrative brothels in the Philippines.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment after he confessed to the police that he tried to kill his mother with a cleaver. But, yesterday, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, one of Britain’s leading mental he alth law experts, told Court 7 how the 17-year-old had been interviewed without the required responsible adult, even though he had been diagnosed with adult autism His appeal continues. In the Great Hall are two portraits, known as “The Fire Judges”, the judges who settled the land disputes after the Great Fire of London in 1666 Today, the celebrities are barristers. In Court 19 are twoof t he finest, George Carman, street-fighter, representing the elegant Khan, and Charles Gray QC, patrician, representing bad boy Botham.

“A libel action,” one defamation lawyer said yesterday, “is like putting on a stage production. The only difference is that you don’t have a script for the witness You never know what your actors will say. It gives colour, uncertainty and a seriousedge to the drama.” And yesterday, Gray, like a formulaic Greek playright, set out the plot and moral of his tale as he laid out the rules of cricket and Khan’s “offensive” accusations about ball-tampering, race and class And last night, Howard Law-Thompson slept with more hope. Likewise, the Mousetrap of the court’s daily th eatre, the McDonald’s libel trial, Britain’s longest ever, took a day off Litigation is the lifeblood of these courts.

But, like the ongoing saga of an attempted takeover of Leeds United Football Club, it was adjourned. There was Colin Moynihan, a former Tory sports minister and Olympic rowing medalist, fighting for his late half-brother’s peerage against those springing from the deceased Lord Moynihan’s sleazy past: Daniel, five- year-old son of a Filippina belly-dancer, and Andrew, seven-year-old child of another of his Oriental brides. Terry Venables was down to defend himself against those who want to disqualify him as a company director. Over it are a stone cat and dog representing litigants in court. And yesterday saw all of human life laid bare – pettiness alongside life and death – at the apex of Britain’s civil and appeal court system.Imran Khan was not the only big hitter. The Great Hall, opened in 1882, with its vaulted roof in white stone, stained glass windows, marble floors and uplifting arches produces a solemnity more in praise of God than law.