Nicholas Allen KC and HHJ Edward Hess interviewed Sir Nicholas Francis over dinner in December 2024, a few months after he retired from the High Court Bench

If I remember correctly, you didn’t originally want to be a family lawyer, you wanted to be a shipping lawyer. Is that right?

I was brought up by the sea and I like sailing, and was offered a job in a prestigious set of chambers, which I think is now called Quadrant Chambers, but was then 2 Essex Court, and I thought it would suit me.

How did you end up at 29 Bedford Row?

I was so bored at the shipping set that I almost decided to leave the Bar. I hated it. I sat in a room looking at a wall 2 feet from me and read charterparties every day for 6 months. I thought it was awful. I was offered a job by one of my pupil master’s clients working for a rice trading company in Karachi, and I nearly took that job. I was offered £40,000 a year tax-free which in 1982 was a lot of money. In the end, I decided to leave 2 Essex Court and sent about 12 letters applying for a second-six and waited to see what happened.

Was it 2 Dr Johnson’s Buildings that replied?

No, at that point, I hadn’t applied to them. I had a lot of replies and I went to a set in Crown Office Row. I enjoyed the pupillage there, but they didn’t recruit that year. In fact, one of my co-pupils was Mark Warby, who of course is now in the Court of Appeal. Then I had the task, yet again, of applying, and I wrote many, many, letters (paper and ink in those days). I was eventually offered and accepted a tenancy at Francis Taylor Building. Then Alan Ward QC rang me up. He asked ‘Would you please come and see us?’ I replied saying I had already accepted a tenancy at Francis Taylor Building to which he said ‘Well, come and see us anyway’. I met with him, Ian Davies and Evan Stone, and they basically offered me a tenancy at 2 Dr Johnson’s Buildings there and then, but because of the irascible but fabulous JJ Davis, they couldn’t call it a tenancy for a couple of months because he would be cross (and anyone who knew him will know that a cross JJ was always to be avoided). I said thank you, but I’m going to Francis Taylor Building, and then the next day Alan Ward rang me back and invited me to the pub where I met with him, Philip Cayford, Neil Sanders, Simon Edwards and a bunch of other people. I think what really persuaded me to accept their offer was that someone called Helen Gilbert came up to me and told me that 2 Dr Johnson’s Buildings really was the best place to be. It was about a month later that Helen Gilbert announced her engagement to Alan Ward, and she is of course now Lady Ward.

When you joined those chambers, what work did you then do?

When I started at Dr Johnson’s Buildings, I think it’s fair to say they did just about everything that wasn’t specialist, so they did crime, landlord and tenant, employment, contract disputes, neighbour disputes and family law. It was what you would call a general common law set. I went to industrial tribunals on unfair dismissal and redundancy cases. I did ouster orders in places like Southend and Billericay. I did a great deal of crime as well, both in the magistrates’ court and in the crown courts. Bromley Magistrates’ Court was the one I most often visited.

Dr Johnson’s Buildings then turned into 29 Bedford Row, how did that happen?

I joined Dr Johnson’s Buildings in 1982. By 1986, we were bulging out of the place; there was just not enough space. I, together with a few others, tried to persuade everybody that we should move. We ended up moving to 5 Raymond Buildings in 1987 and it was a really good move for us. I remember when we got there, we wanted to have a party but strict rules governing barristers’ conduct did not allow them to entertain solicitors. It would have been seen as ‘touting for business’. Alan Ward wrote to the General Council of the Bar asking for permission to have a party where we could invite solicitors. They said we could have one event which we did. We then quickly became too big for Raymond Buildings and in 1990, I started looking for somewhere else to move.

By the time I first met you in the early 1990s, you were doing ‘big money’ work. How early on in your practice did you move from being more of a generalist?

When we moved to Raymond Buildings in 1987, I gave up family law – it may seem a bit weird, but it was how it was. I got fed up with going to Southend and other places and spending all day arguing about whether contact should start at 6 o’clock or 7 o’clock on a Friday evening. I was quite interested in some of the commercial work that other people in chambers were doing, and I decided I wanted to try my hand at that. But then Alan Ward got me in as his junior on a couple of what you might call ‘big money’ cases. I realised that family law wasn’t just about what time contact should start, and I really enjoyed getting involved in, I suppose, ferreting around in people’s financial affairs to find out what money they had. I really acquired a liking for that kind of work and Alan was kind enough to bring me into some of his cases and I enjoyed it. I liked the fact that we were dealing with people. If I have any skills, I hope one of them is that I’m quite good with people. I found it quite boring dealing with insurance companies who didn’t really care too much about the outcome. I think I probably acquired a reputation as being good at dealing with difficult middle-aged people …

We all know the law changed fundamentally in 2000. Was it easier before 2000 when it was all about needs or reasonable requirements – often a house and a Duxbury fund?

Yes, the change was absolutely staggering. I can remember being in a consultation with Barry Singleton QC when the decision in White v White came out. I was his junior and we were dealing with a very rich guy who owned a very large pharmaceutical business. I can remember Barry putting his head in his hands and saying ‘Fu*k, this is going to cost you about £20 million’. It’s true! The difference was extraordinary because, I can’t remember the detail of the numbers, but I don’t think that there’d ever been a case where anybody had got more than, say, around £10 million to £12 million on a reasonable needs basis, however generously interpreted. Suddenly, now every pound you found was 50p in your client’s pocket, or out of it, and it was a staggering shift. My initial reaction to that was there’s no job left because it seemed to me that now it’s 50:50, there’s no job to be done. In fact, I can remember I’d ordered a new car and I cancelled the order because I thought that I wouldn’t have a job; anyone could divide by two.

But then there’s always the fertile imagination of family lawyers to find reasons to chip away at the principles that the House of Lords came up with.

I’m sure many people will remember that there was a prize offered in Family Affairs for the first barrister who could actually get 50% for a wife. White had awarded the wife 40% for reasons that were to do with the husband’s inherited wealth and so on. It seemed for a long time that wives were getting 40% in these ‘equality’ cases. So, 50:50 meant 60:40, which wasn’t actually that far from the old one-third rule that I’d been taught at Bar School. I think it might have been my very long-standing friend John Wilson KC who got the prize for securing the first 50% award. Now, of course, that’s what happens so often, but at the time it was still quite sexist, I suppose, in that half meant 40%.

I find it now almost extraordinary looking back that this sexist approach governed the way the courts operated for so long, in fact, forever really, until that seminal case. I think now it’s shocking to think that wives got what they needed and their husbands got the rest. Even if the husband earned the money, women were giving up their careers to look after the family. It appears now to be an extraordinary reflection of a different world.

