Roger Boyes, Berlin Correspondent of The Times, reports from Vienna on David Irving's failed attempt to persuade a jury that he really had changed his spots.

"It was like a free speech seminar. We had al-Jazeera here and Jyllands-Posten [Danish newspaper], all the people affected by the cartoon war. Everyone one was asking why it's taboo to attack the Holocaust but not to attack the Prophet Muhammad.

"But the case was fought on the detail of what Irving said, testing whether he's really retreated, whether his apologies are really worth anything, whether the judge and jury could believe in his remorse.

"Irving arrived with a phalanx of black-shirted riot police 20 minutes before the trial started, held up his book, Hitler's War, and basically held an impromptu press conference in which he dismissed the trial as ridiculous, saying it was 16 or 17 years since he made these comments.

"When he got into court, the audience was a mixture of law students, concentration camp survivors and right-wing sympathisers - including a couple from Britain. But there was no unruliness.

"Irving walked in with a swagger but soon ended pushed up against the wall in cross-questioning by the judge that forced him to apologise or express regret for almost every utterance he had made over the past 20 years.

"He admitted saying in 1989 that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. But he is saying that since he saw various documents in 1992 he has changed his mind and now accepts that Jews were killed.

"It's a jury trial and Irving kept on making references to his daughter, hoping that he would get a suspended sentence so he could leave Austria. But the judge pushed him all the time, demanding apologies - he was even tougher than the prosecutor.

"The essential weakness of Irving's case is that the libel case in London, which finished in 2000, showed him even then to be a distorter of the historical truth and exposed lots of his arguments as false. So it's hard for him to claim that he stopped being a Holocaust denier back in 1992.

"He pleaded guilty and claimed that he's changed his spots. But the jury was quick to spot there were limits Irving’s remorse. He was adamant that Hitler was not involved in the Holocaust and that he had actually helped Jews.

"Irving also played the rhetorical trick of the far Right: exaggerating the number of German civilians killed in Dresden and playing down the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The jury, led by the judge, saw through these tactics and reached a unanimous verdict guilty verdict and recommended a jail term."