Uncommon knowledge

Perhaps someone will write a book about the number of books that were written during lockdown. You might not have expected so many: it’s much harder to research a non-fiction book when you can’t visit a library or meet a source. Some authors worked remotely, though. And others wrote about themselves.

The latest legal figure to publish his memoirs is Harry Woolf, now 89 (pictured below). As unthreatening as Paddington Bear, he was the one judge that everyone admired.

Perhaps not everyone – the newspapers thought he was soft on crime, not least in 2000 when, as lord chief justice, he decided that the two deeply disturbed boys who had murdered two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 would not have to enter the adult prison system.

Others marvelled at the determination with which Woolf overcame his undiagnosed dyslexia and a teenage stutter to excel in a profession where reading and speaking are so fundamental.

He had a charmed legal career. After a university prank and a night in the cells, the young Woolf received a conditional discharge from the Bow Street magistrate. That was no bar to becoming a barrister.

Although tax law was a topic on which he claimed to be ‘totally ignorant’, at the age of 39 he became revenue junior – advising the Inland Revenue and conducting cases for them in court. A year later, he found himself promoted to treasury devil, advising and representing every department of government. The job is hugely demanding but, in those days, it led straight to the bench and Woolf, then 45, became the youngest member of the High Court in 1979. The Court of Appeal followed in 1986 and he was made a law lord in 1992.

Woolf might have remained in the Lords if fate had not intervened. Lord Taylor of Gosforth, lord chief justice of England and Wales and a fellow Jewish Geordie, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. Taylor was succeeded in 1996 by Lord Bingham, who was then master of the rolls. Woolf was then offered the MR’s job.

That gave him pause for thought because the post is associated historically with the expulsion of England’s Jews in 1290; those who chose instead to embrace Christianity would be accommodated by the MR in a House of Converts. Woolf took the job, becoming only the second – or possibly third – Jewish master of the rolls. Though he does not mention this, all but one of his six successors are of Jewish descent.

Woolf ran the civil division of the Court of Appeal for four years until fate once again intervened. Bingham was a perfectly good chief justice but the law lords needed a strong leader in the wake of the Pinochet debacle. Woolf was a perfectly good MR but better suited to the post of chief justice. And Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, a new law lord, was just the person to take over as master of the rolls. Lord Irvine of Lairg, the lord chancellor, made an inspired three-way switch on a single day in 2000 – something that would now be impossible.

I had been hoping to learn more about this move. Woolf also skates lightly over the alarming and lengthy loss of mental capacity suffered by Lord Widgery, who had to stand down as lord chief justice in 1980. ‘Initially he was still as fully in command of the court as he had been in the past,’ writes Woolf, who sat with him in the divisional court. ‘But after a time it became clear that he was not well and was very much in need of the increasing support that I could give him as a former treasury devil… Fortunately, however, Lord Widgery retired before any real damage could be done.’

Similarly, I would like to have known more about Woolf’s negotiations with Irvine’s successor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, over the constitutional settlement known as the concordat. The closest that Woolf comes to criticising Falconer is over his statutory provision permitting the lord chancellor ‘to be qualified by experience’. ‘Unhappily,’ writes Woolf, ‘the language of the statute has failed to ensure that the prime minister of the day always appoints a lord chancellor who is suited to bear that title… Nine individuals have been appointed who have been insensitive through ignorance or other shortcomings and who have just not been up to the standards the job requires.’

In retirement Woolf has been busier than ever, setting up an inter-faith foundation, conducting wide-ranging inquires and creating courts in Qatar and Kazakhstan. All this and rather a lot more is faithfully recorded in his book, priced at £65 for the hardback. But it seems churlish to question this – or the book’s omissions – when its author is still so much admired.

An Uncommon Lawyer, by Lord Woolf CH, is published by Hart Publishing.

joshua@rozenberg.net