Within sight of where he used to sleep rough, the convicted fraudster and former football hooligan, who became a criminal silk and hosted a TV series talks about his old chum Michael Gove, the lawyers’ ‘futile’ strike action and ‘venal’ solicitors.

An article about Gary Bell QC in The Spectator, penned by his friend James Dellingpole, described him as the ‘rudest man in Britain’ and ‘exceedingly fat’.

So I was pleasantly surprised by the not-so-fat and hugely courteous gentleman who pitched up for lunch at the Fields Bar and Kitchen in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

His entry in Who’s Who at the start of his autobiography, Animal QC: My Preposterous Life, gives away a little of his background, listing his career as coalminer, lawnmower mechanic, forklift truck driver, fireman, pork pie production line worker and homeless drifter, before stating that he was called to the bar by Inner Temple in 1989.

Before what he describes as a ‘Kafka-esque metamorphosis’, Bell was born in Nottingham in the 1960s and destined to follow his father Terry into a life down the pits.

In a truncated, potted history of his early life (a longer and more entertaining version can be read in the pages of his book), Bell recalls: ‘We lived in a condemned slum in St Ann’s. When they knocked it down, we had to move to a village where there was a new colliery, with lovely housing. We had an indoor loo – it was a massive shock and a lovely pleasure.’

Despite being offered a scholarship to the private Nottingham Boys’ School — which he had to turn down owing to various complicated family reasons — Bell left school at 16 without taking exams.

He proudly highlights an extract from his school PE report — one of his best subjects – which is reproduced in the book: ‘Has succeeded in making a thorough nuisance of himself this year and has made no progress whatever.’

Bell received no career guidance from either his parents or school. ‘Everybody went down the pit, so there was no point dwelling on any other ambitions and aspirations’.

After leaving school, he scuttled through a number of short-lived jobs. ‘I was a coal miner for days; I was really crap at that. I became an apprentice mechanic and got the sack after three days for being really crap. I became a forklift truck driver in a pet food warehouse and I did that for two years. Then I joined the fire brigade, but when I was waiting for my training I got in a bit of bother with the police and ended up getting arrested for fraud’.

Working temporarily for a fruit machine company, the ‘enterprising, but directionless’ Bell sussed that he could earn more money playing the machines using a 10 pence piece attached to a wire.

Although not a hugely serious matter, he received a six-month sentence, suspended for two years after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud, the conviction lost him several jobs and could have scuppered his later ambitions for the bar before it had even begun.

Quitting his job at the pork pie factory, Bell bought a tent and headed for Europe in search of ‘fame and fortune’. Finding neither, he eventually returned home and, aged 20, went back onto education – to do his O and A-levels with the aim of becoming a barrister.

Pursuing a career in law was not something to which Bell had given a great deal of thought. ‘I just saw a bloke driving a Jaguar that I liked when I was young. He stopped outside an office that said ‘Solicitors’ and went in. That was a long time before I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I just thought being a barrister sounded a good thing to be’.

He adds: ‘I still think it sounds good. It’s sometimes not that good, but it still sounds good. It’s a very good career and it’s been very good to me’.

His mother’s reaction to her son’s decision was: ‘A barrister? You? People like us don’t become bloody barristers. Just get yourself a steady job, and then you can settle down and get married.’

Undeterred, the young Bell gained three A-levels – B in history, C in law and C in communication studies, and successfully applied to study law at Bristol University (as with much of his life events, there is a story behind his getting in).

It was during the summer after his first year, that Bell’s metamorphosis took place. He consciously dispensed with his Nottingham accent, with its flat vowels and dropped ‘hs’ and ‘gs’, and swapped his stonewashed Lee Coopers and white socks for the de rigueur Sloane Ranger rig-out.

Challenged to mimic the voice of his past, he makes a fair fist before slipping back into the RP voice he intones today. ‘I ‘ave to fink abou’ every word I say and gerrit right. It’s ‘ard, ‘cos I’ve been not talkin’ like this for now for abou’ twenny-eight years’.

Gaining a 2:2 in law and after a period employed at a US law firm, the would-be advocate attended an interview at the Inner Temple to discuss his application for the bar – necessitated by that criminal conviction.

After being assured that his two referees were aware of the conviction, the panel of benchers welcomed him to the Inn, stating: ‘Everybody is entitled to a second chance.’

During his time at bar school and not for the first or last time, Bell found himself sleeping rough – one spot that he favoured was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – he would return to it during his pupillage.

At times ‘bloody freezing’, sleeping rough, says Bell stoically, was not ‘the biggest encumbrance’.

