"The first thing we do," says Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare's Henry VI Part II, "let's kill all the lawyers." I had always assumed that, through some feat of precognition, Dick had Michael Mansfield in mind as being first for the gibbet. Achingly radical, implacably middle class, Mansfield has been a ubiquitous presence these past 30 years, donating his services to alleged Muslim and Irish terrorists, flying pickets, anarchists and what have you - all the way back to 1971 and our own rather pathetic equivalent to the Baader- Meinhof Gang and the SLA, the Angry Brigade. Anyone against whom the state has a grievance, or who has a grievance against the state, turns first to Mansfield for succour. He was there, as we read