Standard keeps up the pressure on Clifford Chance

Christmas seems to have come early for the UK press.

Since the spectacular, headline-hogging collapse of Enron and its accountancy firm Andersen earlier this year, financial journalists across the country have been sniffing around for a British equivalent.

In recent weeks, they decided that they had found their target - City law firm giant Clifford Chance - and there is little sign of them letting up in their assault.

The latest came in a scathing centre-page spread in London's Evening Standard, which declared that 'worrying parallels exist between [Clifford Chance] and Arthur Andersen' (14 November).

These parallels seem to consist of the fact that 'Clifford Chance, like Andersen, has pursued global growth through a series of audacious acquisitions', and its chickens - in the form of a memo sent by a group of disillusioned associates in the New York office - have come home to roost.

The two situations are hardly analogous, but still the paper continued with its predictions of doom.

It dragged out tales of lust - earlier this year, some partners landed in hot water after dragging junior legal reporters to a lap dancing club - and gluttony.

While the firm's new offices in Canary Wharf have 25 dining rooms, the senior partner Stuart Popham, according to the paper, is a man of modest tastes.

'I've never spent more than 100 on a bottle of wine,' he maintained, and suggested that he 'would rather take clients sailing on his yacht than lavish expensive corporate entertainment on them'.

This story, now over a month old, shows no signs of dying away, and it seems the firm is firmly in the media's crosshairs, never the most comfortable spot.

'Clifford Chance may be a great firm,' the Standard concluded gleefully, 'but then again, so was Andersen a year ago'.

Less gloating and more disappointment seemed to be the order of the day after the Queen's speech, which proposed 'the biggest overhaul of the criminal justice system in modern times' (The Independent, 14 November).

This overhaul met with disapproval from The Times, which, although agreeing that 'lawlessness and anti-social behaviour are important issues for millions of voters', argued that 'it would be perfectly possible to target young offenders, overhaul the police and streamline judicial procedure without appearing to treat the Magna Carta as if it were written on the back of a cereal packet' (14 November).

The Telegraph also disapproved of the measures to tackle violent crime, arguing that 'just because ministers have correctly observed that something is wrong does not mean that they have much idea about how to put it right' (14 November).

It concluded that 'for those who value civil liberty, this was a deeply depressing Queen's speech'.

There was dismay when the government said it had not dropped the controversial draft mental health Bill, despite its absence from the Queen's speech.

'Ministers were accused of performing their first U-turn of the new parliamentary session,' The Times reported (15 November).

The Tories, the paper said, pledged to oppose it so long as it includes the measure that mentally ill people who pose a danger to themselves or the public should be detained before committing a crime.

The Independent on Sunday, which campaigned against the Bill, said the confusion 'suggests that the government was taken aback by the scale of the opposition and is willing to listen' (17 November).

'We need a mental health Bill,' the paper said.

'But not this one...

Mental health law should be designed to prevent a person from deteriorating to the point that they have to be detained against their will.'

Victoria MacCallum