‘Other people had absolutely no hope, but I was making my way up in life to become a silk hopefully.’ There was, he says, never a point when he felt he was not going to make it. And that drive and self-belief has not left him.

Having made it to the bar following countless serendipitous events on the way and no little endeavour, he has pursued a successful and eventful career and took silk three years ago.

On the posh-ness scale, he ranks himself ‘bog standard upper middle class’. But he doubts whether someone from his unpromising background could follow in his footsteps today because of the lack of grants and the need to pay tuition fees.

‘Opportunities have gone a great deal because paid pupillages have meant there are far less pupillages around and those that are will go to those who are the “right sort” — people who are connected.

‘It’s very difficult for anybody from my background to come to the bar,’ which, he laments, will result in the profession ‘losing its mavericks’ who tend to come from unorthodox backgrounds.

He continues: ‘The bar’s always been terribly proud that it has a bigger percentage of people from ethnic minority backgrounds than the other professions, but a lot of them are Sri Lankan maharajas and African princes. Show me some working class Indian and West Indian kids – there are some, but very few, and there will be a lot fewer now’.

To improve the situation, he would take a leaf out of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s book and abolish tuition fees completely. ‘It [education] is a right and people should be entitled to education as far as they can go,’ he reasons.

But his advice to aspiring criminal barristers is ‘don’t – because the profession is very difficult and society is very different now.

‘So if you do come into it, don’t have the same expectations and aspirations that I had,’ he cautions.

It was during his Bristol days that Bell got to know his ‘mate’ Michael Gove – now justice secretary and Lord Chancellor. Recognising that he ‘stood as much chance of getting a first as of joining the Chippendales,’ Bell threw himself into debating as a way of demonstrating ‘outstanding ability’.

He often found himself up against Gove on the Oxford University team, and does not recall ever beating him.

On his old pal, Bell states: ‘He’s a very amusing fellow, he’s extremely eccentric – he just is, he’s bonkers, but he’s very clever. He’s quite unguarded for a Tory, but he’s lucky in that he’s a conviction politician so he’s prepared to repeat it anywhere’.

Bell was not surprised that his mate became Lord Chancellor. ‘I was more surprised he didn’t become prime minister,’ he says.

Gove, he says, is ‘pretty approachable’. They see each other ‘pretty often’ and Bell does take the opportunity to talk to him about life at the criminal bar. And he adds, he is sometimes ‘used as a bit of a conduit by the Criminal Bar Association’.

He has faith in his chum. ‘I have to – nobody else is going to help us.’

Gove, he says, ‘gets it’. ‘I think he’ll be very good, within the confines of the budget envelope. I don’t think he’s got any power to go to George Osborne and say “you can’t hit the bar or solicitors anymore; you’re going to have to take it off nurses pay.’

Whether there will still be an independent criminal bar in five to 10 years time, he suggests, depends on his old debating adversary. Naturally, he hopes there will be.

‘I hope under Gove it won’t end. I hope it will strengthen’.

The biggest threat to its existence, he asserts, is not the two-tier system for solicitors’ contracts, but a situation that has existed for some time — the increasing use of solicitor higher court advocates (HCAs), who, he says, are insufficiently qualified and ‘not up to the job’.

‘If I wanted to be a dentist and decided to set up as a dentist tomorrow, I should think that the government would have something to say about it, like “why are you a dentist; you’re not qualified?”’

HCAs, he rates, as ‘rubbish’. ‘I’m sure they’re nice people and are nice to their children. I’m sure they do their best for their clients. Just the same as, if you chose me as your doubles partner in tennis, I’d do my best, but don’t rely on me hitting any top winners.’

He also describes the HCA qualification as rubbish. ‘The higher rights course is just stupid. I know people who’ve conducted major trials who’ve done nothing other than a bail application’.

If you want to be a barrister, he stresses: ‘There’s a way of doing it – which is qualify as a barrister – go to bar school, do your pupillage, get tenancy and make your way up. It’s not easy, but if you’ve got the ability and the drive, you can do it.’

The majority of solicitor HCAs, he suggests, are ‘failed barristers – who either started at the bar, but never got pupillage or tenancy, and for good reason, or who did but then found that they couldn’t make a living because they were useless.

‘So they go and work for these solicitor’s firms as very low paid HCAs and because the solicitors have got the ear of the client they can always persuade the client that this absolutely crap person that they employ is the best person to conduct their case.

