It was in February 1986 that I first asked Harry Woolf for an interview. We were both on a train to Manchester, he to deliver a lecture on judicial review and I to record some of it for broadcast on my radio programme Law in Action.
That was the only way my listeners would be able to hear his voice. Though 1986 was the year in which Woolf joined the Court of Appeal, the then lord chancellor Lord Hailsham did not trust any of his his judges to speak to reporters — as Woolf explained to me with great charm and courtesy. But it would be fine for me to record a public lecture for broadcast.
Now, the former lord chief justice has published his memoirs. Is he perhaps a little more forthcoming than he was 36 years ago? To find out, read my review in the Law Society Gazette.
I declare an interest over Harry Woolf. I have met him a handful of times whilst trying to represent the solicitors’ profession and always, always he has always the most courteous and yet determined of judges; courteous but then always determined to secure what he fully believed was justice.
As a recent Chair of the Criminal Law Solicitors’ Association, I attended its annual conference in Sutton Coldfield where Lord Woolf was our keynote speaker. As it happens, I had been at the time suffering from profound tinnitus but when I , with help, asked him a question, he was consideration personified.
The only time I gathered that he had been impatient had been on that same occasion, when he complained about being looked after and escorted at the venue rather than being left to find his own way.
What a lovely and principled human being, where it is beyond question that we would have been much better placed if, for example, the most far reaching of his Strangeways Report’s recommendations were shelved rather than acted upon.