Over a picnic of roasted potatoes and mixed nuts on top of Winchester’s St Catherine’s Hill, the man dubbed the ‘Naked Rambler’ shares his thoughts on the burkini ban and the ‘mixed up’ nature of the law, and explains why he chose to spend years in jail to defend his right to go about in the buff.

I meet Stephen Gough at the top of a hill overlooking Winchester prison, one of the jails in which he was incarcerated due to his desire not to wear clothes in public.

Gough has cycled to the meeting point, which he selected. He is clothed in black lycra cycling shorts and an orange T-shirt — the latter of which quickly comes off due to the heat.

After spending more than 10 years in prison because of his wish not to wear clothes, the 57-year-old former Marine has taken to dressing in order to be able to be a fulltime carer for his mother, who suffers from dementia.

As debate rages about whether Muslim women should be permitted to cover their entire bodies when on the beach – a right which our hero ardently supports — Gough has found himself in trouble with the law for wearing too little.

Having left the marines, started a family and lived for while on a commune in Canada, he began going about naked, he explains, after he ‘started to question things’.

‘If your mind is a bit curious you start questioning things. Why do people shake hands — what do we do that for? Why do we use phrases like “raining cats and dogs” or “what are you up to”? When you start to take a more objective look at life, you start questioning things’.

Out of curiosity he went to a nudist beach. ‘All the people with different shaped bodies – they didn’t seem particularly self-conscious. I thought this is great – why aren’t we like this all the time?’

Pushing the boundaries, he went nude on a beach that was not for naturists. ‘No one seemed to say anything, but when I went into the water, a guy came up to me and growled “pervert” under his breath.’

But, he stresses, there is nothing perverted, or even sexual, in his wish to wear only his birthday suit.

‘It’s a deep thing. It’s not really about nakedness. It’s about the innocence that we are. It’s a celebration of what I am and what we are.

‘It’s not really about the body. It’s an expression of what I am as a human being – it’s innocent and good. If what I am in a deep sense is good then what I am externally is good too’.

People in general, he suggests are confused about the portrayal of the human body. A healthy relationship with your body, he suggests, is ‘indifference’.

‘People who strut their bodies about have a twisted mentality – they’re identifying their body as being who they are. A long time ago a girl said to me “I like you cos of your body”. I was insulted by that – that’s not who I am. She missed who I was. I’m not about my body.’

Those who suggest that wearing clothes has something to do with preserving modesty or decency, he says, have missed the point and misunderstand the meaning of the terms.

‘The context in which people use the term immodesty has got mixed up. It’s not related to what I’m doing, but the attitude in which they are doing it. I wasn’t trying to express how great I was — the “I” meaning Steve Gough — but how great I am, we all are as part of the greater expression of nature.’

Wearing clothes, he says, is just ‘conditioning’. ‘When someone does things differently, it challenges opinions — often ones we have never really thought about.

‘When I walk naked from A to B in this country, I’m breaking culture, because you don’t see people doing it. It’s like if I started shaking hands with people with my left hand instead of my right hand.’

He doesn’t find it embarrassing being naked in an environment where others are clothed. ‘You get used to it,’ he says.

His choice to be naked cost him the relationship with a former partner. ‘She couldn’t give me a good reason why I shouldn’t be naked, because there is no good reason. It’s just convention’.

On his right to dress or rather not to dress, as he sees fit, Gough insists: ‘It’s not a right I need to really fight for; it’s a right you’ve got. Nothing says you can’t be naked, so you can be naked. There’s no law that bans you from being naked; it is not a crime’.

As a ‘celebration of being human’ in 2003 Gough walked naked from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

He was arrested several times for causing harassment, distress or alarm, under Section 5 of the Public Order Act. Then the police upped the ante and slapped him with an anti-social behaviour order, or ASBO, which banned him from appearing in public without his genitals being covered. For breaching that, which he repeatedly did, he found himself jailed – sometimes being re-arrested as he left prison naked.

Gough has spent almost 10 years in jail – naked – and much of which has been in solitary confinement, and in Scotland, which he says, was pretty chilly. ‘I had to do exercises to keep warm – step ups on the bed’.