What do you say to anybody who would say ‘That’s not the judge’s job, that’s the job of Parliament’?

Section 25 is a remarkable creature. It has adapted itself through judicial interpretation from 1973 (in fact its precursor was in a 1969 statute), right through to the current approach in relation to pre-nuptial agreements. Such agreements do not feature at all in the 1973 Act, yet now they are given substantial weight and are increasingly determinative of outcome. I think the draftsman of that probably did rather a good job. I think if we had it all redrafted now, it might be rather less well put. I personally think that it’s not our job to change the law, but it is our job to reflect social change, and there is a tension there. It is inevitable that the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court will define the law by their interpretation of section 25. It often surprises me how many puisne judges find it necessary to set out their own version of the law when it has already been done by the superior courts.

Any debate about family issues so often gets degraded by the tabloid press saying that these things ‘devalue marriage’. It ignites debates about religion and morals. I believe that if the courts are dealing with these things tolerably well, parliamentary time can possibly be better used addressing so many other pressing issues.

What do you think the Law Commission paper will say when it comes out shortly? And what should it say as the way forward?

In terms of what it might say, before I retired as a High Court Judge, I was involved with some of the meetings and I don’t want to say anything that would breach any of the confidentiality of that. I think if there is going to be a change, I think it should say that effect should be given to pre-nuptial agreements if they meet various conditions but these are already set out in the case-law. I think the courts are doing quite a good job with pre-nuptial agreements so do we actually want it to be changed by statute? Perhaps it would be more democratic if it was legislated on by Parliament but I’m bound to say that at the moment the courts have gone quite a long way towards saying that nuptial agreements that are properly entered into with safeguards will be upheld by the courts. So I’m not sure that it’s necessary. I also think Parliament would find it difficult to put into statute Lord Wilson’s phrase ‘a predicament of real need’. I see that phrase as delightfully adaptable to the circumstances of a given case.

One of the things that I feel very strongly about is the unfair and illogical situation we now have in relation to interim maintenance or maintenance pending suit and legal fees provision. How much court time would be freed up if we didn’t have all these endless arguments over interim maintenance and funding of costs? I think we should have the ability to make interim lump sum orders. So often I’ve had cases where the husband has control of marital assets which are relatively liquid, but he forces the wife, and I don’t want to be stereotypical but it often is that way, to go and borrow money at extraordinarily expensive rates, arrangement fees, and very high interest rates, presently around 24%. If you could make an interim lump sum order, why can’t you just say to an applicant in a big money case in a long marriage, ‘Well, here’s £100,000 on account, pay your own fees’. I think it is incredibly patronising (and often stressful) to say to somebody that they’ve got to borrow the money and keep an account of everything they’ve spent, in a case where you’re likely to get equality of outcome. In fact, what I’ve done in those cases when they’ve been in front of me is I’ve made it very clear that if the husband (I’ll just stick with that assumption for a minute) makes the wife borrow money at expensive rates when he has liquid resources that could be used, I will treat all of those costs that she’s incurred in borrowing that money as liabilities to come out of his share of the assets. And anybody who’s giving these judgments saying, ‘Well, they haven’t satisfied the conditions’, I’m afraid that as soon as they see me and I tell them, ‘Well, I’ll make them pay the cost of the borrowing if they don’t sort it out’, then they sort it out. That’s obviously only in the bigger money cases, and I appreciate that might not be relevant in many of the smaller cases in family courts around the country, but I’d like to see that change.

There are, I fear, many cases where coercive spouses continue the coercion and the bullying by the control of money post-separation. I detest the idea that a wife must prove that she can’t borrow before the husband will be ordered to provide her with litigation funding.

Assuming you’re dealing with a relatively big money case where there is a prenup, so needs are met in any normal sense, is it the worst of all worlds where the court gives a significant amount of weight to a prenup but then tinkers at the edges? Do you think it would be better to either say either, ‘It’s not Radmacher compliant, I’m going to completely disregard it’ or say, ‘Here it is, you did the deal, stick to it’? Are we almost in the worst of both worlds at the moment?

I think that’s a good question. I think it’s a really, really difficult area. I mean, I’ve often thought, do I just rip this pre-nuptial agreement up and pretend it doesn’t exist or do I amend it a bit? It seems to me that if people have agreed they were going to do X, Y, and Z, and I just rip it up because I want to change it, I think that’s the wrong thing to do. I think I have regard to it, but if I think it’s unfair, for example, it leaves somebody with, as said by Lord Wilson in Radmacher, ‘in a position of real need’, then I will meet that position of real need. I don’t think I’d rip it up (which, by the way, is a 1982 hit by Orange Juice) and start again.

Is there merit in restricting maintenance obligations to a limited number of years, or would that be unfair?

It could be unfair. Funnily enough, I’ve just been involved in a case where somebody was going to qualify as a teacher and became a teaching assistant because they had children and one of the children had special needs. Fast forward 20 years, he’s got all the money and she’s still a teaching assistant earning really quite low wages. She will never be able to achieve a particularly high income and she’s got no savings and no pension. I think in that case, where the husband’s earning a great deal of money, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, I think it’s incredibly unfair to limit her to a given number of years. What does she do? She’s, say, 52, she retires at, say, 65. What’s she supposed to do when she gets to 65? What’s she going to live on? I think there are cases where lifelong orders are required unless, of course, you can capitalise a maintenance claim at the time of the order. But I would not want to restrict the claim to a specific number of years. I’m not in favour at all of the idea of the ‘meal ticket for life’ where, as they used to call it, ‘ladies that lunch’ can just leach off their husbands, but I’m quite sure from almost all the work I’ve done that there are very few of those. On the whole, women are disadvantaged financially as research evidences, by the choices made during the marriage, and they earn less because of it.

Onto a different subject – the compensation principle. You’ve recently said something about that. Do you feel that’s been under-observed in the authorities?

I did have a case about that recently where the wife was the first female partner at her firm and the highest paid woman ever at that firm. She was in her late 20s and she had to leave because she was having a relationship with, and later married, the boss of that firm. They then had children, but she had huge difficulties with pregnancy and with birth and a lot of ill-health. She had gone from the highest paid first female partner to being a stay-at-home mother for all sorts of reasons. It seemed to me that if she didn’t get compensation, then the principle simply meant nothing. I hate the over-used word ‘paradigm’ case, but if that wasn’t a case where compensation should be paid, then the principle has no purpose at all and then I would be ignoring some of the principles set out by the House of Lords in Miller/McFarlane.

