Then, after shouting for several minutes that he declared himself innocent and that he had "never ordered the death of anybody", he was asked to calm down by the judge.
Mr Cooper said he had been further angered by the treatment of anti-nuclear protesters, and also by an incident involving Walter Wolfgang, then 82, who was thrown out of the 2005 Labour Party conference for shouting "nonsense" at then foreign secretary Jack Straw as he delivered a speech.
And so there's a belief that you can keep your audience if you focus more on these kinds of shouting and, you know, if you start discussing policy, then maybe they're going to switch to another channel.