To imagine what it’s like, he says is ‘quite simple – just lock yourself in a room for a day.’

His time in prison, he reflects, had no real impact on him mentally, though he finds the length of time he has been jailed – longer than some rapists – ‘very bizarre’.

He sees himself, as others described him — a ‘prisoner of conscience’.

‘I’ve been jailed for doing nothing and really for doing a good thing – just expressing myself as a human being. That’s what I’ve been imprisoned for in a supposedly free country – something as innocent as that – it’s like, wow, it (society) can’t be that free then, can it?’

The law, reckons Gough, is ‘pretty flexible’. ‘I heard something once – a judge said what I do is make the right decision and fit the law around it.’

And he agrees with that approach. ‘A good judge will do the right thing and then say a lot of things to make it sound right.’

He has come across a range of responses from the benches he has appeared before. ‘Some judges said it was a contempt of court when I was in court naked and sent me out. Three or four judges in Scotland let me cross examine witnesses naked’.

The law and legal practice, he concludes, is ‘all over the place.’ ‘The police have let me go and cheered me on, when they can do it without getting into trouble,’ he notes.

His most recent conviction was in October 2014, when he was not allowed to appear unclothed in the court. He subsequently appealed the conviction and 30-month sentence and made legal history in 2015 appearing naked, albeit via video-link, at the Court of Appeal, which dismissed his appeals.

The previous year, the European Court of Human Rights dismissed his case alleging that his repeated arrest, prosecution, conviction and imprisonment for being in the buff in public, infringed his rights to private and family life and freedom of expression.

Gough has lodged a second challenge to the Strasbourg Court on the basis that the indefinite ASBO is an unjustified and disproportionate infringement of his right to freedom of expression.

Despite the length of time he has been imprisoned and missing out on much of the childhoods of his two children, Gough insists he has no regrets. He is not angry at the way he has been treated; more baffled.

His barrister, Matthew Scott, too has written copiously about the lunacy and cost of imprisoning his client.

Times columnist Danny Finkelstein wrote a piece last December suggesting that in his wish to be naked, Gough is perhaps ahead of the curve, but he insists that he must act within the law to change the law.

The Fink penned: ‘Mr Gough is not being jailed to squash his liberty and personal freedom, he is being jailed because we are committed to liberty and personal freedom and believe that only the rule of law can secure it’.

Gough’s response: ‘The rule of law – what does that mean? I’ve read books on it and some judges don’t understand it’.

His definition of the rule of law is simple: ‘The rule of law is your truth. So I am following the rule of law – that truth in all of us. It’s that deep thing of how I know what’s right – a gut instinct.

‘I reckon you could take anyone from any culture, if they can get in touch with their innocence and rule of law gut instinct, we’d all be the same. All humans have got it. What gets in the way is when we get attached to ideas and beliefs — that’s called being closed-minded.’.

Will you carry on with his naked crusade?

‘I really don’t know. I’m not into planning things. At the moment I am complying with the ABSO, so that I don’t get arrested because I want to look after my mum’.

He continues: ‘I often think about it. Why am I sitting here in the heat with these sweaty bottoms on? But, I know if I acted sensibly and stripped off now and got myself a bit aired, someone might come across and call the police and I wouldn’t be able to look after my mum’.

‘Right now, what is important in life is to be alive,’ he says, adding that his goal in life is ‘to achieve freedom’. But then he corrects himself: ‘Actually, what I just said is rubbish. You can’t achieve freedom, you can only be it.’

Over steak tartar, grilled fish and a spicy virgin Mary at The Ivy, the criminal barrister who rules over his own tv court and is bezza mates with actor Benedict Cumberbatch, reveals what goes on behind the scenes, recalls the good old days of the bar and discusses his fear for its future.

ITV’s hit reality series, Judge Rinder, stormed the airwaves in August 2014. Presided over by 2 Hare Court’s Robert Rinder, the show airs daily in the week and bagged the top daytime programme accolade at last months Royal Television Society awards, something of which its star is hugely proud.

Rinder got the gig almost by accident. His hobby was script-writing. Coming back down to earth with a bang after working on a meaty case in the Turks and Caicos Islands and finding himself schlepping off to Croydon Crown Court everyday, he pitched a script to Helen Warner, at an ITV production company.