I didn’t mean by that to expand the concept of compensation. I agree, of course, that just because somebody might have been a brilliant snooker player at the age of 16, didn’t mean to say they were going to go on and win the World Championship. It wasn’t meant to be kickstarting another scramble for made-up cases, and I really feel strongly that solicitors and barristers shouldn’t just lay it on and run hopeless cases, I hate it when they do that. I have never hesitated to make issue-based costs orders in that situation.

However, the case that I am talking about was hard evidence of somebody going from earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year with a clear path to progression, to not working outside the home. When they divorced, it seemed to me that I should recognise that she had made that sacrifice and I don’t think there was anything remarkable about that at all. I feel profoundly in that case that it was the right thing to do. And whether the parties did also, I don’t know, but certainly nobody appealed me.

Compensation isn’t dead, it just is very rare. It has no part to play at all when it’s low income or no income families struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage. I think we really need to remind ourselves that that’s almost all of the cases. But yes, I do think that there are cases where it applies, and I think we need to be able to identify them.

Just building on that, you obviously heard O’Dwyer after Waggott. Can one read between the lines in O’Dwyer that you felt rather constrained by the fact that one can’t share future income?

No, I don’t think so. I think that O’Dwyer was a very unusual case (not least because it was called O’Dwyer and it was an appeal from His Honour Judge O’Dwyer). I think I did in that case say that the wife should not have to amortise her capital until the husband had retired so I gave some nod to, if you like, the sharing of income. But they had been joint franchisees of a business and, looking ahead, he was now the sole franchisee. I like to think in that case I achieved a fair outcome. The only problem I had was that I did not have much help about budgets and expenditure, which, by the way, is another thing I have a problem with. I wish the lawyers wouldn’t just create an expenditure schedule on a ‘here’s-one-that-they-did-last-time’ basis. But I felt I achieved a fair outcome in that case.

Do you have any sympathy for the broader argument that in a very long marriage, let’s say the wife exits with her share of the capital, the husband exits with his equal share of the capital, but he doesn’t have to touch that capital because he’s got the very high earnings that she’s contributed to, but she doesn’t get a share of that going forward.

I do have a lot of sympathy with that. I remember in Parlour when I was against Nicholas Mostyn, one of the best family lawyers of my generation, and a friend and judicial colleague, he ran the case that Ray Parlour’s income was an asset of the marriage that should be shared. I think that an earning capacity isn’t a marital asset (and so does he!) but I do think there are cases where, as I said earlier, you’ve got a couple where, let’s just say, the wife has given up her lucrative career at, say, 30 to look after the family, and at that point they were equal earners, and they get divorced when, say, they’re 55, and he’s earning lots and she’s earning nothing, I think it’s a real unfairness sometimes that the wife has immediately to start to amortise her capital and the husband doesn’t.

But it seems to me the trend has moved away from ‘joint lives’ orders. That’s partly reflective of society, which is understanding that parents need to share the care of their children more and that marriages are more equal in terms of contribution and input. But I think the court should be alive to what has actually happened, the decisions that people have made during the marriage and the unfairness that that can create.

One might say, as a very broad-brush stroke, that we lived through the Thorpe era and then the Mostyn era, and perhaps we’re now in the Peel era. How would you assess those three leaders?

Thorpe LJ was in the Court of Appeal and Head of International Family Law. Mostyn J was a delightful and brilliant maverick. He was the guy who could say, ‘I don’t agree with the Supreme Court, so I need to do this’, which is something I think I would not be brave enough to do. Robert Peel was my pupil (how is that possible?), and now he’s doing this important job! Robert is brilliant at what he’s doing. I don’t think that I can say that those individuals have made a particular massive change to things because it’s not about the individual, it’s about the judiciary.

Nick Mostyn, I think, is on record as saying, ‘The person who appeals Nick Mostyn most was Nick Mostyn’.

Also, the person who relies on Nick Mostyn’s judgments the most is Nick Mostyn.

For me, if I am talking about people I’ve been against in the Bar, in terms of opponents the Bar, Nick Mostyn was probably the opponent I most feared because he was so good at cross-examination.

As a judge, would you say he had a monumental effect on this work?

I think the judge in charge of financial remedies does have a huge impact on it, possibly bigger than they should. But yes, Nick Mostyn steered that for a long time, but there were other people doing it as well, and he was appealed, sometimes successfully. I don’t think that it’s like a dictatorship, I think he ran it, he ran it with his extraordinary style. Robert Peel is doing it very differently. I think Robert Peel is less emphatic. He’s a better listener and does it in a very different way. He might also have less impact because of those things, who knows?

If you look back on your time on the Bench, what are you most proud of?

Pride is not a good countenance, as my mother told me, ‘Pride before fall, Nicholas’.

I was at the Bar when I did Vince v Wyatt, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge. When you are overturned by the Court of Appeal (with Thorpe LJ calling my decision unprincipled), and then nine Supreme Court judges all reinstate you, that’s quite a good moment. I had more professional emails that day than I’ve ever had on any other day of my life. I think that’s probably the case that I’m the happiest with, if that doesn’t sound arrogant.

When you were very early in your high court judge career, you were thrown into the case of Charlie Gard, which became a national story. How did that affect you?

It came in to me as a half-hour application for permission to turn off the life support machine. I was just the urgent applications judge that day and I said, ‘We need to think about this a bit more carefully’, and so listed it for directions. When it next came in front of me, I had the Daily Mail, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, The Guardian and many more of them in there, and I was quite surprised. The reason that it was in open court was because the parents were crowdfunding through the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, and they wanted it in open court. Having heard submissions, obviously, I agreed that it could be heard in open court if that was their wish.

People often say to me that that must have been the most emotionally difficult case that I’d ever done. It was emotionally difficult, but it wasn’t really more difficult than a number of other cases. I’ve done, and I have done many other tragic ‘end of life’ cases. What made it difficult, I suppose, was that it was so public. There was one day when the queue to get into court was all the way down to Ludgate Circus, it was massive. We had two overflow courts but still many who wanted to come into court were unable to. What was hard work was knowing that you were in the eye of the press all of the time; and that the White House and the Vatican had each offered to make Charlie Gard a citizen of their respective states. I think it was the Daily Mail who said ‘In a single sentence, Mr Justice Francis managed to put down both the Pope and President Trump’. I don’t think many people get that accolade or criticism, whichever way you want to put it.

