Currently he has solved the first two problems at least and he was able to deliver a show

Currently, he has solved the first two problems, at least, and he was able to deliver a show which, although basic, reaffirmed his title as the king of hillbilly rock. His melancholy smalltown tales are stained with sweat and engine oil, and have a rough layer of scar-tissue courtesy of Buddy Miller’s buzzing guitar. Brocket, they said, had sold a replica of a Ferrari 250 SWB as if it were the original thing. The purchaser was Jon Shirley, one of Bill Gates’s partners and the former president of Micro- soft. Four days before Brocket was due to plead again in court on the first charge, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police had him arrested and charged him a second time, for obtaining money by deception.They arranged to arrive at his house in mid-afternoon, on a Friday, so that he would be arrested in front of his children who had just come back from school. He never believed the police could mount a case against him.To put pressure on him to change his plea, the police collected evidence of a second fraud.

“I had nothing to do with it.”In the end, it was another minor participant, Barry Flynn, who never got fully paid for his part in the scam, who finally gave the game away But even then Brocket thought they’d never really get him In February 1995, he was arrested Two of his co-conspirators told the police the full story But Brocket, when charged, pleaded not guilty. Lady Brocket, he insisted, was a drug addict and had a fertile imagination “You have to believe me,” he told his family. But Lord Brocket sued the insurers, hoping to force their hand. He lied to his lawyers, and forced his car dealer, Richard Purtado, to do the same.When his Cuban-American wife became worried that she might be called as a witness, she told his mother and his uncle, the senior family trustee, that Lord Brocket was behind the theft His lordship denied the accusation. By foreigners, he added.The loss adjuster, David Cook, was even more sceptical. Classic cars like Brocket’s just don’t get nicked, he told himself.

The insurers, who were reluctant to pay out, were delighted when they found that Brocket had been lax in reporting previous losses That gave them a technical reason for not paying up. Called out to Brocket Hall one Tuesday morning in May 1991, when it was discovered that the showroom where Lord Brocket kept a part of his magnificent collection of cars had been broken into over the Bank Holiday weekend, they couldn’t understand how a lorry could breach the security of Brocket Hall, load up three Ferraris dating from the 1950s, a 1960 Maserati, and four engines, and drive out without being seen by a single person This was what Lord Brocket insisted had happened He even told the press the cars had been stolen to order. Lord Brocket would often tell the chauffeur of his beloved Bentley, “Don’t tell me about the law. I make the law.”But Lord Brocket underestimated how much the authorities wanted to get him The police were suspicious from the start. Gently, he dismissed the appeal, and sent Brocket back to Ford.An Hereditary peer with an Eton and Guards background, Lord Brocket, now 45, turned Brocket Hall, a Georgian mansion in Hertfordshire, into his business by letting it out for international conferences And he could indulge his passion for classic cars.

That, Causer said, should be enough to allow the Court of Appeal to reduce the sentence. Brocket’s prison experience was, he pleaded, “wholly exceptional” That might have clinched it But Lord Rose was not convinced. Guppy, who unlike Brocket had succeeded in getting his insurers to pay up when he faked a theft of gemstones in a New York hotel, had been given the same sentence. Why should Brocket, who was paid nothing, suffer the same fate?Causer argued that the judge who sentenced Brocket could not have known the violence he would suffer in jail. He raked over the ground, and dug out all the details that might help.

Causer pointed out that the wording of the Criminal Appeal Act of 1907 had been changed in a significant way when it was revised in 1968, to give the Court of Appeal wider powers in amending prison sentences.He began by arguing that Brocket’s five-year sentence was too long. Lord Rose was the judge in the trial of Darius Guppy, another fraudster, and he has little patience with men who meddle with the law.That did not stop him listening carefully to the arguments presented by Brocket’s counsel, John Causer. A soft-spoken man, whose greatest love is his rose garden, Causer had prepared Brocket’s case with care. Around the bench, on three walls, right up to the ceiling, are shelf upon shelf of leather-bound books, the legal authorities on which British justice depends.