(One of his many dicta: “Pornography is the canary in the coal mine of free speech.”) And his campaign is against both state and statutes alike. He maintains that pornography is a class issue, a gender issue, a philosophical issue, a freedom issue, an everything issue. Jackman fervently believes he has to lead a crusade against what he sees as the unjust obscenity laws and that he absolutely must succeed – or else fail himself, his allies and the wider cause of civilisation as he sees it. (The invite for his 40th birthday, last November, asked friends to “a funeral – for the death of youth”.) But close up, he’s softer, sensitive, comradely, far more Hagrid than Sergio Leone villain. From a distance, he looks vast and indomitable, a figure of great appetites and refusals, the rogue lawman in a spaghetti western. Jackman is broad and tall with plaintive eyes and a beard like Bedlam straw. But he does not merely defend the accused: his life’s great plan and purpose is to rid this country once and for all of its laws criminalising extreme pornography – laws that he regards as morally and socially iniquitous. Myles Jackman is Britain’s leading obscenity lawyer. More than that: a chance to change the world. His was a constant vigil – Google alerts, Twitter, the forums, the court reports – for he was a man with a mission so unique that he alone considered Holland’s case to be an opportunity. Meanwhile, from the roost of his London flat, Myles Jackman was watching. He was banned from seeing his daughter for 18 months. Hate mail and excrement were posted through his letterbox. As he told me, the consequences were “worse than being dead”. On the streets of north Wales, in the newspapers and all over the internet, Holland quickly became known as “the tiger-porn guy”.
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