There was a time when the so-called ‘Christian’ Right in the United States had made death threats against my children online, that was difficult. We ended up having anti-terrorist police outside our house. We had to tell our children things about not talking to the press, and that was quite hard work. But it was a case that I felt, in a sense, privileged to deal with because it was such a profound responsibility.

It was legally not that complicated, in the sense that the legal path had been already set down by other similar cases before it. It ended up going to the Court of Appeal, Supreme Court, and the European Court twice. I don’t say this out of any sense of arrogance, it wasn’t about me but the need for speedy decisions, but to be upheld by the Court of Appeal, Supreme Court and the European Court twice all in the same 6 months was, I think, quite unusual.

It grew its own momentum, and it was strange having my picture on the front page of the paper almost every day. I remember, when we had our judicial photographs taken when we were sworn in, Lord Thomas, then Master of the Rolls, saying to me, ‘Nick, let’s have one or two of you looking solemn’. ‘We’ve got to have those in case your picture appears on the front page of the Daily Mail on a sombre case’. How right he was. Fortunately, the picture of me that went in the papers was me wearing my ridiculous full bottom wig and red garb, so hopefully it didn’t make me too recognisable.

But it was hard work and it was very emotional. I went to see the baby in Charing Cross Hospital, which was obviously difficult. But I actually did a few other of those end-of-life cases as well about children, but they didn’t hit the press. I know that other colleagues have had very public cases like that as well, for example Hayden J did the Alfie Evans case. I think until you’ve done one of those in the glare of the public, you probably don’t quite know what it’s like. I think we support each other during those times.

After the Charlie Gard case, I had the loveliest letter from Sir Alan Moses, saying that he felt that I had upheld the greatest traditions of the Bench, and that was a very special letter to receive.

But most of the work we do is not really noticed or published. I think I’ve really enjoyed being able to help people. I think I’m quite good at getting people into the room and saying, ‘Look, do you really want to do this? Can we actually not sort it out?’ And there’s so many cases which nobody knows about, nobody ever will know about, where judges are able to bring parents together to resolve issues or to persuade local authorities just to step back from seeking a care order to see whether the parents can’t be given one last chance; and of course persuading couples to step back from the brink in money cases. Those sorts of cases which we can’t identify for privacy reasons, are probably the ones I’m most proud of but can’t talk about. I think I’m quite good at bringing people together and trying to resolve disputes.

How would you assess your contribution to the world of pensions on divorce?

I think probably my biggest contribution to pensions on divorce is nothing to do with the hideous acronyms PAG and PODE!

Actually it was a case called Martin-Dye, which was, I think, very early in my time in silk, where I wanted to establish a rather straightforward proposition that £100,000 worth of pension wasn’t the same as £100,000 worth of cash. It was a second appeal. I can’t remember who the earlier judges were, but eventually it got to the Court of Appeal where Lord Justice Thorpe, in his usual way, liked to criticise all counsel and say they’d all got it wrong. But anyway, we won that case. I think it was an important landmark in a way, because a lot of people would rather have £100,000 in their bank than £100,000 in their pension fund.

In respect of PAG, I obviously co-chaired that with you, Edward. I think it’s fair to say that in the second round of PAG you did far more than I did. In the first round, I like to think that I made an equal contribution (in the section 25 sense!). A lot of very busy people made an enormous contribution to the report. My main role was to chair meetings, which sometimes became a bit scrappy and argumentative, but those debates were an essential part of the process. I think it has laid down guidelines which, in my experience, are now being used in courts across the country. But the credit should go far more to others than to me.

Now that I have retired from the High Court Bench, I of course no longer visit the family courts around the country, but my understanding anecdotally from members of the profession is that the Galbraith Tables, the reports, PAG1 and PAG2 are used a lot, mainly by the District Judges and Circuit Judges, because they are the judges who are doing most of these cases. I don’t think many of my High Court colleagues pay much attention to it, not least because pensions are, in the big money cases, usually a smallish part of the overall assets. I know that in a case called SJ v RA [⁠[2014] EWHC 4054 (Fam)], when sitting as a deputy, I said that in big money cases it would be unlikely that we will need reports from PODEs (I didn’t use that word, I said from pension experts) because if you’ve got a defined contribution scheme, which is basically a pot of money in an account which happens to be a pension wrapper which can be converted into cash, we don’t really need anybody to spend a lot of money on valuing it, and that we should stop spending so much money on these valuations. I believe very strongly that in the big money cases, we don’t need to do that.

I also feel very strongly, and I disagree with some of my colleagues on this in PAG1 and PAG2, that there should be no distinction between men and women in relation to the value of pensions. I remember Mostyn J asking in the foreword to the second edition of Pensions on Divorce: A Practitioner’s Handbook, ‘Would you prefer 10 years at £20,000 or 20 years at £10,000?’ That’s an interesting question, but I think it’s wrong as a matter of principle to give somebody more because they are younger or older or female or male. I think too much money is spent and delay caused obtaining pension reports aimed at equality of income in money purchase schemes. It is, of course, very different in defined benefit schemes.

Turning away from the law now. The personalities, the barristers, the judges – who would you remember as the great figures of your day?

For me, in terms of my own mentors, I think Sir Alan Ward was probably the person who was the biggest influence in my professional life. Without him, I wouldn’t have joined what was then 2 Dr Johnson’s Buildings. In fact, without him getting me a little drunk with his now wife, and her not disclosing that she was about to become his wife, I wouldn’t have joined his chambers. I am incredibly grateful to him for his support. I think it ended me up in the world that I think I suited well.

I think the people who taught me the most, in terms of how to be a good advocate, were Barry Singleton, Florence Baron, and Martin Pointer. I was led an enormous amount by both Florence Baron and Barry Singleton. I’ll never forget Barry Singleton, one of his lines to me was, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff and don’t salami slice’. It may sound silly, but that’s just so important. Just don’t bother about the little stuff. I think Florence Baron’s approach was always, ‘Just say what you mean’. I tried, particularly in silk, to establish a reputation where I didn’t say to the judge or to counsel on the other side that I wanted £20 million when I knew I was only going after £10 million. I think it was a pointless way to negotiate. I can remember once being against somebody who said to me, ‘Well, I want £10 million’. I said, ‘You know perfectly well that you’re not going to get that. You’re not going to get more than £6 million’. He said, ‘Well, you got to start somewhere’. I said, ‘We’re not bargaining for carpet’. I feel really strongly that anybody reading this should say what they mean, because if you don’t say what you mean, you get a reputation for not saying what you mean. Once somebody drops from £10 million to £6 million in the space of an hour, they lose all credibility.