She received it, he recalls, with ‘her undivided indifference,’ but the pair got chatting over email about doing a British version of the US hit court show, Judge Judy.

Warner asked if Rinder would be interested in doing it and they arranged a meeting. ‘She put it on TV and I’m here. It was a series of random events’.

Daily, Rinder metes out his own brand of sassy, camped up, no nonsense justice, and has become the master of the withering put down.

A couple that will be familiar to fans are ‘When my lips are moving, yours aren’t’ and ‘I can smell a lie like a fart in a lift.’

And the classic line delivered to one litigant on a sticky wicket: ‘The problem is, there’s a lovely phrase, which let me tell you, in Darlington they think of nothing else. It’s called caveat emptor.’

Any snooty viewer who dismisses the show as car-crash, Jeremy Kyle-style justice, would be very wrong. It is public legal education at its most successful – going daily into people’s sitting rooms to explain the law in simple, accessible terms and in a manner that the public actually choses to engage with.

‘I know there’s an element of pantomime to an extent, but it wouldn’t have worked if it didn’t have integrity. I wouldn’t have done it if I felt it was going to be the law does jazz hands’.

From start to finish Rinder and the production take the cases ‘absolutely seriously’.

‘We film eight to 10 cases a day. Each is treated as if it were being dealt with in the small claims court’. Some take up to an hour-and-a-half to deal with, though the clip shown has to whittled down to 30 minutes.

Apart from being filmed in a studio building, he says: ‘We do everything to get all the sense of a real court environment, albeit a bit American.’

Rinder presides wearing a barrister’s gown, but no wig. Much to the consternation of English legal system purists, a gavel sits beside him. ‘It is just symbolic; I don’t bang it.’

Before a case gets on the show, much work has gone on behind the scenes. ‘The guys that make the programme are amazing – it’s a creative community of young people, none of whom has a legal background’.

He explains: ‘They have to find the cases (not just from people calling in, but scouring twitter or internet forums like Mumsnet), consider if they are going to be sufficiently interesting, understand the regulatory landscape to know if it’s a case we can do, speak to the parties and persuade them to come to court and then actually get them there’.

For doubters, he insists that all the cases are authentic and the parties are not actors. ‘We are so regulated by Ofcom. The team has to do a shed-load of due-diligence to make sure the cases are real, the parties haven’t already been to court and that people aren’t just trying to get on telly’.

The production team frame the cases alongside the litigants and produce a synopsis for the judge. ‘Very often that will mean full on litigants in persons coming in with truck-loads of papers. The guys have to go through everything and they do it with the parties, sometimes until three, four or five o’clock in the morning’.

Another headache for the producers, he says, it that they cannot be sure how somebody will react to the court environment. ‘Outside, one party might tell the producers that they are super-cross with the litigant on the other side, but when they see each other for the first time coming into court, their whole attitude changes’.

Although Rinder is a criminal barrister, rather than a civil law judge, the law delivered, he insists is ‘100% the real deal’ and the judgments have the same effect as in an arbitration.

While there’s an element of ‘entertainment and oddness’ in some of the cases – for instance, tattooing a penis onto a man’s leg, and the wrong pies being provided for a pie-eating competition – most of them are ‘about fairly mundane issues, which everybody has to deal with – broken contracts, dodgy holidays, lending money, rubbish workmen, cars that have broken down and basic consumer issues’.

There are, he regrets, many cases that he is unable to do. ‘We get a huge number of calls about dodgy mobiles, but surprise, surprise, the companies don’t want to appear on our programme’.

And the cases covered have triggered conversations about the law across social media. ‘They are not ground-breaking principles of international law or things that will get into Treitel [the seminal contract law text], but about things that are important to ordinary people, like the importance of getting contracts in writing and how to read a tenancy agreement’.

While the litigants putting themselves forward for the show are not a result of the legal aid cuts, as most cases would not have attracted public funding, many have been put off going to law because of the perception that it is financially out of reach and too complicated.

Rinder is keen to bust those myths for small civil claims like those on the show. He’d like to see more people going to the small claims court, which he says, has low costs implications and where the process is not complicated to navigate.

