Armed robber Ronnie Easterbrook enters is his 38th week on Hunger strike. Diane Taylor interviewed Ronnie in his cell at HMP High down, she said she has met a man who is convinced of the justness of his cause-but who may not live to savour the victory. (This is the unedited version of the article which appeared in The Guardian on Monday 27th December 1999). It has taken a fortnight of faxes, the handover of my passport, passage through many locked gates and finally an escort by a prison guard accompanied by a lively looking Alsation to get to Ronnie Easterbrook's bedside. He is in the prison's medical wing , a corridor of barren cells painted anaemic yellow and as a category A - top security- prisoner he's under hourly supervision. Easterbrook, a convicted gangster given four life sentences, is poorly because he's starving himself to death - he says it's the only option left to him to highlight what he believes to be a gross miscarriage of justice. If he dies he'll be the first prisoner to end his life this way since Bobby Sands and nine others died in the H-block hunger strike in 1981. It is nearly six weeks since Easterbrook started to refuse food (Nov 11) and I expect to find him horizontal, croaking and gasping. But he is sitting in an armchair, gaunt but alert, both his short white, hair and grey tracksuit hanging off every bony bit of him . He's slipped from 81 kilos to 64 since he stopped eating. "Hello, I'm glad you could come," he says. He has the quiet stillness about him of someone not completely alive. His room is bare except for the most basic of beds, a couple of chairs,a sink and a toilet. Two pairs of slippers are shoved under his bed along with his stash of Ribena and Kia Ora, the most nourishment he is prepared to take. I ask him how he is feeling. He keeps on chafing away at the left side of his abdomen. "I haven't been feeling at all good these last few days. I've got a pain just here." he jabs his stomach with his hand. "They say that after a certain amount of time without food your body starts to digest itself. That's what's happening here. I'm eating me." I check up on his age and he answers rather eerily as if he has already died: "I would have been 69 next May. Easterbrook, 68, was sentenced to 'whole life' imprisonment in 1988 after taking part in an armed robbery which went horribly wrong. A police informant, Seamus Ray, set the job up and duly tipped off the police. As they made their getaway Easterbrook, Tony Ash and their driver Gary Wilson were ambushed by a police team from PT17, the elite tactical firearms unit. A dramatic shoot-out ensued - Ash was shot dead by a police marksman and Easterbrook, Wilson and police inspector Dwight Atkinson all suffered gunshot wounds. The shootout was captured by a Thames TV crew and media pundits commented that it made Hill Street Blues look like Dixon of Dock Green . Easterbrook, a career gangster well known on the south London scene, doesn't dispute his involvement in the robbery - a £10,000 wages snatch at Bejam's supermarket in Woolwich in November 1987 . His criminal CV as an armed robber stretches back to 1958 and he is used to long spells in jail between jobs. What he doesn't accept though is that the police acted legitimately during the ambush. He says the police shot first and that he believed they were operating the same shoot to kill policy as northern Ireland. "A bullet bounced off our getaway car and even though Tony shouted out I give up, I give up, they still shot him dead." Because of this, he says, he had no choice but to shoot back in self-defence. The police insist Easterbrook started it, firing six shots from his Smith & Wesson revolver. The truth about who fired first has never emerged although Detective Sergeant Andy Huth, one of the officers involved, said at the time: "It got a bit confusing towards the end" "I don't enjoy hurting people, the only time I have ever shot was when my freedom was at stake." says Easterbrook. But he was never allowed to air the shoot-to-kill theory at his trial. Although he wanted his barrister to focus on police tactics as part of his defence the request was refused on the grounds that a political defence was not permitted.(the rules have since changed). "I wanted my barrister to use the Amnesty International report about the shoot-to-kill policy in northern Ireland to argue that it was being replicated by the Metropolitan Police and had several parallels to my own case but he wouldn't." Easterbrook ended up representing himself and as he admits, made a lousy job of it. "I left school at the age of 14. I was totally out of my depth in the trial and didn't have the intellect to put forward a structured defence." He was also perplexed by the 'whole life' sentence meted out to him by the judge. His is the only recorded case of such a sentence being imposed on an armed robber in the absence of medical evidence to establish dangerousness. His case even gets a mention in the law bible Archbold as one which is unusual because it does not accord with other known authorities on sentencing. " I never got a proper trial because I was denied a barrister. This hunger strike is all about my human rights. I'm entitled to them just like any other bastard. If this had happened abroad we'd all be up in arms about it but because it's happened here the establishment just try and bury it." Appeals to the high court and Criminal Cases Review Commission have failed and although his lawyer is taking his case to Europe it will be at least five years before it is heard. His tariff has been reduced from whole life to 12 and a half years but he says he won't apply for parole because he doesn't recognise the legality of his sentence and that until he gets a new trial justice will not have been done. Easterbrook describes himself as Britain's oldest political prisoner. He's also probably the only gangster behind bars to be in the throes of a political campaign. But he never quite was the archetypal gangster. Sure, he was at home with guns and the criminal underworld and suitcases full of used banknotes, but, he insists, he always had his standards. He came from a poor south London family and when he left school he got a job working with tipper lorries earning £2 ten shillings a week. It was far too little to survive on and he was endlessly borrowing off his dad and older brothers just to hold himself together from one week to the next. "I thought, if i work hard like this and still can't make a living wage, what's the point of going to work. When I started with the robberies I wasn't out for fortunes, I just wanted more money than I had from the tipper lorries. I'm not a saint and i liked the money but I used to give a lot of it away to people worse off than me. I know the home office have me down as the most evil man that ever lived but they're wrong." Others back up his own assessment of kindly, affable rogue. South London nightclub owner Harry Haward has described him as 'a man with three hearts'. Ironically he had decided to go straight when Seamus Ray approached him and Ash and asked if they were interested in doing the Bejam job. "I wasn't keen because I was 56 and had had enough. I'd just got my council flat nice, don't drink, gamble or take drugs and so could have managed without much money. I wanted to start having a quiet life but we agreed to do it and that was that." Now that there are no legal avenues left Easterbrook says that the only tool at his disposal is his body. "It is only by starving myself to death that I can highlight what's been done to me," he says."The establishment wants me to die in jail and if that's going to happen i'll do it on my terms not on theirs." His lawyer Simon Creighton says that a public airing of the issues surrounding his case may make Jack Straw at last feel some disquiet about it and initiate a review. "I hope public opinion will recognise how desperate this situation is. I don't think i have ever come across a case where I have met such barriers from the establishment. I find it bizarre that the system would rather see him die without having a proper hearing than afford him the basic human right of legal representation in court. Ronnie is no saint but he does have a right to the same sort of trial and punishment as everyone else ." Easterbrook slumps back into his armchair apologising for his exhaustion. He puts on an oversized pair of brown framed glasses which magnify his eyes so that they appear to have bounced right out of their sunken sockets and leans forward, scraping together his last dregs of energy to make a final point. "I want a new appeal and if I can't have one I want to die. I'm not afraid of death. I know that when I get close to the edge all my problems will melt way and everything will suddenly become clear. After I've died the case will go to Europe and I'll win posthumously. The authorities will mutter, 'hunger striker, committed suicide' but that won't be accurate. They should record my death as judicial murder."