I was against Martin Pointer an enormous amount. The first time we were against each other, we argued. I later realised that I wasn’t the first person to argue with Martin, so I invited him to go and have a glass of wine at El Vino and after, let’s just say, a considerable quantity of wine, we became friends and remained friends throughout. I think he was one of the best advocates that I was ever against. I learned an enormous amount about how to be advocate from him. Probably the most important lesson was what not to say rather than what to say. He was a master at not putting very much in his opening note to the court, a master at cross-examining as little as possible and just being incredibly incisive. If I think about advocates who I learnt the most from, yes it’s Florence Baron, Barry Singleton and Martin Pointer. I’m so sad that Martin had the accident which has caused him the disabilities from which he now suffers.

Is that what makes a good advocate, less is more?

Lots of things make a good advocate. First of all, I think you have to be prepared to be charming to people. If I’ve learned anything as I’ve got older, it’s don’t get cross, don’t fall out with people, be nice to people because you get far more that way.

But yes, it’s much better to know what not to say than to know what to say. Be really direct in what you’re saying and remember that the judge is really busy and you’ve been preparing that case for weeks or months or even years, the judge probably started reading that case yesterday (or even this morning!). A 10-page concise note is so much more useful than 25 pages of imprecise narrative. People call things skeleton arguments when they’re a thesis. I was a great fan of advocates who really put it in a concise way, which, if you like, told me what they wanted and why they wanted it, rather than rambling on.

I want to say one other thing, which is if the judge asks you a question, answer it. The number of times I’ve had people who will say, ‘Well, I’ll come back to that’ and then they don’t. If the judge asks you something, it’s on their mind. Just answer it.

What attracted you to go to the Bench? How do you respond to peers who said ‘I came to the Bar to be an advocate’?

I’m old enough to have been in the role of assistant recorder and was promoted within about 4 months, not because of merit, but because the rank of assistant recorder was abolished. But I still do get a little bit of pension from being an assistant recorder! I suppose when I started as a barrister, it was always in my mind, might I become a judge? But it wasn’t a burning ambition. I ended up going from being a Recorder to a Deputy High Court Judge in the lunch queue at Cumberland Lodge when Elizabeth Butler-Sloss said to me, ‘Nick, isn’t it time you started sitting as a High Court Judge?’ I said, ‘Okay, then’ and I did a week later – it’s a bit different now. I’m very glad I did that because I found sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge really exciting. It was actually very useful in terms of my practice as a barrister because there’s no better way to learn what a judge needs from an advocate than to be a judge. Doing both, I think, was an enormous amount of help to me. I then ended up applying to be a judge and decided I would only apply once and, to my shock, I got the job.

Did you enjoy being a full-time judge?

Dealing with terrible child abuse and murder, end-of-life cases and those difficult decisions in the High Court is not enjoyable but I think I would have regretted it if I hadn’t taken an appointment. It was an honour; and an opportunity to give back.

So did you prefer being a Deputy to being a full-time judge?

I think I probably preferred being a barrister and a Deputy High Court Judge to being a High Court Judge. It’s not about the money, I’m very glad I was a High Court Judge, but for me, and I think for many of my colleagues, the problem, certainly in the Family Division, with being a judge, is all the stuff you have to do that isn’t being a judge. Every one of us has to do a job, for example, being a presider for a region – I loved being the presider for Wales. But, particularly during Covid and since Covid, I think basically it’s two jobs – you’re doing your judging job, and then almost every morning at 9.00 am or 9.30 am, there’s a Teams meeting. Covid brought us the ability to do remote hearings and Teams meetings, but meetings that used to happen three or four times a year were suddenly happening every month just because they can, because people didn’t have to get on trains and things. I found that I was doing meetings at 9.00 am, often at 1.00 pm and again at 4.30 pm. When you come out of court at 4.30 pm, you don’t just go home, you’ve got to catch up on your day’s work, you’ve got to start writing the judgment and prepare for tomorrow. I think probably the biggest annoyance of all was the Wellbeing meeting, which was every other Monday between 1.05 pm and 1.55 pm. I was thrilled to be on the Wellbeing Group and I hope I contributed quite a bit to that, but the idea that for the entirety of my lunch break I’m on a Teams meeting, I think is completely absurd. What do I want to do at lunchtime? I want to get out, have a walk around the block, have a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and clear my head for a moment.

Does the pressure in the Family Division come from the fact that it’s the smallest of the three Divisions, or does it come from the nature of the work that it does?

I think that the pressure on us in the Family Division is greater than the other Divisions, largely because there aren’t very many of us. Every one of us does what I would regard as a pretty full-time job, whether it’s being a presider or in charge of the programme at the Judicial College or whatever it might be. That’s one of the reasons why I decided at the age of 66 that it was time to do something else.

I did quite a lot of work on this issue because I was one of the co-authors of the response to the Senior Salaries Review Body in terms of an application for an increase in judicial pay. I estimated that about half of the work that the Family Division judges do now didn’t exist 25 years ago. I mean, if you look at the explosion of child abduction work, you look at things like forced marriage, FGM cases, radicalisation cases. There’s an enormous increase in the amount of Court of Protection work compared with what they used to be. In relation to that, I would say that if the Assisted Dying Bill goes through, as presently drafted, it’s going to involve a High Court Judge, and I imagine that needs to be a full-timer, not a part-timer. There are only 20 of them, one of them being the President who, because of all their other responsibilities, doesn’t sit full-time. If they place that burden on the High Court Judges, if that bill goes through, we will have to have more Family Division judges.

When I was a senior junior, I remember that the threshold for getting cases into the High Court was about £1 million. Nowadays, the District Judges and the CFC are doing cases up to £15 million. That’s fine, but it means that not much of the work, really, in the Family Division is now money work. The experience that I brought to court was 25 years of work in what we used to call ‘ancillary relief’ now financial remedy. I probably spent only about a quarter of my time actually doing that as a judge. We desperately need more High Court Judges in the Family Division and I’ve been arguing that case for quite a long time. I think the President accepted that and I think there may have now been a submission that there should be two more. I think there should be a lot more than that.

When I spoke with my colleagues in the King’s Bench Division, I think they are under a lot less pressure than the Family Division judges. When I was doing the SSRB submission, I had some judges from Chancery and King’s Bench who said they weren’t busy enough – I don’t think anybody in the FD would say that! That’s not for a second to criticise them, but whether I’m in lodgings with people or chatting to colleagues, they don’t have the other heavy administrative responsibilities that we do, nor so many days in court.

