Gordon Brown recently appointed several members of opposition parties as government advisors - an extraordinary thing to do. Such a move, though, recalls the approach advocated by the lawyer, judge, and politician Frederick Edwin Smith (1872-1930). He thought that vital political issues should be dealt with by a Government comprising people from various political parties.

A barrister of lacerating wit, a controversial right-wing Conservative MP, legal reformer, and influential Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead - “F. E. Smith” as he was known - made a major impact on English law. He was renowned for his high-living, his captivating speeches, and his deadly ripostes. Take this one:

JUDGE: Mr Smith, having listened to your case, I am no wiser.

SMITH: Possibly not, m'lud, but much better informed.

And in a case, when he’d directed a jury on a point instead of leaving it to the judge:

JUDGE: What do you suppose I am on the bench for, Mr Smith?’

SMITH: It is not for me, Your Honour, to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.

Smith was from Birkenhead, outside Liverpool. He was very ambitious. At the age of 10 he declared his aim to become Lord Chancellor. He got that job at the age of 46, the youngest man to have been appointed for 234 years. He studied for four terms at Liverpool (a fact he tried later to suppress) before going to Oxford, where, having switched from classics to law, he gained a first.

A flamboyant president of the Oxford union, Smith stayed at Oxford after graduating as an academic for three years. He then passed his bar finals with distinction and set up a successful practice in the north of England before becoming an MP.

His political career got off to an explosive start. His maiden speech in 1906 is one of the most famous débuts in parliamentary history and made him an instant star. Although a conventional right-wing politician in many respects, Smith wasn’t a slave to dogma. He once said: “We have the highest authority for believing that the meek shall inherit the earth; though I have never found any particular corroboration of this aphorism in the records of Somerset House.”

He had a low view of women even given the era. In 1913, he said that “the average woman’s judgments and opinions are more coloured by emotion and by personal considerations than the average man’s”, and that women were unsuited to participate in democracy because, especially in moments of “public excitement” they might prove “a source of instability and disaster to the State”.

Smith was acclaimed for his excellent technical legal knowledge, his advocacy and his dramatic technique. He once appeared for an insurance company in a case where the claimant wanted damages for an injured arm. While asking the claimant a series of questions about the injury, and with a lulling casualness, Smith inquired in passing: “How high could you raise your arm before the accident?” The man obligingly demonstrated, and so instantly defeated his own claim.

In 1911, in Chapman v Hicks, Smith appeared for Miss Eva Hicks in a contract case. A breach of agreement had entailed her not getting enough notice of an audition. Smith persuaded the court to grant her compensation for a lost career opportunity – a novel win.

In 1919, Smith’s appointment as Lord Chancellor was widely questioned, as he was young and politically controversial. Even the King asked the Prime Minister to reconsider the appointment. But Lord Birkenhead (the title Smith took), initially quashed doubts about his suitability.

His judgments, especially in complex commercial cases, were admired for their elegant legal reasoning. In 1920, ironically for a man whose love of liquor often overcame his better judgment, Lord Birkenhead formulated the law about when drunkenness could be a defence to a crime. Arthur Beard had committed a gruesome killing but said he was too drunk to have intended it. Birkenhead stipulated that for crimes where an intention is crucial, drunkenness might render someone incapable of forming an intention. But Beard wasn’t that drunk, so he was hanged.

Birkenhead introduced significant legal reforms including the extension of the work of the county courts, and vast changes to property law which spring-cleaned the system of relic medieval principles. But his extravagant lifestyle and drinking eventually caught up with him and he began to disgrace himself in public. Reports of his witticisms and invective against his opponents often had to be qualified by the observation that the Lord Chancellor had “dined well”. When drunk he was often just an aggressive bully.

Like many remarkable people who shake the world, Lord Birkenhead wasn’t a simple character. Although he often had a pop at pomposity, he was himself arrogant and imperious. The cartoonist David Low caricatured him as Lord Burstinghead. Drink fuelled some of his feistiness, but it was his stone cold sober lines that were the most winning.

Once, just as Smith rose to address a jury, Mr Justice Ridley unjudicially said: “Well, Mr Smith, I have read the pleadings and I do not think much of your case”. Smith replied with perfect poise: “Indeed, my Lord, I’m sorry to hear that, but your Lordship will find that the more you hear of it, the more it will grow on you.”

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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