Witch

A local baron has joined forces with an arts festival to petition the Home Office for the pardon of Britain's last convicted witch. Helen Duncan was arrested by naval officers and charged with conspiracy, fraud and the use of black magic. It was 1944, the height of the latest Great War for Civilisation; Mrs Duncan had told the parents of a missing sailor that his ship had sunk; the news of the sinking had not been made public; and so the only logical explanation was that the lady had conspired with the spirit world to lower public morale before D-Day. Luckily for Mrs Duncan, the seventeenth-century practice of judging guilt by buoyancy had fallen out of fashion, and the twenty-first-century practice of tying the suspect to a board and half drowning them in a bucket of water had not yet received official approval among the forces of freedom; so she was merely jailed for nine months in Holloway prison. Churchill later repealed the statute under which she was convicted, but the conviction itself (for black magic only; Mrs Duncan was found not guilty of the other charges) has been allowed to stand until now. It's unfortunate that the Home Secretary whom the petitioners are approaching happens to be John Reid, a fervent believer in the principle of crimen sine lege and the faithful familiar of a Prime Minister who might easily be inspired to place Exodus 22 xviii back on the statute book. After all, his reverence's authority has started looking rather shopworn in recent months; there must be some reason for it.