But I do also think that the Family Division has suffered for quite a long time from a crisis of administration.

Do you mean by that, the issues in relation to the Clerk of the Rules and how the list office operates?

The Clerk of the Rules office is full of amazingly good people who are fabulous to work with and work incredibly hard, but there aren’t enough of them. I fear that because civil servants aren’t paid enough money, there’s quite a revolving door process going on, which is that the really good people get out into other jobs in the private sector where they can increase their income substantially, and I don’t blame them for that. But the admin in the Clerk for the Rules department, I’m afraid, is shocking or has been. The computer system, I described it to the President of the Family Division when I was making submissions about this to him not very long ago, was less sophisticated than the one we put into 29 Bedford Row when we moved there in 1991. Let me give you an example about that. When I was on the circuit, say in Wales, if my clerk wanted to know what I’m doing next week when I’m in London, he couldn’t look at it online on an electronic diary. He had to ask a colleague of his to go and queue at the only computer in the Clerk of the Rules department with an electronic diary on it, to look at the system which was called ‘Flight’. Then they would have to screenshot each page with their mobile phone and then send it to my clerk.

That is, I think, now changing, but partly it’s changed because a number of us complained so much about it. I said to the President I was going to raise the issue at every single meeting we had because I felt so strongly about it, and it was not like that in Chancery or the KB. When he asked why I thought that was I said it was because we didn’t shout loud enough.

We have to have a proper admin, and I don’t see how we can expect the system to run properly without it. We don’t even have a single colour photocopier in the whole of the Queen’s Building, so that when documents would come in, my clerk would have to get his highlighter out and highlight in red or blue, whatever the colour was, the bits that needed to be coloured because we didn’t have a colour printer. I got my own colour printer, which I paid for myself, fine. But when I raised this to the powers that be, I was told we were having new printers. I thought, ‘Whoopie!’ and guess what? None of the new printers were colour! Frankly, the new printers were no better than the old printers. That is not the same problem in KB or in Chancery. It is completely absurd that in 2025, there isn’t a single colour printer available to the High Court Judges in the Queen’s Building, except, I think, for one in the Clerk of the Rules department, so we buy our own. It gets very depressing when you have to work within that system.

Is it a question of leadership?

It’s a very hard job being a leader in anything, and it’s easy to criticise it. I think that we need leaders who understand people, as well as law. I think that the pressures that are on the Clerk of the Rules probably aren’t as fully understood as they should be. When people in important positions in that department are leaving due to stress, we should be asking ourselves why that is happening. A huge amount, I think, has been done recently to improve that, but it seems to me that we are constantly reacting to situations. Sometimes we all sit as what’s called an urgent applications judge, or we do what’s called ‘shorts’. There are many days when I was sitting on shorts, which are applications that go no more than an hour, so you’ll get at least five in your day. Well, maybe 50, 60 or 70% of them don’t turn up. Why don’t they turn up? Because the notice of hearing hasn’t been sent out. The cost to the parties of not having their hearing is huge, so is the cost to the HMCTS, the Ministry of Justice, in listing these hearings with no one being there. Of course, to us, we read the papers, we get ready for the case, and then no one’s there. It is shocking, and I don’t believe this happens as much in the other Divisions. We are under different pressures, and I don’t claim to understand all the reasons for that. I would describe the system as, certainly when I left it at the end of May 2024, in a state of crisis.

Is the answer to that in part money?

Money is always part of the problem. I mean, you can say that about the cleaning. The Queen’s Building basically doesn’t really get cleaned. It’s not because we don’t pay cleaners, it’s because somebody doesn’t manage somebody to clean it properly. I really don’t know what is paid to HMCTS, and it’s beyond my power to say it, but I suspect that it’s not just money. I think it’s an element of people being encouraged rather than discouraged, people being allowed to stay, people being congratulated for the good work that they do. If you pay people more, of course, it’s going to be easier, but it’s not just about money.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. What I can identify is problems that I believe that we have in the Family Division that they don’t in other Divisions. If we do need more money, then we have to campaign for it, but I think there is a real crisis of confidence and a crisis of management. Let’s face it, people who are very good judges and who are very intellectual and very good at giving very fine erudite judgments about important things aren’t necessarily good managers of people. When we all get appointed to these roles, be it as a presider or whatever other job, we haven’t been given any management training. I think many judges, brilliant judges, brilliant academics, are not necessarily good at managing people. When we got the job description of what the presider is, a number of us looked at it and said, ‘Well, it’s a full-time job, we can’t sign up to that’. I think too much is asked of the judges, but I also think that judges should be judges.

When I was a presider, for example, I got one case where a District Judge’s parent had a suspected broken neck and I was asked to approve that the judge could have time off work. Why does it need a High Court Judge to deal with that? Why can’t there be somebody in HMCTS dealing with that kind of thing? Of course, they could refer to the presider if people are frequently taking days off for various issues, but it seems to me to be ridiculous that judges are troubled with those sorts of things and they happen almost daily as a presider. When I became the presider for London, where the increase in population was about 3.3 million in Wales to about, what, 14 or 15 million inside the M25, with a huge number of courts, every day, often several times a day, you were getting requests like that, or someone wants to be able to move a week’s leave carried over to next year. I don’t think that we should be dealing with that. I think it’s a waste of our time, a waste of the resource of the High Court Judge. It’s exhausting.

As a general rule, were you able to switch off on a Friday night?

It’s very difficult, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re dealing with, even if it’s a money case, I mean, anyone reading this is probably a lawyer and thinks about their cases when they perhaps shouldn’t, but you can’t just press a stop button. It’s when you are dealing with whether a child should live or die and when you are being called the ‘executioner’ in the tabloid press, or a ‘murderer’, it is bound to weigh on your mind. I don’t think that it deflected me from the task that I had to do at all, but let’s just put it this way, you need something relaxing to do when you’ve got those decisions to make.

Did you find it more difficult to switch off on the Bench than you did at the Bar, or is it different?

Well, the pressures are really different. At the Bar, I found the few days before a final hearing were pretty heavy. I mean, if you’ve got a 2-week case starting on a Monday, however well-prepared you are, certainly for me, I would spend the whole of the Saturday and Sunday working. Even if I thought I knew the case, I’d want to keep on doing it.