Those who appear on the show, he says, come with an idea of the law from what they have seen on television dramas. ‘When they get here, they realise it’s not like that.’

The perception of many that the law is against them, says Rinder, also acts as powerful disincentive. ‘People hear things about the law and take them up as true-isms, which can result in serious things like dads walking away from families’.

The positive reaction to the programme from the bar, he puts down to the fact that he ‘put in his time’ in practice before turning to telly. ‘It’s not like I came from nowhere. I’d done more than a decade of high profile, serious cases and worked with and been lead by the most brilliant people’.

Explaining why his chambers have been so supportive, he says: ‘Where people are good and busy and professionally confident, they tend to be nicer, because they are less insecure’.

That’s not to say that he does not get a good ribbing from some colleagues. ‘David Howker QC can do a full Judge Rinder impression. He can do a whole case; it’s hilarious’.

He is grateful for the supportive reception from the legal press, singling out Times hack, Jonathan Ames, who edits The Brief, and who did the first interview with him after the show’s launch, for website LegalCheek.

‘I’m such a fan of Jonathan Ames. He seems a good egg and his writing is really good and very funny.’

Quality writing, he observes, is a rare thing. And it is something that he is getting to grips with, penning a column for The Sun. He started answering readers’ legal problems, but has branched out to introducing them to a new legal topic each week and trying to make them more ‘sceptical and questioning’ about what they read.

Would the tv judge like to be an actual judge? ‘I don’t know. Ask me in few years. I feel I’d look good in ermine.

And how does he think judges will do when their sentencing remarks are televised? ‘I think they will behave impeccably’.

The north London, Jewish lad is the son of a black taxi driver and a successful businesswoman who bought, and later sold, the London Publishing Corporation.

His parents divorced when he was little so he ended up with two backgrounds. ‘On the one hand I was brought up by my amazing middle class mum and on the other I had real working class roots. I’m incredibly close to both sides of my family’.

After grammar school, he became the first in his family to go to university – Manchester – where he got a double first in history and politics, and where he met his best mate, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

‘I loved my university degree. It’s easy when you like it,’ he says, reflecting that he would not have liked the idea of doing a law degree.

‘It’s such a different landscape now the way people come to law. When I went to university it was free, so there is more scope to be freer about your choice of what to study’.

He ‘fell into law, ‘ he says by a ‘series of accidents’ due to the debating he did at uni, winning international competitions.

‘I always say that as a foundation for the bar, debating is way more important than mooting. Everybody who did debating went to the bar, so it was a no-brainer’.

He fancied crime ‘because that was where the advocacy, the talking, the constructing of an argument and being on your hind legs was’ but he only ‘fell in love’ with it after starting pupillage at Desmond de Silva’s 2 Paper Buildings.

‘It was while the party was coming to an end, but it was still sort of in full swing. It was just a great time to be at the bar. People were being properly paid, within reason – it wasn’t as good as in the past, but you could make a living and the work was really interesting’.

The bar is not the same now, with the legal aid cuts and other pressures: ‘Things kind of changed. Instead of discussing law in chambers people were constantly talking about funding’.

He got his break from a Birmingham solicitor, Mohammed Nasser. ‘He noticed me and gave me a brief to try me out. From there I got a series of quite high profile trials, doing back-to-back gang work, murders, then eventually terrorism’.

His first big case was representing one of the four men charged with the 2003 murders of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis. It was the first trial in which witnesses were allowed to remain anonymous.

‘It was an amazing situation to be in court, where you could see the witness, but you were barred by a court order from disclosing any of the details to your client – what they looked or sounded like, which could have revealed their identities’.

Having practised for more than a decade, at 2 Hare Court for more than half  his career, he observes: ‘Being at the bar completely challenges your judgements about people. It schools you out of making judgements about people and having preconceptions based on things that other people do’.

He is worried about the future of his profession. ‘There always will be an independent criminal bar – my chambers, 6KBW, 3 Raymond Buildings, Hollis Whiteman and several other sets will always be there.

‘But the critical question is whether there will be a publicly funded criminal bar? The answer is that I can’t see it’.

