A. No, I do not believe that [Bane] thought that his son was a kind of callous criminal. Q. No, but involved with criminals. People who were being manipulated by criminals. A. Those criminals were his mother and his aunt. He was an object of pity, I think, rather than hatred. Q. It also means that he was an object who [Bane] would have thought long and hard before he gave money to him because he was being manipulated by … his mother and his aunt, therefore money to him was effectively giving money to the mother or the aunt. Don’t you agree with that? A. I mean I think that’s possible, but then it’s difficult to understand why he would have wanted to give him money at other times … Q. It is one thing to give him – and the very most we see him give him is £12,000. It is another to give him the very great wealth that [Bane] had created, given the danger that that would fall into the hands of other people that [Bane] thought were satans and demons out to harm him, isn’t it? A. Yes.” 194. Finally, Professor Howard was asked to comment on the diary entries relating to Zoran’s invitation to Bane to walk with him on the links at St Andrews in April 1984. Professor Howard agreed that the probable explanation for these diary entries was that Bane thought Zoran had tried to drown him. He also said he would “have to agree” that throughout the period from the onset of his illness the probability is that Bane had this deluded belief, and it would probably have affected his assessment of Zoran’s claim to receive benefits under his will. Professor Howard then added: “But I would also have to say that, you know, this is quite a sort of stark note, and we are putting the most sort of psychotic persecutory interpretation upon it. I acknowledge that that’s probably right …” 195. Miss Montgomery QC’s cross-examination of Professor Howard in relation to Bane’s support for the Conservative Party was designed to help make good the proposition that his support could not be divorced from his delusions, but was to a considerable extent a secondary product of them. She started with Bane’s letter of 10 December 1984 to the Prime Minister, from which I have already quoted extracts in paragraph 176 above. She also referred to an earlier, unsent draft of this letter, in similar but not identical terms, which Bane had filed in a separate file including other draft letters to the Conservative Party and a series of notes on people who later featured in his delusional system as part of the pharmaceutical drugs ring. Professor Howard was disinclined to attach any significance to the fact that Bane had filed all these documents together, but to my mind this fact supports the inference that I would