‘They are the best person from one perspective — it’ll optimise the earning capacity of the solicitor’s firm. And if that means that the client has to go to prison for a few years, that’s not really a problem for the solicitor – at least they can buy another Aston Martin.’

Bell hopes Gove will ‘do something to stop solicitors making decisions about people’s liberty and the quality of their representation based upon their own financial interest.’

His ire is not directed towards HCAs themselves, but the firms that compel them to do higher court advocacy. ‘It means that venal solicitors will earn a lot more money. It’s greed; it’s avarice, which adds to our public relations disaster –people can see us being venal and that’s a perfect example of it’.

He is pretty confident that his words won’t get him de-briefed by solicitors who instruct him. ‘If there are any solicitors that read this who employ HCAs, they can fuck off anyway, because they’re destroying both professions’.

The strike action, taken by both solicitors and barristers at a time when Gove was engaging with practitioner groups, Bell describes as ‘absolutely useless’ and futile’, particularly as it was during the summer — the quietest time of year for the courts.

Though he did join the picket line. ‘I know I’m from Nottingham and we’re traditionally scabs up there, but I stood firm alongside everybody else’.

But he says: ‘You’re not going to win the hearts of the minds of the public by saying “more money for barristers”. And all the stuff about commitment to justice – it may well be right, but it’s really about a commitment to make sure that barristers and solicitors are paid enough to do their jobs, which you can understand”.

He continues: ‘A few less Burberry handbags would have been good on the marches. I don’t think that the public get it at all, from the barristers’ point of view and I don’t think the Socialist Workers’ Party are going to dust off their banners and start marching down Park Lane saying “more pay for barristers”.

He had harsh words for the ‘venal solicitors’ who took advantage of the situation for their own gain and nicked others’ work. And the Public Defender Service, drafted in to help with case in a couple of areas, he characterises as ‘a fantastic retirement fund for some silks and juniors who can’t make a living at the bar’.

‘They can’t make a living at the bar for the same reason that I can’t make a living as a model – I just don’t get the engagements. I don’t understand why – I think I’d be fantastic’.

HCAs get a tiny bashing in his book too. Elsewhere it provides an entertaining romp through the highs and lows at the bar. From his first appearance before the Hampstead bench, when he was rendered ‘almost dumbstruck’ at the ‘awesome responsibility’ of his task – a mode of trial hearing — up to the point where he received the email telling him that the Queen had approved the Lord Chancellor’s recommendation that he be appointed a QC.

Showing the softer side of the fearless defence advocate, Bell states: ‘I am not ashamed to say that I burst into tears.’ In between, he has also been an award-winning stand-up comic and a TV presenter.

Finishing his diabolo pizza, Bell sums up his ‘preposterous life’ in the words of Mr Crocker Harris, in Terrance Rattigan’s The Browning Version: ‘I got what I deserved. No more, no less.’

Over a pub lunch, the man who next year will lead whatever criminal bar is extant, discusses why advocates should train as solicitors, the legal aid gravy-train and the curse of twitter

Francis FitzGibbon QC caused a stir this month, becoming vice chair elect of the Criminal Bar Association. The result was announced at the same time as the outcome of the CBA’s ballot in favour of joining the solicitors’ protest over legal aid fee cuts.

FitzGibbon had stood on a ‘no to strike’ ticket, beating Garden Court North’s man, Mark George QC, whose pro-strike stance seemed to resonate more with the rank and file membership, if not with the CBA generals.

Escaping the teeming rain, I meet him at his hostelry of choice, the Duke of York, on Roger Street, just round the corner from his Doughty Street chambers. The 1930s establishment boasts numerous art deco mirrors, shell-shaped up-lighting, abundant yukka plants and hearty pub grub.

Under a cycling jacked, the diminutive figure with closely-cropped salt and pepper hair is casually dressed in tight khaki trousers and a light cotton pink and white striped shirt.

After a ‘fairly intense’ few months, during which he has done four murders and a rape, juggled with CBA activity, he is winding down before heading of on hols.

We head for a booth at the back of the pub away from the melee and ordering a cool lime juice and soda, he tells me he has spent the morning being briefed on a new knowledge database programme.

‘I’m trying to go paperless,’ he says. ‘I do that a lot more now. It took a bit of getting used to. Like many barristers of my generation, I’m a bit of a caveman when it comes to the more sophisticated online stuff, but I find it incredible helpful to have everything on my laptop so I don’t have to shuffle round endless files.’

An avid cyclist, who pedals his way to court whenever he can, he is keen to reduce the amount of clobber he has to cart around and tries to have only file containing all core material.