He accepts that the criminal bar cannot be immune from commercial pressures and needs to think creatively about how it operates, but warns that the ‘wholesale assault on legal aid’ and criminal justice funding is having a negative impact across the board, lowering the quality of the defence and prosecution, and reducing diversity.

TV and writing (his book Rinder Rules: Make the Law Work for You! was published in October) mean that he is not currently working in court, though he remains a member of 2 Hare Court.

Will he go back to the bar? ‘Hopefully not full-time. I don’t think lawyers really appreciate just how stress-full the job is.

‘The level at which they’re operating, especially when it comes to the judgements that they’re making, both in terms of the implications for their clients and for them. In a big trial you’re making judgments all the time and the consequences for the individual involved are serious’.

And when you stop, he says, you can lose the intellectual muscle that you build up and the immunity you develop to cope with it all.

This weekend, he swaps his gown for his running shoes and his court for the streets of London. Rinder is running the marathon in aid of Buttle UK — a ‘really cool small charity’ that gives grants support children and families in crisis.

Good luck, Your Honour, and see you in court on Monday.

Over risotto and roast chicken at the Adjournment in Portcullis House, the libel silk who successfully represented Lord McAlpine, following allegations made on Twitter by Sally Bercow, and former Solicitor General discusses privacy injunctions in the internet age, why he won’t be publishing his tax return and the likely successor to David Cameron, if the public vote ‘out’ in the EU referendum.

As the Sun on Sunday and launched its bid to overturn the celebrity ‘threesome’ gagging order, following the naming of the pair in publications in America, Scotland and Ireland, Sir Edward Garnier QC insists that the situation does not make the law an ass or mean it is outmoded.

‘It just demonstrates the difficulties with privacy injunctions when you have a worldwide media system, the internet and social media age. Injunctions contra mondum – against the world – have become rather more difficult to enforce.

The law, he says, is ‘constantly catching up’. But adds that ‘judges are not hide bound and, guess what, judges look at the internet too’.

He ‘couldn’t give a monkey’s’ about the threesome story itself, but accepts that it ‘sells newspapers’.

Though he knows the names of the individuals concerned, Garnier says he does not know enough about the underlying facts or the basis on which the case was put to give a view on whether the Court of Appeal was right to grant the injunction.

The court, he surmises, would have heard the King Canute argument about the futility of granting an injunction, when the parties can be named elsewhere.

‘But simply because something is easy to evade or avoid, doesn’t mean to say the decision was not right.

‘And whether it was right or wrong, if you think the decision is wrong, there are appeal mechanisms rather than people taking the law into their own hands.’

He does not condone breaching the injunction, but the former Guardian lawyer understands the frustration of newspapers when the story ‘is running wild on the internet and is out there in the United States and jurisdictions beyond this one’.

He has some sympathy with the public grievance at the rich and famous who appear to court the media when it suits them and then use their wealth to gag the press when the attention is unwanted.

Where a celeb has courted publicity, Garnier suggests, a court would be less sympathetic to a plea to have their privacy maintained.

But he adds: ‘It depends which area of their life they are trying to protect. You may have a reputation as a footballer and have courted publicity about that, but you may not have shown off or courted publicity about your adulterous affairs.

‘It’s possible to promote yourself as a footballer, without having yourself promoted or exposed as an adulterer’.

Garnier supports the decision of the Commons’ speaker, John Bercow, banning MPs from naming the couple.

‘It’s a pity when members of Parliament go behind orders of the court [as John Hemming did in relation to footballer Ryan Giggs], in order to demonstrate that they know something and think they have the right to let everyone else know that they know’.

It is, he believes, important that the ‘two limbs of the constitution – the law and Parliament – respect each other’ and he doesn’t want to see them ‘taking lumps out of each other’.

An Irish-based political blogger who identified the pair online using an American-based server dismissed the notion that he could be arrested, telling The Times’ daily legal bulletin, The Brief: ‘You can’t arrest foreign people for doing things in their own country. What are the English going to do? Send the Royal Navy to shell my home?’

Agrees Garnier ‘They are no more going to send the Royal Navy to his home than they are to California or Ohio’.

