Held, application dismissed. An application for an order of venire de novo could not be made on a freestanding basis, it could be made only in the course of an application for permission to appeal against conviction. The key point to recognise was that the writ of venire de novo was a remedy. That was its historical origin. It remained a remedy with the advent of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. Although its survival was not, perhaps, at first recognised it was used to enable the court to order a retrial. It was exercised by that court in the event that a conviction was found to be null and void. The provisions of Section 53(2) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 had not created a division between the merits and the vires jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division. The jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division with which we were concerned was to hear appeals against conviction. It was a single jurisdiction created by statute. It was exercised when a person applied to the court for leave to appeal. Once the application had been made and leave had been granted, the court would consider whether to allow the appeal or to uphold the conviction. It might determine that it could not uphold the conviction because the conviction was null and void in the sense that the trial was invalid for some reason. The court then might order the issue of a writ of venire de novo. It was not then exercising some separate jurisdiction; rather it was dealing with the position by way of a particular remedy. The language of section 53(2)(d) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 was the language of remedy. It referred to the jurisdiction to order the issue of the writ. It did not speak of a jurisdiction to apply for the issue of the writ (paras 27, 34).