Without messing around with starters, he goes straight in for the main course – cheeseburger and chips.

Fifty-four-year old FitzGibbon, studied classics at Magdalen College, Oxford before falling into law.

He recalls: ‘Coming to the end of university I didn’t have much clue what I was going to do. My father had died that year and I was feeling at a lose end generally. A very close friend suggested we study law.

‘I thought that would be a great thing to do. It was 1983/4 — you got a government grant and didn’t have to pay any fees. It was a way, I suppose, of putting off the inevitable day of having to find a job.’

They signed up to the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster). His friend lasted a month before ditching the course, but FitzGibbon stuck with it.

Called to the bar by Middle Temple in 1986, he accuses the Inn of ‘coming close to destroying my liver’.

‘You had to do, not only do 24 dinners, but eat them in blocks each term. If you missed one, you had to start at the beginning again. Somehow I managed to not eat my dinners in the right slot so I had to start again. I think I had about a hundred dinners before I became a barrister.’

His family has no legal background. He quips: ‘The only lawyers that my parents ever came across were divorce lawyers – they both got divorced, from each other and from other people. So lawyers had a poor reputation in our house.’

A friend of a friend introduced him to the now retired Law Lord, Leonard Hoffman QC, who offered him a pupillage, which he accepted without knowing much about the work his chambers did.

‘It was so boring – they all did commercial leases and technical things. From day one, the work might as well have been in Chinese,’ he remembers with horror.

He got the criminal bug while squatting at Cloisters and more than 25 years later he doesn’t regret the choice.

Though, he adds, he would not recommend students follow in his footsteps. ‘The job is wonderful, but if you’re starting out now, there are too many obstacles.’

His advice to young people considering the criminal bar is ‘think very hard before committing to it’.

‘I tell them the truth about how hard it is to get started and suggest that if they really want to do it, the better start would be to get a training contract with a solicitor’s firm. Then decide if they want to do advocacy and if they can develop into that.

‘I’m sure that it would have made me a better advocate if I had done some training with a solicitor. It would have given me a greater understanding of the system,’ he muses.

Though he reckons it would be beneficial for solicitors and barristers to undergo a common training, in criminal law, he favours separate litigators and advocates, citing ‘good practical and ethical reasons’ for maintaining the split.

‘I can’t predict what shape the professions will take in the future, but I should imagine they’ll be a degree of fusion of barristers and solicitors. Whether that will just be at the training stage or throughout is hard to tell,’ he says.

Adding: ‘For the public interest, the key thing is to have specialist and properly motivated litigators and specialist and properly motivated advocates.’

There is, he accepts, no rolling back the trend for some barristers to move in-house. ‘That ship has sailed.’ But he suggests the extent to which it continues depends on the economic viability for solicitors to employ them.

‘Employees are very expensive and you’ve got to be able to forecast your turnover and profit to work out how many people you can afford to keep on’, he says.

He contrasts that with the ‘beauty of the freelance bar model, which doesn’t cost the solicitor a penny.’

With wry understatement, he observes: ‘These are interesting times. In the next couple of years there are going to be massive changes to the way criminal law is done.

‘Funding will be very different, as will the professional arrangements that will flow from whatever funding model they finally settle on.’

His plan for a quiet lunch is shattered as a boisterous party of eight select the next-door table. He is softly spoken and to catch his words above the din, I almost hover over his lunch.

Looking at the bigger picture, he says, falling crime rates mean there is less work to go round.

‘With the best will in the world there won’t be enough work to sustain the numbers of criminal lawyers that we have at the moment.’

Those who will lose out, he laments, will be barristers at the start of their careers, doing the smaller work.

‘As solicitors, either by choice or compulsion, do more advocacy, that will come away from the bar. While the more complicated, smelly stuff that they don’t want to do, they will farm out to the senior people,’ he predicts.

The position of silks, he says, is uncertain but overall the profession will shrink and recruitment of new good people will be a ‘huge problem’.

His mobile rings and he excuses himself to take the call. It is the man from Auntie — Clive Coleman seeking clarification about the bar’s strike action.

Returning, he paints a picture of the stasis that criminal lawyers have been in due to continuous consultations, policy and funding changes and uncertainty over the future.

‘For years now there has been a permanent planning blight over the whole profession. People have been very reluctant to invest money because they don’t know what the outcome is going to be because.’

He looks forward to the time that changes will develop into something permanent that the profession can ‘set its compass by’.