But he adds: ‘He’s committed a contempt within this jurisdiction in the sense that his blog is readable in this jurisdiction, so it is published here’. As such, h he may find himself in trouble if he steps off a Ryan Air flight in London.

Despite the debacle, Garnier insists that privacy injunctions are not rendered pointless by the internationalisation of the media. ‘Some have nothing to do with celebrities, but relate to medical confidence and all sorts of other things that it is important to protect’.

Panama Papers fall out

Garnier plays down the impact of the tax dodges revealed as a result of the massive data leak from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

‘People do take an interest in it, but then people take an interest in all sorts of things, which dispassionately looked at are quite uninteresting. That’s not to say that tax evasion by political leaders, be they in Russia or China or wherever, isn’t of public interest.’

And any damage caused to Prime Minister, David Cameron, as a result of the coverage of his late father’s tax affairs, says Garnier, was ‘staunched’ by his statement to the House of Commons early in the week.

‘The story for the opposition and for those who want to embarrass David Cameron is that he and his team mishandled their reaction to the story, but there was nothing in the substance of the original story for him to be embarrassed about’.

The MP for Harborough, in Leicestershire, says he has received a couple of emails, to which he has not replied, from constituents asking if he has off-shore investment trusts and whether he will be releasing his tax return.

Garnier says he has no offshore trusts and the answer to the latter question is an emphatic ‘no’.

If he were Prime Minister, he says, he would not have released his tax details. But adds: ‘I’m not the Prime Minister and I don’t have the pressures on me that he had’.

The story, he suggests, has created a ‘feeding frenzy’ and although the ‘door has been opened’ on the tax affairs of the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Garnier thinks it would be ‘unwise’ to extend it further.

‘I don’t think anybody’s tax affairs should or needs to be revealed. People are prurient and enjoy poking around in other people’s business’.

Garnier sees nothing wrong in the existence of offshore financial services, defending them as a way for countries with no ‘indigenous industry’ to make money and an acceptable way for people in certain situations to deal and invest.

‘There’s nothing immoral or illegal about being an offshore country or having an offshore financial services industry. What is wrong is committing crime’.

Investigatory Powers Bill

The barrister and former solicitor general does not share the concerns of the Bar Council over the lack of measures to protect the safety and confidentiality of sources and whistle-blowers or those seeking legal representation, in the bill dubbed the Snoopers’ Charter, which gives greater powers of surveillance to the police and security services.

‘I think there is, perhaps understandably, misplaced and exaggerated concern,’ he says.

‘If someone is not involved in criminality, they won’t be investigated. There must be some basis upon which to investigate somebody and on which to persuade the commissioners that surveillance ought to be permitted.

‘The police don’t just say “let’s go out and do a bit of surveillance; we’ve got nothing else to do”.’

He is content to trust the police to operate within the law, though accepts that is not always the case.

‘I’m not saying the police are perfect; they are occasionally very stupid and badly behaved. But just because they behave like idiots on some occasions, doesn’t mean they do so on every occasion’.

Garnier is scathing of the police’s handing of the investigation into historic sex abuse allegations made against senior politicians, including his friend, the former Home Secretary, Lord Brittan, and other prominent members of the establishment.

In relation to Brittan and his widow, Garnier says, the behaviour of the police was ‘just dreadful’.

‘The poor man died with allegations of child sex abuse and an allegation of rape from 40 years ago still hanging over his head.’

Garnier has dealt with a number of cases of historic sexual abuse, and says: ‘They leave the most appalling long-lasting damage on the victim.

‘I’ve seen 50-year-old women who were abused when they were six, seven or eight, who are still suffering the consequences.’

And he states the way the ‘idiotic way’ that the police sometimes carry out investigations is ‘a real disgrace’.

‘It does the victims of genuine sex abuse cases no good; it does the justice system no good and it’s unfair on those who are pilloried.’

He adds: ‘Because a lot of people made a lot of mistakes in relation to Jimmy Savile, it doesn’t mean that you have to misconduct investigations into other people’.

Should the law be changed so that suspects are not named?

To this question, he says, there is no easy answer. ‘There’s a perfectly legitimate argument to say that by identifying the accused at an early stage you may enable other alleged victims to come forward and help with the case.

