Within minutes of his appointment by John Major as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Lord Nolan left no one in any doubt that he, and he alone, would determine how the committee would conduct its business. Responding to the Prime Minister’s Commons declaration that the committee would probably sit in private, Nolan pronounced that he had always sat in public and intended to continue doing so.

Nolan chose his own agenda.The committee, which was established in the autumn of 1994, may have owed its existence to the cash-for-questions affair, but Nolan set in motion a far-reaching inquiry that scrutinised MPs’ conduct and looked at local government, party funding and quangos.

In his role as chief inquisitor, Nolan was patient, courteous and good-humoured. Determined not to be seen as distant, he used speeches and interviews to provide a running commentary on his findings. He also proved a skilled chairman. By insisting at the outset on an agreed report, he prevented the committee from breaking into factions. He was attentive to the opinions of his fellow committee members, and his handling of the former Defence Secretary Tom King was particularly adroit.

The committee’s first report, published in mid-1995, argued that MPs should declare their earnings from acting as parliamentary consultants and be banned from acting as paid agents for lobbying firms. It also recommended that a new commissioner be set up to oversee MPs’ conduct.

Not surprisingly, this extensive critique upset a large number of MPs: one Conservative member badgered Nolan as he went into the House to listen to a debate on his report, while the former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath called him “unworldly”.

Some sections of the Press, meanwhile, perhaps not entirely relevantly, spotlighted Nolan’s own wealth, particulary his second home on the Côte d’Azure, and accused him of hypocrisy.

The son of a solicitor, Michael Patrick Nolan was born in 1928. His father’s family had emigrated from Co Kerry during the Irish potato famine. He was brought up in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, and attended Ampleforth, where his housemaster instilled in him a lifelong love of fishing.

After two years’ National Service in the Royal Artillery Nolan read law at Wadham College, Oxford. At Oxford he made two lifelong friends — the future Northern Ireland Secretary Patrick Mayhew (later Lord Mayhew of Twysden) and the future Chief Inspector of Prisons, Stephen (later Sir Stephen) Tumim. He also met his future wife, Margaret, the younger daughter of the poet Alfred Noyes. The couple married in 1953.

The same year Nolan was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple. He chose tax law, he later explained, because “I was very short of money and briefs were hard to get.”

With a meticulous eye for detail, Nolan steadily built up a large practice. Though he was happy to advise companies in their battles with the Inland Revenue, he refused to dirty his hands with dubious tax avoidance schemes. A superb, measured advocate, he made each point once and once only. Judges soon warmed to his relaxed style, his organised approach and soft-spoken charm.

Nolan became a QC in 1968. He was called to the Bar in Northern Ireland in 1974, taking silk there at the same time.

Having served as a Crown Court recorder for seven years, Nolan was appointed a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court in 1982. Two years later he granted the National Coal Board two injunctions against the use of flying pickets by the National Union of Mine workers.

In 1985 he awarded another to Westminster Council, restraining the GLC from using posters to persuade Londoners to back its fight against abolition. That same year, he was made presiding judge on the Western Circuit.