In defence of healthy opposition

Glasses chinked. From massive chandeliers, lights glittered beneath the high vaulted ceiling; heroic statuary around the carved stone walls stared eyelessly down; heraldic flags draped from brass rods; and a sense of history and of – how shall I say? – consequence hung in the air. We were dining at the Guildhall in the City of London, and from my place at the top table, flanked by judges, eminent barristers, our host Lord Grabiner QC of One Essex Court chambers, and the justice minister Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, one could survey the whole hall: perhaps 400 of the brightest and best in the English legal world.

These were not, for the most part, old men. The occasion was the Times’s annual law awards: an essay competition for young lawyers. Young men and women of great promise mingled with men and women of great distinction. My own editor, John Witherow, speaking at these awards in a previous year, had observed that ‘there hasn’t been a greater collection of forthright opinions in one room since the last time Michael Gove dined alone’.

I was there in the editor’s place. In these violent times, as newspaper headlines change by the hour, Fleet Street editors must go light on the ceremonial, and our guests understood that. They were perhaps less sympathetic towards the absence of the Lord Chancellor and justice secretary, who has always attended. Dominic Raab had not bothered. I’ve hung around politics for long enough to remember a long line of lord chancellors, from Lord Hailsham in the 1980s to the errant Mr Raab, and so was able in my speech to compare the series with that famous cartoon called the Ascent of Man: a line starting with a chimpanzee and ending with a proud and upright human being, only (I suggested) in the case of lord chancellors it seems to be the other way round.