Michael Arditti

Michael Beloff QC drops names – but they’re not the ones we’re curious about

Chelsea Clinton, Jeffrey Archer and Cherie Booth feature - but he’s frustratingly reticent about representing Ian Brady or the Scientologists

Michael Beloff, as head of the International Cricket Council’s code of conduct commission, addresses the media in Dubai, October 2010. [Reuters/Nikhil Monteiro/Alamy]

‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent, Michael Beloff QC has been one of the prime exemplars of that excellence over the past 50 years. While he may not enjoy the profile of contemporaries such as Helena Kennedy, Michael Mansfield and Geoffrey Robertson, the Times, on his retirement, described him as ‘one of the great ornaments of the Bar’, and he himself notes that he has argued more than 475 reported cases (a lawyer’s way of assessing their significance). In a more dubious honour, he has appeared in two novels by his friend Jeffrey Archer.

He explains that ‘this is a memoir about my quasi-public and not my private life’, so there is barely a mention of his wife and children, although a measure of domestic detail might have leavened the narrative. He writes more fully about his ancestry – highly distinguished, given its putative descent, through the 16th-century Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, from the biblical King David. More immediately, his father was Max Beloff, a fellow of All Souls and founding father of the University of Buckingham. His aunt was the political journalist Nora Beloff.

Beloff has the dubious honour of appearing in two novels by his friend Jeffrey Archer

After a stellar career at Eton and Oxford, he joined Gray’s Inn at the same time as Tariq Ali. The meat of the book is an account of his long career at the Bar. He abandoned criminal work early on, so there are ‘no titillating tales of murder or mayhem’. Instead, there are exhaustive records of his more significant – but less engrossing – involvement in immigration and employment law, and of his late-life incarnation as ‘the Godfather of Sports Law’, representing athletes including John Conteh and Tessa Sanderson and arbitrating at the Olympics.

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