The trial of Simon Walsh at Kingston Crown Court

A man is on trial, in Britain in the second decade of the 21st century, because he received an email containing pictures of the sender engaged in various unconventional, but perfectly legal and consensual, sexual acts. The defendant is (or was) a pillar of the community: a barrister and an alderman of the City of London. He also happens to be gay. But we all know, do we not, that Britain is a tolerant, open country that leads the world in legislation giving equality to homosexuals, and the Crown Prosecution Service, as Nick Cohen noted recently, "now regards itself as a liberal organ of the state". So the prosecution cannot be a result of institutionalised homophobia. The defendant's solicitor Myles Jackman notes that "amongst other things [he had] prosecuted police officers accused of disciplinary offences." But that surely can't have anything to do with it either.

Just what is going on here?

The rest of this post, which contains some explicit details (and may well therefore be unsafe for work) is in the dungeon.