To a degree, he accepts the unpredictable. Life at the criminal bar, he explains, has ‘always been a totally insecure profession, like any kind of freelancing. Anyone coming in who thinks that they’ve got a permanent job and income is deluded — it’s just not like that and never has been.

‘I’ve tried to tell myself over the years that insecurity is my friend, because life in general is insecure and, if you start getting used to things and think you are entitled to them, when you don’t have them anymore you get into a bit of a pickle.’

He recalls: ‘During the golden years of legal aid there was masses of work. It was quite well paid — in some case it was probably excessively well paid. Some people thought it was going to go on forever. But I’m sorry, things don’t go on forever.’

FitzGibbon is naturally guarded over what he says about the current uncertain state of affairs, in advance of the CBA executive’s meeting.

He likens the MoJ’s desire to hasten the consolidation of the criminal defence market to ‘doing an experiment on live animals to see if they can force the pace of change’.

I ask who he thinks if winning the fight so far. He answers in a flash: ‘The government. They control the money.’

But, he is not at home to ‘the language of antagonism’. ‘Talk of winning and losing and battles, is unhelpful. What we should all be trying to achieve is a high quality standard of criminal justice for everybody,’ he insists.

On the twitter storm that followed the confusion over whether or not the CBA was due to attend a meeting between solicitor bodies and the Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, he is reluctant to regard it as a reliable bell-wether

‘Twitter is endlessly fascinating, but I don’t think you should take anything on it as representative of people’s feeling s in general,’ he asserts.

The explanation, as far as he is aware, is that of the ‘confusion and misunderstanding’ put forward in the joint statement by the solicitor groups and the CBA — the meeting was set up by the solicitor groups and, and although the CBA was invited to attend as an observer, that request was not followed up.

There are, he assures, ‘no hard feelings about this on the part of the people who are actually concerned’.

Rather he insists: ‘It’s all been magnified on twitter for reasons that I don’t begin to understand. Nobody on our side was remotely miffed about not being there. It wasn’t our show.’

He is reluctant to predict the outcome. ‘At this stage all I can tell you is that CBA executive committee will make an executive decision one way or the other to continue to support the action or to put the matter to another vote of the membership. What the actual decision will be I have no idea at all.’

He stood for election on the message that tactically now was not the right time to strike because of discussions in progress with the MoJ. ‘I couldn’t see how a strike now would advance the cause,’ he explains. But he understands why solicitors acted.

‘They’d been led to expect that the second 8.75% cut would be introduced in January [2016] with the new contracts, and they were then told at short notice that they would be coming in at the beginning of July. They faced a dilemma about how to deal with it and they decided they should strike.’

Whether their meeting with Gove delivers the concessions they want, he says, remains to be seen. ‘We don’t know about that because the statement issued afterwards was properly non-committal.’ That statement described the meeting somewhat opaquely as ‘potentially useful’.

His intel on the meeting is that Gove invited them to suggest alternative savings.

But he is doubtful whether doing so will result in a reversal of the cuts. ‘Unfortunately the MoJ has a history of doing that and then just pockets the savings and carries on cutting,’ he observes.

His view on Gove?

‘I’m regularly accused on twitter of being a fan of Gove, which I’m not. I’m entirely ambivalent to him, but it seems to me that the announcements he’s made early in his job, in not building a new children’s prison and ending the prisoner book ban, are pretty fundamental shifts in policy. Whether you like him or not, I think he and his department deserve some credit for that.’

He is doubtful whether the Secretary of State’s openness to reversing policy extends to increasing legal aid spend. ‘They [the MoJ] are not masters of their fate — they are led by the Treasury,’ he explains.

But, he notes: ‘Gove has said all this stuff about having a two-tier criminal justice system in which poor people get a bad service, and said that he wants that to change. He needs to be helped and shown how to do it.’

His continues: ‘The fact that he’s had discussions with groups may suggest that he’s in earnest. I’m not a cynical person and I’m not inclined to write people off immediately before I’ve seen what they’re like.

‘I’m not enough of a politician to know if he would feel sufficiently threatened by the solicitors’ and barristers’ action for it to make any difference, but I rather doubt it, because ultimately he holds the cards.’

His advice to Gove is: ‘Keep listening to the judiciary and to the leaders of the professions, who understand how the system works from the inside. Decide if you want quality and, if so, whether you’re going to pay for it.’

And crucially, he recommends penal reform to cut the number of people going to prison.

FitzGibbon however, does not altogether buy the line that no more money can be found. Rather he suggests: ‘More money can always be found. It’s a question of where it comes from.

