All my life I've had a rather ugly prejudice against barristers. I'm not a fan of the wigs, the gowns, the Temple and the Inns, the chambers system and the mysterious elevation by private wizardry of publicly paid professionals to the rank of Queen's Counsel. I'm instinctively with Dickens in seeing Chancery, indeed the whole courts system, as a dark, forbidding land, like ancient Sardinia, populated by tribes speaking strange dialects only too ready to fall on unwary travellers and divest them of all they have.

My prickly antipathy to barristerial cant was one of the reasons why I wasn't at the otherwise admirable Convention on Modern Liberty at the weekend. There's a certain sort of silky smuggery about some of freedom's self-appointed defenders that I can do without. But this week, on the eve of the convention, I appreciated just how mean my prejudice was.

Iain Morley is a university contemporary of mine who was born to be a barrister. Privately educated, a world debating champion, with a sonorous voice and an invincible belief in his own rightness. I loved arguing with him as a student, but wondered how noble it was to pursue a profession that rewarded him for behaving as pompously as we both did while undergraduates.

That was until a mutual friend told me about the turn Iain's work recently took. He's been serving as a prosecutor in Arusha, pursuing those guilty of war crimes during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It is painstaking, soul-wrenching, emotion-mangling labour. For years now Iain has been immersing himself in the horror of planned, systematic, ideologically driven, intimate and bloody mass murder, the reality of hand-to-hand slaughter of hundreds of thousands. And he has patiently used the machinery of law, in all its slow certainty, to bring the perpetrators to justice.

The precincts of the courts are kept in Lincoln's Inn order by a team of gardeners, one of whom, a young man called Joe, struck up a friendship with Iain. Iain recognised that Joe took more than an ordinary interest in the mechanics of justice and the two began talking about how courts worked, and what law meant. They talked, discussed and argued as we once did in the Oxford Union bar 20-odd years ago.

Since that first conversation Iain has been hard at it in his prosecutor's role and this week he was rewarded with a letter entitling him to use the letters QC after his name. But his pleasure at that was as nothing compared to the joy he felt when Joe, after much goading, then coaching, then study, all paid for by Iain, graduated recently as a judge in Tanzania. What bound these men together, the Oxbridge QC and the gardener who cannot quite believe he now sits on the bench, is they both see in the law not a way of scoring points and an engine for earning more and more but the cement of civilisation.

The flipside of the pomposity to which some lawyers can easily become prey is an earnestness about justice, a belief that due process is a good in itself, that rules codified with care are the best bulwark against barbarism we have. I don't think I'll ever warm to the world bounded by Gray's Inn and Middle Temple, but the principles they uphold there are, in their way, the answer to the anguished prayers of the victims of Africa's continuing agonies.

More widgets, please

The news that surprised me most last week was the revelation that sales of canned beer are down. The carry-out, as I was brought up to call it, was an integral part of Scottish adolescent life, as central to a Friday night in Aberdeen as the Agnus Dei to a Tridentine Mass.

With recessionary pressures driving us out of the pub but the requirement to drown sorrows more pressing than ever, I would have thought that the purchase of beer for domestic consumption would have soared. There are certain businesses that always do well in hard economic times, from the cinema to takeout pizzas. It seemed to me that a few cheeky tinnies would offer both escape and value for money and there'd be no lack of demand for them.

But having had to spend rather more time, and money, than usual on canned beer myself recently I think I know why there's a problem. Apart from Guinness, Boddington's and Worthington there are almost no quality beers offered in cans with the widget that guarantee near- draught quality. The cost of a widget can't be that great. Cans of draught Guinness are scarcely more expensive than other beers. But they taste infinitely better. Why don't brewers ensure every can is of the same, high, quality? Is it the case, as it was in the past when so many pubs served gassy keg-stored alcohol-infused ullage instead of proper real ale, that the problem with most of the big brewers is that they don't really like beer?

On the grapevine

Still in recessionary mode, can I offer some more advice to complement my recommendation of Wordsworth Books' superb Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural series? One of the best wines I've tasted recently is Berry Brothers' Extra Ordinary White. On sale at just over a tenner a bottle, it works out at around two quid a glass. Which is what one of Wordsworth's classics cost. But even they can't take you to the places this white bordeaux can. Perfect for numbing the pain. Get some now - before Fred Goodwin buys the vineyard.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

Times Recommends

• A dose of defeat is just the medicine
• Protecting ourselves from Eurocreep
• After the summer of LUV, it'll still hurt