‘And in theory the acquittal, if and when it comes, is supposed to be sufficient to vindicate the accused, but of course, it never does’.

He represented a man falsely accused of rape, who successfully sued his accuser for defamation and received around £200,000 in damages.

‘But you can’t have a situation where every rape acquittal leads to the prosecution of the complainant.

‘I really don’t know what the answer is, but at the minute there is no satisfactory system whereby people who are falsely accused can have their reputation repaired’.

Prison isn’t working

As shadow prisons minister, Garnier looked into the effectiveness of the prison service. ‘Broadly, our system doesn’t work very well at stopping people from reoffending,’ he observes.

A trustee of the Prison Reform Trust, he is encouraged by Justice Secretary Michael Gove’s approach. ‘He is a justice minister who is genuinely interested in the subject. But like every government minister he is beset by budgetary problems’.

Garnier’s solution is to reduce the prison population, enabling more money to be spent on rehabilitation, and ‘beefing up’ the community punishment system, which he describes as ‘a mess’.

There are too many people in prison who should not be there, he argues, citing the large proportion of the prison population who are mentally ill or addicted to drugs and who should either be in hospital or be given help to get off drugs.

Observing that ‘the state is not a good parent,’ he also notes the high number of people who leave care and end up in the criminal justice system.

Tackling economic crime

As solicitor general, Garnier was instrumental in the introduction of the American –style deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) for those companies held to account under the Bribery Act 2010 and for several other financial crimes.

After the first DPA was approved by the court last year, lawyers predicted a slew would follow, but that has not immediately happened. But Garnier speculates that confidential negotiations between the Serious Fraud Office and potential respondents to DPAs, are on-going.

And his assessment of the beleaguered SFO? ‘It’s got a huge caseload and it is under-resourced’.

‘When I went to Manhattan as solicitor general, looking at the American way of doing DPAs, I remember telling the district attorney that the SFO’s budget was coming down from something like £40m a year to around £29m a year. He asked “is that just for one office” and I told him that was for the whole operation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

‘And he didn’t say this, but I make it up: “I spend more on flowers in my office than that”.

He explains: ‘Until recently we’ve never really taken economic crime as seriously as we have blood and guts crime. People say “it’s only money, nobody’s hurt” or “it’s only a bank or insurance company – so what”.

‘But actually these are very serious crimes that undermine the whole way our economy works’.

One of the problems in tackling corporate economic crime, he notes, is the fact that the prosecuting authorities still have to grapple with the Victorian ‘directing mind’ principle.

‘It’s quite difficult with massive international companies to work out where the directing mind is. If your agent or divisional manager in some far off place, does something he shouldn’t, does that attach to the directing mind of the board in London?’

Garnier would like to see the law move to the vicarious liability system that is used in the United States.

The first DPA, in which he acted for the SFO, involved a charge under section 7 of the Bribery Act 2010 – failure to prevent – which, he says, is the nearest we get to vicarious liability.

He would also like to see an increase in the number of offences that come within the ambit of failure to prevent. ‘Until we do, people will be feel they can get away with misconduct’.

‘The Prime Minister is clear that corruption is a bad thing and he wants to devote more government time on dealing with it. But you need to provide the SFO and the CPS with the necessary weapons to do it. It’s not just money; it’s also deployment of expertise’.

Human Rights Act v British bill of rights

Garnier does not support the proposal to replace the Human Rights Act, which allows UK nationals to rely on rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights before the domestic courts, with a British bill of rights.

‘We should remain adherent to the ECHR. I’m not sure a British bill of rights would add anything to it – we’re either a member of the Convention or we’re not.

‘And even if we were to come out of the Convention or if we were to pretend we were to come out of it by having a British bill of rights, I can’t believe that the judiciary would dis-apply convention jurisprudence.

Brexit

But on the UK’s membership of the EU, Garnier is with the PM on this, saying: ‘I have taken a fairly positive view about the European Union since before I became an MP’.

‘The strongest argument for remaining in the European Union (accepting that it’s one of the most frustrating institutions you can possibly come across, it’s in many respects badly run, its accounts are a pile of the proverbial and it’s terribly difficult to get decisions made) is that we have a single market of five hundred million people and that’s not a bad thing to have sitting on your doorstep’.