‘If we’re going to persuade the MoJ to divert money into paying lawyers, you’ve got to show, first that it’s value for money and, second where they can get the money from.’

He observes that the Treasury found a ‘significant amount of money’ to prosecute big financial crime. ‘That tells me a case can be made for money to be put into the system, but it’s got to be a very powerful case and one that carries weight politically.’

Criminal lawyers, he notes, while good at putting other peoples’ cases, have been bad at putting their own and have struggled to shake of the ‘fat cat’ image pedalled by the government in the past.

‘It’s difficult for lawyers to say “I’m a lawyer, pay me more money.” It’s not a very attractive message,’ he accepts.

On the solicitors’ decision to go back to work in the police station and magistrates’ court, FitzGibbon understands why many felt they could not continue with the action.

‘They need to keep the money coming in — they have businesses to run and commercial obligations — rent and wages to pay.

‘There is a time limit on how long they can stop earning money. The question was always when the action would hit the buffers. I don’t think anyone should be surprised that the action didn’t last indefinitely; it was never going to.’

Next autumn when he takes up the reigns as CBA chair, who knows what the landscape will be. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, he promises utopia.

On that note, his ‘phone rings again and it’s another call he must take.

Over lunch at Inner Temple Hall, the veteran silk who defended the Krays and is the former Tory politician responsible for the National Lottery discusses the demise of the criminal bar and why he voted yes to strike action

Sir Ivan Lawrence’s chambers at 5 Pump Court are in a quiet, shady corner at the heart of London’s Temple. The waiting room is homey with canvass prints on the wall and two bright red sofas. A hardback copy of his memoirs, ‘My Life of Crime’, sits alongside magazines and newspapers on a coffee table.

The dapper 78-year-old is wearing a striped shirt with a starched white collar, paired with a flowery tie in shades of purple and yellow, the button of the order of chivalry of knight’s bachelor in his lapel and gold House of Commons cufflinks.

He greets me warmly and sinks into the opposite sofa, lamenting the state of the criminal bar, which only days before had voted to support action being taken by their solicitor colleagues over fee cuts and proposed contracting arrangements.

Lawrence, whose party battled the miners during their strike against pit closures in the mid-eighties, voted in favour of protest action in the recent Criminal Bar Association ballot. Indeed last year, at a meeting of the Tory Reform Group, he called on barristers to strike over the ‘total madness’ of the government’s legal aid policy.

The £220 million savings the cuts are designed to achieve, he says, are ‘pitiful’ and will only serve to make an already inefficient system worse.

Citing the decline in fee rates, Lawrence notes: ‘When I do a murder or a fraud trial now, my clerks tell me that I get less than half what I was being paid 20 years ago.

‘And there are juniors who have been at the bar for years who are paid £50 a day. How can people work for that and why will people want to come into the profession for that? They simply can’t and won’t do it. The result is that people won’t come to the criminal bar.’

Since taking up his post as Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor after the election, Michael Gove has overtly courted the criminal bar in his speeches and performance before the justice committee, stating that it’s preservation is one of his ‘top priorities’.

Lawrence says he does not know Gove personally, but he credits the former journalist with greater intelligence than his predecessor, Chris Grayling. ‘He can see further ahead politically, and is more forceful and principled. So the bar is in with a better chance.’

But, even with the new, more conciliatory broom, Lawrence does not hold out much hope. ‘The [publicly-funded criminal] bar’s fees are set by civil servants who have an agenda – fusion of the solicitors and barristers professions,’ he explains.

He acknowledges the obvious – there will still be a need for criminal advocates, maintaining there will continue to be both barristers and solicitors doing that work. But, predicts Lawrence, aside from a couple of large sets with senior silks, crime specialist barristers will be working in-house in one-stop-shops rather than independent practice.

He fears that the professions have been heading towards the civil servant’s dream of fusion ever since the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, which sought to break the monopoly of the bar by giving solicitors rights of audience in the higher courts. And that is the direction in which things will inexorably continue.

At the time that the bill went through Parliament Lawrence was MP for Burton. He spoke against it. Hansard records his warning that it would be ‘the beginning of the end of the independent bar’ and lead to a ‘fused profession’.

To arrest the cuts and contracting reforms, he states: ‘Industrial action is the only thing that the government will listen to. I’ve been saying it for a long time, but people haven’t been listening.’

Bar strikes last year saw off the government’s planned advocacy cuts. Lawrence takes a modicum of modest credit for that change. During the action that saw bewigged, placard-waving barristers chanting outside courts, he attended a reception at Number 10.