I think as a judge, the pressure is at the other end of the case. I remember, I often used to think, quoting the line from Monty Python, ‘You lucky, lucky bastard’, because when you all leave on a Friday and the case is done, you can send the papers back to your solicitors and it’s over, but that’s when the judge’s work really starts.

The pressure of writing a judgment is considerable. If we finish a case, very often I would find cases were underlisted in their time-estimates. It’s a lovely concept that in counsel’s time-estimate, they’ll say closing submissions end at 4.30 pm on a Thursday, and then say judgment at 2 pm on the Friday. You think, ‘Well, hang on, I’ve got half a day to write this judgment’ and you probably spent a week at least writing your opening note, preparing the case. What would often happen would be that you’d finish your case on a Friday, you’d have to spend the Sunday reading up for the case that’s starting on the Monday, but all the time you’ve got your judgment hanging over you from the last case. I think the pressure of writing judgments is one of the biggest pressures that we have.

One of the suggestions that I’ve made about wellbeing is that if anybody goes through a really catastrophic situation, I don’t want, particularly, to identify what it might be, it could be someone having cancer or being bereaved, they should be required to have a mentor who will be completely confidential and independent. One of my bleats about wellbeing is there’s no suggestion ever of any mentoring or therapy or even checking in on you to ask how you are doing. In the police, if you look at distressing images, you’re forced to have counselling in relation to those, or you’re not permitted to remain in the job. I remember once somebody coming along to me and saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got this opportunity to have some coaching on counselling’. I said what does that involve and they said, ‘An hour a year’. Well, I’m not someone that’s really got much into therapy, but I do know that if I had an hour’s therapy, I doubt I’d get much beyond my name and address. I think I’m afraid some of my colleagues may look upon it as being a bit ‘Moaning Minnie’ or ‘namby-pamby’. Well, I think we should care about our work, and I think we should do more to support our judges. In my role as a presiding judge, both in Wales and in London, I was very aware that the District and Circuit Judges are under intense pressure. They do a relentless list of often hideous child sex abuse cases. When they complain that they are stressed, there is nothing there for them to support them.

If I could change one thing about the judiciary, it would be the support that they should be offered. This isn’t about me and the Charlie Gard case, by the way, it’s not that. It’s about realising how many of our judges are under such intense pressure. We are about a third of our number of District Judges short in the London region and I have to ask why. I think it’s because it’s frankly a very hard job and not particularly well paid. It’s not badly paid, obviously, in average terms but there is almost no support. Some of my colleagues, without naming anybody, have said things like, ‘Oh, well, so and so said to me that they are depressed or overworked, to which I said to them, why don’t you man up and grow a pair?’ I’m afraid that is an attitude which I detest and I’m appalled by. I think something really must change from the top. It has to be a radical alteration in the way we look at things.

Who should do that? Who should be responsible for implementing that?

Well, I suppose you work from the top down, don’t you? It’s not for me to say who should do it. What I’m saying is there must be fundamental change and not have those at the top saying things like ‘I come from the school of hard knocks’ or the situation will continue to deteriorate. I would say we need a complete root and branch reform of the way that we look at things. I feel that the Family Division, that’s the only one I really know about, is still being run in the way that it was run back in the 1950s and 1960s and yet I suspect if you were to go back to a High Court Judge at the time when I started the Bar in 1981, and compared the workload then with the workload now, I think that the High Court Judge of 1981 would be shocked by the amount of work that there now is. At the Magistrate, District and Circuit Judge level, it is pressured, although in a different way. I think that the expectation is that you just soldier on. I don’t mean that we need to be cosseted in a bubble, we’ve got a big job to do and we should get on with it, but I do think there needs to be some understanding of the pressure.

My main issue here is actually not about the High Court, it’s about looking after the other judges. Let’s face it, almost all of the family work in this country is done by magistrates and District Judges. I don’t know as much about the magistracy as I would like to. I do know a lot about the District Judges that have been my responsibility as Family Presider, and they work relentlessly hard, with little or no support, appalling administration and crumbling court rooms. They are expected to make life-changing decisions with insufficient time and reliant on evidence that is often produced by other professionals (such as social workers) who are under similar pressures. This is all in the context of a huge rise in the number of parties who are unrepresented with all of the additional work that requires.

Were some of these pressures a motivation to step away from it slightly earlier than you might have otherwise done?

People often ask me why I retired early. I retired in the same month as I became a state pensioner and got my Freedom Pass; I don’t think it’s particularly early. If I’ve learned anything from the last few years, it is get out there and enjoy life while you still can. Let’s face it, 75 is an age when life may have to slow down for any number of reasons. At 66, I am able to enjoy a whole new phase in my life and that is what I want to do. Also, I did quite want to get back into the world that I know, which is big money cases, which I wasn’t doing that much of in the High Court. A very wise friend of mine who is a solicitor said to me, ‘If you want to get back into arbitrations and FDRs, don’t wait until you’re too old. Get out there and do it now’. I think that was good advice and I’m really enjoying getting back into that.

There were significant numbers of other practitioners who wanted to take an appointment and so it wasn’t like I was leaving the situation vacant. I’ve done 8 years, I don’t think 8 years is too short. I happen to think that over 70 is probably too old for most people. Yes, it would have been wonderful to have Baroness Hale or Lord Neuberger going on for longer. For every one of those, I suspect there’s an awful lot of judges around the country for whom it’s probably time for them to move on. I’m very happy that I’ve retired at 66, I’m doing loads of things, most of them still very much connected with the world of family law, in particular private FDRs and arbitrations and a fair bit of charitable work. I’m also taking some time out to enjoy life with my family and friends.

Would you, therefore, bring the retirement age back down to 70, if you could?

I’m not going to say what I would do, I’m not in Parliament, I’m not legislating. It is ironic, isn’t it, the moment the government lost the argument about judicial pensions, they put the retirement age back up to 75? Let’s face it, if you retire at 75, you’re going to get fewer years of pension, aren’t you? I rather hope I’ll get more than 2 or 3 years’ worth but time will tell!

So no regrets at your retirement?

Well, not yet, but I haven’t done it for long yet!

What else would you change?

One of the things I’d most like to change is judicial diversity. When I was a co-author of the SSRB report on pay rises for the judiciary, we had papers from a number of people, including one from a High Court colleague. His paper said that it costs him about £42,000 a year to be a judge in London moving from the regions, as we call them. Now, why is it that when I go to Cardiff, for example, I get my train fare, I get my newspaper, I even get my gin and tonic paid for. But when the fabulous new High Court Judge, Ms Justice Henke, comes from Cardiff to London, she gets no expenses at all.

