The legendary hack of the Old Bailey returns in this latest instalment of the Rumple chronicles. For die-hard Rumpole fans, there’s enough here, though it has to be said that the earlier books had more substance.

For the Bombay High Court Original Side Bar — especially the junior Bar — this Rumpole might strike a chord. For one thing, Rumpole now wants to take silk, and become a QC (“Queer Customer”, to his thinking). Some of the passages on this sound strangely familiar. Here’s a conversation between Rumpole and his wife, Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed.

“I’m sure. But there’s only one thing my client is really worried about.”

“What’s that?”

“He wants me to become a QC. He really wants to be defended by a silk.”

“Really? And have you agreed to that, Rumpole?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“If you got it you’ll be put at the level of Daddy.”

“That would be an honour.” My fingers were crossed. My late father-in-law’s performances in court didn’t improve when he became a QC.

When he does apply, but writing to Justice Leonard “Mad Bull” Bullingham (who, incidentally, has taken a remarkable shine to Hilda) for support, Rumpole says:

“My dear Old Bull,

My wife may have told you during the course of one of those tedious card games you both appear to enjoy, that I’m thinking of putting on a silk gown and joining those QCs (Queer Customers is what I call them) who loll around the front row in various courtrooms relying on their underpaid ‘juniors’ to do all the hard work.

And here’s his take on the whole business of going onto the senior lists:

Rumpole, QC. As I say, Queer Customers is what I always call them, and no doubt they’d be calling me that; but there are so many queer customers who have attained the rewards of senior barristers, a silk gown and a seat in the front row, that one more shouldn’t make much difference. I remember what Bonny Bernard [a Solicitor] had said about this most unassuming of men accused of manual strangulation: he wanted a QC to defend him. Even Hilda had wondered why, after so many years at the Bar, I had not reached the front row. I tried saying ‘Rumpole, QC’ again and found that it had rather a distinguished ring to it.

In the good old days — well, there were some good things about them — a barrister with a longing for a silk gown had only to get a couple of judges to write up to the Lord Chancellor, who as head judge easily found out who got drunk in court, or who ate peas with his knife, or would date a woman on the jury, and indeed anything else likely to let down the high standards of the front bench.

Times, of course, have changed and nowadays it seems there must be a committee for everything, including sorting out the list of applicants for the silk gown.”

If this has a familiar ring to it, small wonder among a small and withering band that still marks fees in guineas and clings limpet-like to bewildering traditions like extended collective institutional holidays — never mind the staggering backlogs — on the feeble argument that lawyers work very hard and hence need to go on holidays en masse. Of course, doctors, accountants, engineers, architects and just about all the rest of humanity doesn’t work hard, or else we’d have entire hospitals wandering off into the sunset. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in how many professional institutions can you spend time watching a cricket Test Match? I’d love to know what Rumpole might make of this.

In this book, Mortimer takes potshots at New Labour’s trampling of civil liberties, reserving his most acerbic comments for the excessive political correctness that seems to have oozed its way from America to the rest of the world. An ASBO is, of course, an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, and Rumpole is the subject of one such, for eating (and smoking a cigar) in Chambers. Rumpole takes rather a dim view of these things, seeing it as an unbridled curtailment of his liberty devoid of any rational procedural safeguards. At the same time, he’s also defending one of the youngest members of his long-standing tribe of recidivist clients, the Timsons, on yet another ASBO, this one involving playing football on a street. Of course, R v Timson has murkier dimensions than the Rumpole ASBO.

Meanwhile, Rumpole has another brief, too (as he says, “briefs are very like the number 11 bus. You wait an age to get one and then a whole platoon turn up at the same time”) involving a young, single clerk in a government department and a dead girl.

Rumpole’s conduct of these trials and his linking of one to the other, while no great example of forensic brilliance, is still engaging — due to a large measure to Rumpole’s blistering exchanges with judges with a marked predilection for donning the mantle of the prosecution. Rumpole makes his abhorrence for this quite plain, with predictable consequences.

Review by Gautam Patel. It should be obvious that the views in this review, particularly regarding vacations, are not the views of the Association.