Lawrence took the opportunity for a word in the PM’s ear, warning him that the cuts, which would affect around a quarter of a million voters – lawyers and their families – could result in the party losing key support and marginal seats to UKIP.

A few days later, the cuts were cancelled. ‘I like to think I did my bit,’ says Lawrence.

On that note we stroll in the sunshine across the court and under the cloister to Inner Temple and into its wood-panelled dining room, festooned with the crests of benchers gone by.

The high-ceilinged hall with light pouring in through stained glass windows, laid out with rows of long wooden tables, would make any Hogwart’s pupil feel at home.

With charm and exquisite manners, Lawrence guides me in and explains the canteen style – there are stations from which to select starters, salads, mains and pudding and the special today (Friday) is fish and chips.

He has abandoned his usual place at the high table with the masters (of which he is one) to sit with the rank and file and his guest. The hall is surprisingly full and although most of the lunchers are male, there is no air of machismo or exclusivity. The atmosphere is convivial and banter good-hearted but reserved.

We both prefer the chilled sweet potato and cumin soup to the green pea and parsnip alternative, with a generous portion of deliciously greasy croutons. We carry our bowls, bearing the inn’s Pegasus crest, to a table at the side of the hall. It is strewn with flyers – one for a performance in the Inn of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another for a fundraising concert at the Temple church and the third and most interesting for the ‘Inner temple Hendrick’s Pop-up’ – the ancient Inn has teemed up with gin makers for a mixology master class and cocktail events.

Tucking into the creamy, delicately spiced fare, the only child of working-class Jewish parents explains why he opted for a ‘life of crime’.

‘No other reason than when I was a schoolboy I liked reading about famous trials. When I was in the air force thinking about what to do with my university place, I went to watch a few trials and I thought “I’d like doing that”’.

And the rest, as they say, is history. The grammar-schoolboy studied jurisprudence at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was called to the bar by Inner Temple in 1962 and took part in some of the 20th century’s most infamous murder trials, including those of the Kray twins, serial killer Denis Nilsen and Russell Bishop, wrongly accused of the Babes in the wood murder in 1986.

Having been at the bar for 53 years and taking silk in 1981, he is more qualified than most to profess what makes a good advocate. ‘You have to be able to speak and be understood,’ which he asserts ‘is not really compatible with having too strong a regional accent’. A glass smashing at the next table accompanies what some politically correct types might regard as bit of a clanger.

He continues: ‘You need self confidence and a wish to be independent (a theme he will return to) rather than getting a weekly wage from an employer who tells you what to do all the time.’

In addition, he points to the attraction of working in a world ‘where every day is different and where you’re dealing with people’s lives in difficult situations and, as a defence lawyer, trying to help them’.

With characteristic humility he adds: ‘As time goes on I realise something that I hadn’t done before — it is actually quite a privilege to be invited into somebody’s life with a view to improving their situation.’

He relishes the freedom from the drudgery of a 9 to 5 job that the independent criminal bar brings, but stresses ‘you have to be paid’.

Dispelling the myth of the fat cat barrister that successive government’s have been keen to sell to the media, Lawrence states: ‘Nobody could ever earn a fortune at the criminal bar. A handful of people do or who say they do, but that is only ever for a limited period.’

In more than half a century of practice, he has seen ‘massive changes on every front’. Indeed, he reflects, ‘little is the same’ and reckons that the rest of the lunch hour would be insufficient to cover all the changes.

By way of illustration, he indicates with thumb and index finger that when he came to the bar, the Crown court practitioner’s bible, Archbold was about an inch and a half thick printed on very thick paper and containing a limited amount of law.

Now, he gestures, it is twice as thick, printed on very thin paper and with three supplements each year that double its size.

‘The criminal law is so complicated and has seeped in to every aspect of a person’s life’. Society too has changed, which he says, is reflected in the cases that come before the courts.

‘There were no money laundering cases and few sexual abuse cases – it was simple burglary, rape, a bit of murder, a bit of fraud’.

On the competing rights of the parties involved, he says: ‘The impetus has gone towards the prosecution, but that is not to say it has gone too much that way. The right to silence has been diminished, but to some extent that may have been necessary.’

We break off to go up to the counter to get our main course, but have to wait for a refill of the popular battered fish.

Lawrence excuses himself to catch up with one of his chums. Having selected chips, old-school style cauliflower cheese, a large pickled onion and a healthy dollop of tartar sauce, he returns, stopping on his way to greet fellow diner Rob Rinder.