On which way the vote will go, he says, ‘it is too close to call. It’s going to be very close’ and affected by things that have got nothing to do with the European Union.

If the vote does not go the PM’s way, Garnier says the ‘general received wisdom’ is that Cameron ‘wouldn’t last until the weekend.’

‘If that happens, and I hope it doesn’t, we will need an orderly handover and not a rushed leadership election.

‘If the vote is ‘out’ the obvious candidates for who would succeed Cameron, speculates Garnier, would be London mayor, Boris Johnson or justice secretary and lord chancellor, Michael Gove, but there will no doubt be others throwing their hats in the ring, such as Home Secretary Theresa May’.

Role of the Lord Chancellor

On the role of the Lord Chancellor, Garnier believes it should be held by a lawyer and he would like to see it separated from the role of Justice Secretary.

Secretary of state for justice, he says, is a ‘spending role’ like any other secretary of state and the holder does not need to be legally qualified.

But, on the position of Lord Chancellor he states: ‘The judiciary needs a voice in cabinet and it’s important to have a reasonably senior and respected lawyer in cabinet’.

Reshuffled

Appointed Solicitor General in the coalition government following the May 2010 election, Garnier was, to the surprise of many, replaced by Oliver Heald just over two years’ later.

On being shuffled out, Garnier is sanguine, observing: ‘Politics is a strange business. If you come into politics thinking you are going to be seamlessly promoted purely on your charm and merit, you’re heading for a fall.’

Adding: ‘The trouble about being in a coalition is that the prime minister needs to let everybody have a go’.

He was not surprised when his colleague Dominic Grieve QC was sacked as Attorney General almost two years later, but says he would not have got rid of him.

And how does he rate the current AG/SG duo?

‘Well they’re there’.

‘It’s fair to say, and it’s not controversial, that the bar was surprised by their appointments, for two reasons – (a) they hadn’t heard of them and then, (b) when they found out who they were, they realised they didn’t have any high court or appellate experience’.

He adds: ‘They’ve survived longer than I did and they’ve made a pretty good fist of it’.

Why law?

The son of a colonel, Garnier read history at Jesus College, Oxford before studying for the bar, which he says he did initially to give him a couple of years to think about what he wanted to do, but found he enjoyed it.

Though his great-grandfather had been a barrister and a more distant ancestor had been Solicitor General, Attorney General and Lord Chief Justice in the eighteenth century, he did not have close links to the profession.

He recalls his ‘luck’ getting into One Brick Court chambers, in which he has spend his career: ‘My father happened to live next door to a partner at Bird & Bird, John Hartley, and his younger brother, Richard Hartley, was a silk in those chambers. So I rang him up and asked to see him.

‘He took me to lunch with a chap called Richard Rampton and half way through lunch he said “oh by the way, Richard, Edward’s going to be your pupil in September”.

‘Richard said ok and I’ve been there ever since’.

Leon Brittan was in the same set. ‘I used to go into his room and talk about politics. He told me “stop talking about it and go and do something about it.’ So here I am’.

His son is following him in to the law and is currently doing a pupillage in a shipping set. His advice to aspiring barristers is ‘don’t go into it unless you are prepared to put your back into it’.

There are, he says, two bars – the privately funded bar and the publicly funded bar.

‘The publicly funded bar is impoverished. There are hundreds of utterly wonderful and dedicated people working at what’s left of the criminal legal aid bar earning peanuts.

‘I heard of a barrister who went down to a hearing at Winchester – they were paid £45 for the hearing and it cost them 50 quid return to get there’.

He warns that the derisory pay will cause the most able criminal barristers to quit, with the knock-on effect on the judiciary. ‘We will have to have inadequate people, both as advocates and as judges’.

No longer in office, Garnier continues his media law and corporate criminal practise at the bar.

His practise is predominantly advisory, so he is not in court much, making him able to combine the job with parliamentary and constituency duties. ‘I’m quite capable of bashing out a letter to a constituent about a drain or a bus stop and then advising on section 7 of the Bribery Act or on whether an article is defamatory’.