case will cause people to question Bermuda's ability to hear high profile cases.

It is too late for that. Bermuda has already failed that test and failed it miserably.

What is left is a mess, and there are very few people who come out of it well.

Puisne Judge Dennis Mitchell may have won some initial credit for his forthright statements about the case.

Few would disagree that Bermuda is an expensive place to live, and even fewer would deny that the salaries offered to judges fail to attract the best and the brightest in the profession.

Equally, the two years or so that the Thyssen case has already taken must be the nearest thing to torture for any observer, let alone the judge, who must have questioned if he wished to spend the next few years of his life listening to lawyers debate the technical details of trust law.

This case was initially trumpeted as "the trial of the century''. By all accounts, it has proven instead to be the bore of the Millennium.

But that does not mean that Mr. Justice Mitchell is blameless. Far from it. In his rather extraordinary statement from the bench, he indicated that he was under severe stress and ill health and was not certain that he could last out the case. But it was also revealed by this newspaper that he had been attempting to "negotiate'' a higher salary. Evidently, the cure for whatever ailed him was more likely to come from the taxpayer than a doctor.

Mr. Justice Mitchell also decried the extraordinary waste of money that the case was entailing. Who could disagree? Any case in which one side is allowed to spend 15 months on its opening statement is clearly a waste -- but it was Mr. Justice Mitchell who allowed it.

Just because the parties involved paid for the court to be fitted out did not mean that they owned it. It was Mr. Justice Mitchell's court, and if he allowed lawyers to talk and talk and take Fridays and British holidays off then that was his fault.

Still, the fault does not all lie with him. Some of Britain's best lawyers have allowed this trial to drag on as well.

Finally, the warring father and son in this case are at fault too. Surely they can see that only the lawyers are getting rich from this exercise. If they were to settle, they would save themselves and Bermuda the embarrassment of being a party to this absurd exercise in egotism.