The barrister and star of ITV’s reality show Judge Rinder was in chambers with Lawrence’s only daughter Rachel, whose death of lung failure due to cystic fibrosis two years ago devastated him and his wife of almost 50 years, Gloria.

Glancing round the room, the inn’s sub-treasurer, Patrick Maddams, is at the other end of our table with a young lady member from Hong Kong who had just finished her PhD. And solicitor-blogger David Allen Greene has slipped in on the next table.

On his return, Lawrence explains apologetically that he needed to arrange the handover of a bottle of the Inn’s finest port to a commercial silk who had won it at an auction in aid of a cystic fibrosis charity. ‘I’ve been carting it around in my car for weeks and it won’t do it any good.’

After a run-down of the bigwigs on the high table, which include the treasurer, Lord Justice Moore-Bicke and reader, Judge Cryan, Lawrence returns to his earlier subject of the future of the profession.

‘I fear the criminal bar will go – there won’t be a criminal bar in the future,’ he predicts with considerable regret.

He won’t forecast how long the death throes will last, but laments: ‘It’s happening and it’s happening to a substantial extent.’

Lawrence paints a picture of an inefficient, bureaucratic criminal justice system, characterised by the falling standards of defence solicitors and the prosecution, and waste. Swinging fee cuts have meant criminal law firms have had to increase their volumes of work to survive.

This has had a knock-on effect on the quality of work, suggests Lawrence. ‘They pile it up and do not do a proper job. They tie papers with rubber bands instead of tape – always an indication of slackness – briefs are not prepared, proofs are not taken and the work that solicitors used to do in advance is being left to the advocate to do in conference with the client’.

Returning to the bar’s independence, Lawrence explains there are two reasons why it is important. ‘You have to be independent of your boss and independent from the judge.’

He moves on to the rasion d’etre of the criminal bar – advocacy. He is not anti-solicitor and naturally relies on them for instructions. But, he is not happy with their encroachment on what used to be the preserve of the bar.

‘We are trained advocates whereas solicitors have to combine it with other things. Advocacy is putting your best points forward persuasively in the shortest available time. It’s an art that has to be learned and practised. Solicitors can’t do it if they are doing other things.’

Recounting the story of a crown court judge, not born when he was called to the bar, and who angrily challenged his line of questioning only to return apologetically after the luncheon adjournment, Lawrence expresses his concerns over the judiciary.

‘There is too much pressure on judges – they don’t know what they’re doing – they have to tick boxes, be on top of the latest changes in the law, control trials, be available…the pressure is great and some who have come from a more 9 to 5 background can struggle.’

He adds in the interest of fairness: ‘Of course everything I say is a generalisation to which there are always exceptions.’

The indefatigable advocate, whose time at the bar was for 23 years coupled with being an MP, remains busy. Among his caseload, he has a couple of murders and cases listed at the Court of Appeal.

Over strawberries and cream, and a glass of cold coffee, I ask if he sees himself retiring? ‘I don’t see why’, he retorts, ‘ unless something intervenes.’

Lawrence claims that he does not really relax. ‘To keep fit I used to play squash, but I have run out of partners – they have all either died, had strokes and got Parkinson’s, he laments, so now he engages in the more solitary pursuit of swimming and ‘tries to play the piano’.

‘I have my fingers in a lot of pies,’ he adds, rattling off numerous societies and organisations he remains actively involved with. He is on the Board of Deputies of British Jews, involved in his local synagogue, lectures at the University of Buckinghamshire (from where he has an honorary doctorate) and BPP Law School, is president of his school old boy’s association, trustee of the Holocaust Education Trust and president of the Spelthorne Conservatives, to name but a few.

On that note our lunch has to end as he is taking a local counsellor and her family around the Temple Church.

We pop briefly back to chambers, where he shows me his narrow room crammed with papers and books. Among the numerous pictures on the wall, is one of him with Margaret Thatcher.

The signed picture of a house painted by Ronnie Kray after his murder convictions, that used to adorn the wall, is no longer there. Lawrence sold it for ‘a fair amount of money’.

But the picture entitled ‘Head of Girl’ drawn by Stephen Ward, osteopath and one of the central figures in the 1960s’ Profumo affair, remains as Lawrence was unable to persuade the National Portrait Gallery to buy it.

On my way out he hands me a paperback copy of his memoirs, with the instruction to come back and get it inscribed once I’ve read it.

Marked by courtesy and good manners rather than political correctness, Lawrence is a gentleman from another age. There are fewer and fewer advocates of his kind or with his tales to tell — and that is a great shame.