🛑 System Failure: The Grand National of Justice: The Tale of Donkey Proctor by Jeremy Bamber

Proctor the Donkey (created by Grok)

Once upon a time, on the windswept sands of Blackpool beach, there lived an old donkey named Proctor. He had spent his summers plodding lazily along the shoreline, ferrying children a few feet back and forth. His pace was slow, his ambition slower. When the summer ended, so did his work ethic. Retirement suited him, he liked his oats, his hay, and above all, his paddock naps.

But fate had other plans.

One day, Proctor was carted off to a prestigious racing stable in Newmarket called CCRC Racing. The stables boasted banners claiming they were “the finest in the land,” “honest to the core,” and “champions of truth.” But behind the glossy brochures lay a grim reality: the Henley Report had exposed the place as a pasture of lazy donkeys, overseen by sheep who couldn’t be bothered to bleat, let alone lead.

Enter Slevin, the head trainer, a sheep with a badge, once a police officer, now too woolly-minded to notice anything amiss. Donkey Proctor convinced sheep Slevin he could win the Grand National, the most gruelling race in the land. “Trust me,” said Proctor, “I’m training hard every day in my paddock. No need to check, I’ve got this.”

Slevin, true to form, didn’t check. He told the crowd, and ‘Bamber’, the hopeful backer, that Proctor was up at dawn, galloping and jumping like a thoroughbred. It was a lie. Proctor was munching hay and watching clouds.

In fact, he’d already told Bamber, plainly, that he wasn’t going to jump any fences. Not because he couldn’t. Not because he wasn’t allowed. But, because reading Bamber’s 2021 submissions, which laid out the evidence needed to clear each fence, would “blow his mind.”

That was the standard now: mental detonation by exposure to evidence. And yet Slevin, eyes wide and voice booming, assured everyone that Proctor was airborne, clearing hurdles with grace and grit. Meanwhile, Proctor hadn’t even approached the first fence. He was still in the paddock, chewing cud and contemplating the sky.

The Grand National Begins

The Grand National, in this tale, was no ordinary race… it was the ‘Bamber miscarriage of justice’ investigation. Each fence represented a critical evidentiary hurdle from Bamber’s 2021 CCRC submissions. Ten fences. Ten chances to prove the truth.

Race day arrived. The crowd gathered. Proctor trotted to the starting line, ears twitching, belly full. The gun fired. He ambled forward.

He didn’t jump. He trotted around it, claiming that the COLP horse had cleared it years ago. But the COLP horse had actually fallen, photographs proved it. Proctor squinted and said, “I don’t see a horse. That could be a cow for all I know.”

When pressed about the second, third, and fourth fences, each representing key evidentiary hurdles in the Bamber submissions, Donkey Proctor didn’t offer analysis, facts, or even a half-hearted trot toward the truth. Instead, he turned to the crowd and brayed, “Ask the late Lester Piggott!”

It was a deflection, of course. But it didn’t stop there.

In his official race report, Proctor insisted on obtaining statements from Major Mead and Peter Sutherst, two figures long deceased, and whose testimonies were, quite literally, impossible. Everyone at the CCRC Racing stables knew they had passed away years ago. Proctor had been told repeatedly. But he was a donkey. And donkeys, it seems, don’t let facts interfere with fiction.

Rather than engage with the living evidence, Proctor preferred to consult ghosts. It was as if he believed that invoking the names of the dead would lend his report gravitas or, at least, distract from the fences he refused to jump.

Yet, at the finish line, Proctor declared victory. He produced a 101-page report, 15 pages of which explained why he didn’t need to jump any fences. “It’s policy,” he wrote, “not laziness.” He claimed two horses: SBJ/1 (silencer) and DRB/1 (sound moderator) had run the race together, ridden by a single jockey. Eyewitnesses, photographs, and forensic reports all said otherwise: ‘each horse had its own rider’! But Proctor insisted, “I saw it, Essex Police saw it, even the lame horse at CCRC saw it.”

He hadn’t read the forensic files. He refused to let anyone else read them either. “My word is final,” he brayed.

At the photo finish, Proctor presented a single doctored image showing himself crossing the line first. The original footage had been sliced and edited, standard practice, said the police, to let the stewards (DPP and CPS) crown their chosen winner. Proctor was delighted. “If I stick to my lies,” he thought, “I’ll be remembered as the champion.”

But the truth was clear: he hadn’t jumped a single fence. He hadn’t run the race. He hadn’t even trained. His report was 90% recycled nonsense and 10% pure invention. But what could anyone expect? Proctor was a donkey. He didn’t want to ‘blow his mind’.

And so, the tale ends with Proctor munching hay in his paddock, blissfully unaware, or wilfully ignorant, that the race was never his to win. The real victor, buried beneath decades of non-disclosure and institutional denial, was the hopeful backer, Bamber.

But donkeys don’t care for justice. They care for oats.