Leveson was right to point out that trial by magistrates — who dispose of some 95 per cent of criminal charges — is much cheaper than trial by jury. So how do we persuade defendants to save money? It can only be by offering lighter sentences, unprincipled though even that may appear.

Leveson was speaking just a week after another member of the Court of Appeal called for reforms in the way that juries were handled in court. Lord Justice Moses said there was no point in discussing the desirability of juries since no government would abolish them in the foreseeable future. Sounding somewhat disappointed, he used the Bar Council's annual law reform lecture to argue that judges in England and Wales should no longer sum up the case to the jury at the end of a trial.

Moses was scathing about the ability of juries to absorb "a lecture in a foreign language about foreign subjects which may last without break for an hour or more and continue for a day or even days".

Legal directions showered on to the heads of the jury could cover "the burden and standard of proof, the separate consideration of different counts and different defendants, the difference between direct evidence and circumstantial evidence" and so on. "Everyday life does not require people to distinguish between inference and suspicion," the judge said. "Few, if any, ask themselves if they are driven to a conclusion."

And Moses also questioned the need for summarising the evidence. "The modern judge eschews anything which might light up the tilt sign of the pinball machine of a criminal trial," he said. But if the judge was not going to comment on the facts, what was the point? "Let us no longer pretend that judges can assist a jury's recollection by a recitation of the facts."

In his review of the criminal courts nearly a decade ago, Lord Justice Auld recommended that trial judges should devise — and then put to the jury — a series of questions, the answers to which would lead logically to a verdict of guilty or not guilty. Endorsing that approach with enthusiasm, Moses said it would reduce the risk of the jury becoming deadlocked and lessen the chances of an appeal against the judge's summing-up.

Moses delivered an entertaining speech to an audience which included many of his fellow judges. But he rightly suspected that there would be little support for his proposals. Perhaps he didn't help his case by telling his own "jury" that its members believed in fairy tales, "spooky jurisprudence" and humbug.