Let’s just suppose you are a really successful legal aid practitioner in one of the big cities out of London, be it Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, wherever, and you may well have children. As a legal aid lawyer, you probably haven’t been able to save much money. You may have no partner or you may have one who isn’t in a particularly well-paid job. But even if you have all of those, you may have children at school. You are not going to get people to apply for the job if it’s a London-based job because they do not and cannot uproot their entire family. This assumption is based on the very outdated and frankly discriminatory idea that High Court Judges are from a financially privileged position and have someone at home to look after the children while they go away to work for weeks at a time.

If you want to do a single thing to change the diversity of the judiciary, which I think most people probably support, you need to get rid of this idea that it’s a bit like being at boarding school – you go out from London for 18 weeks a year on circuit, you sleep in lodgings and you miss home. I really don’t see why each major city can’t have a High Court Judge. They can sit in that city, but of course, they can then travel to London and work there as well and get expenses paid for doing so when necessary.

You are otherwise not going to get any sense of diversity, by which I suppose I mean people who aren’t rich or relatively well off, to do the job. I was lucky. I was earning enough money at the Bar that I was able to save because I was doing big money work in a big set of chambers, and I saved money, and I was able to take the reduction in salary. But we’re not even talking about that, we’re talking about moving from outside London to inside London. One of my other colleagues pays £24,000 a year to rent a flat in London, just for himself. He also has to pay the council tax and all the other bills on top of as well. Now, that means he’s probably got an outlay, I don’t know, of £30,000 a year just to come into London to do the job. If you gross that up, it’s about £55,000.

Quite apart from that, of course, we have to leave our children behind when we go away. It’s an anachronistic system. When I put this idea to some of my very senior colleagues, they said to me, ‘Well, Nick, that’s the way it’s always been done’. To which my response was, ‘Well, there was always slavery in the 1800s. Then we paid women less than men. So should we do that as well?’ Of course not. I think that it would change the diversity of the judiciary within a short time if we could make that single change, which is, to me, so obviously sensible. I haven’t heard much support for it from anywhere, but I’m very glad I’ve had the opportunity to say it because actually, in this interview, it is a single most important thing that I want to say. Put bluntly, unless you are rich, if you live a long way from London and need to have a property in London, be it rented or purchased, you can’t afford to take the job.

In these interviews we always end on some personal questions away from the law, a bit like Desert Island Discs. If you were on a desert island what film, what play, what book, what song would you have with you?

Well, I would take the record, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. I would also need to have a really good hi-fi to play it on, if that’s allowed.

And your book?

I suppose on a desert island, The Lord of the Flies would be quite good, wouldn’t it?

One of the things that I want to do with my time is to read more because I read at school and I read at university, but since I’ve been at the Bar and being a judge, I haven’t read enough. I want to read more.

What novels do you have the aspiration to read?

I probably ought to read some Dickens because I haven’t read much Dickens, that may sound a bit boring. I have a lot of political biographies gathering dust which I would like to read. I like Wilbur Smith, but that’s really embarrassing to admit! I’m the sort of person who looks at airport bookshops and buys the winner of some prize or other for my holiday reading and then doesn’t read it!

What is your luxury item? You can’t say a decent hi-fi system because that’s to play your vinyl.

Moisturiser! A lifetime supply of high quality moisturiser.

You’re quite an appreciator of music.

It’s probably my biggest thing apart from sailing and my family.

Aren’t you also a big fan of music festivals?

I go to at least four festivals a year. I love that opportunity to escape into a parallel universe. In fact, a little anecdote, when I finished the Charlie Gard case, it was Latitude weekend. I went out of the back door of the court by the Queen’s Building at the turnstile gate there, in my jeans, Pink Floyd t-shirt, trainers, baseball cap and sunglasses on, hoping I’d be incognito, and the Great Ormond Street legal team were outside and they said, ‘Have a good weekend, Judge’. When I got on the train to Suffolk, my picture was on the front page of every copy of the Evening Standard which people were reading. Fortunately, I was wearing my silly wig in that photo, so people didn’t recognise me.

You’ve been on the radio a few times?

I’ve been on 6 Music. I was also Jeremy Vine’s legal eagle on Radio 2 for a time as well, and I’ve done a few sessions on Radio 4’s Legal Week. I would love to be the music presenter or radio DJ if I have my life again but that’s just a pipe dream, there are too many good people in that world. I think I’m going to do a few podcasts and see how that goes.

Back in the early 90s, I also won a pop quiz on what was then called Greater London Radio, but it’s now BBC Radio London. I got a holiday for two to Barbados for two weeks. Yes, that was fun. The question was, by the way, ‘What year did The Pretenders’ song, Brass in Pocket, get to number one?’ The next question was, ‘How many weeks was it number one?’ I got them both right.

The answer to those are?

January 1980 and 2 weeks. It was the first number one of the new decade.

Am I remembering correctly that you rang in to 6 Music? You did a phone-in?

A couple of times, yes. Once was when the question was, ‘Which word in the English language would you most like to abolish?’ I think the word that won was ‘moist’, but my suggestion was the word ‘me’ because I said it would then mean that we couldn’t have my children saying to me, ‘Me and my brother are going on our bikes’.

Another time was when I was on the way to Caernarfon. I was driving up there to go to court. They had this thing called The Chain on the Radcliffe and Maconie show and I pulled over in a lay-by and called them.

Music is probably one of the biggest things in my life. I suppose in terms of my career, the bits I’ve enjoyed the most, I’ve acted for a huge number of rock and pop stars. In fact, when I did my welcome speech at Cumberland Lodge, as High Court Judges traditionally do, instead of going on about my boring life and how brilliant I am, I basically did a pop quiz of songs by all the artists I’ve represented, and that was quite fun. I think John Wilson won the prize (again!).

We know you enjoy sailing. Have you had more time to do that in your retirement?

Not enough yet, no. I’m getting older, when you get to this age going out on a cold Sunday morning and capsizing and wearing a wet suit is just less attractive. I do need to get back into it, but I think I might be possibly graduating into boats that don’t capsize quite so often.

Do you still have the rib?

I do still have the rib and I still take it out. I took you out in the rib once Nick, didn’t I? I capsized you in the Solent, do you remember?

I remember vividly!

I also ought to tell you, I actually capsized Patrick Chamberlayne, a great, great friend of mine. His two daughters were in the rib with me at the time. His delightful younger daughter, then probably aged about 11, screamed out, ‘That’s my only daddy!’, as he went capsizing into the water. But happily, Patrick survived.