Luke Wells looks like he has it all. High-ceilinged, late-Georgian chambers overlooking the Walks in Gray’s Inn, now catching the last of the evening light. Tall bookcases crammed with planet-brained case law. Dark grey suit on his back – from a little gem of a Soho tailor who does the best cutting for Savile Row. Wig and gown hanging off his panelled door – handy for the quick sprint to Court Number One at the Old Bailey to rescue that battered glamourpuss, wrongly accused of murdering her lover, currently splashed all over page three of the Telegraph.
Well, that’s what Luke thought he would be doing after reading law at Lincoln College, Oxford, and bar school. He’d been brought up on Rumpole of the Bailey and John Grisham – and so plumped for criminal sets when he applied for pupillage.
That’s why he’s just got back from Chelmsford Crown Court for an application to vary bail conditions for a serial shoplifter. Fee – £350. Return rail fare – £12.90. Time spent getting there and back, waiting for case to be heard? All bloody day. Time spent waiting for fee to arrive in his bank account? Eternity. What was it he was told at Bar School? Justice delayed is justice denied. Try getting your case heard at Snaresbrook, with a backlog that stretches till next Tuesday.
Want to annoy Luke? First say ‘Legal Aid’. Then ask him about his old Oxford friend, Giles Archerton KC, now in a Chancery set in Lincoln’s Inn. ‘Seven figures, yes,’ Luke overheard Giles say at a Clerkenwell dinner party last night. ‘But half goes on tax. Throw in chambers fees – people think we work there free. And what’s the point of clerks? Overpaid secretaries.’ Luke begrudgingly agreed about the clerks – and what Giles went on to say about how slow solicitors are. But now, at 45 – 22 years’ call – he hasn’t broken into six figures. He hasn’t taken silk, either. Giles did – six years ago.
Luke’s children – Theo, 6, and Martha, 4 – will never attend the London private schools Luke’s parents (a history don and an English teacher) could afford 40 years ago. Neither can he and his wife, Suzannah (ex-graphic designer; now a full-time mother), ever buy the kind of tumbledown Camden house Luke was brought up in.
Their Walthamstow house is a decent size. Luke was lucky to get in for under a million in 2018 after he married Suzannah (Temple Church wedding; reception in Middle Temple Hall). Now he tortures himself with that constantly repeated newspaper feature on London house prices freezing in real terms for a decade. The house isn’t too bad – and the bike ride downhill in the morning can be a joy on the right autumn day. But his forever home? Please, no!
There are some high points in his career. They’re the ones he passed on to the dinner party last night. Everyone loved his victory at the Court of Appeal, when he saved Jock the Ripper. Well, he’d only been the junior, but it was largely his own work – even if the bloody silk hogged all the coverage in the Times. Then he served up the horror stories – the Swiss Army Knifer who’d punched Luke in the cells after he didn’t get him off an unwinnable case. And the pompous judge who corrected him on every tiny blunder: ‘By registry office, might you happen to mean “register office”, Mr Wells?’
Most defendants are deferential; even the old lags, who know Luke won’t work any more miracles than the dozens of sub-optimal briefs they’ve had before. He likes it when he wins a case; when he helps someone down on his luck; when a jury hangs on his every word. And he feels a glow – part altruistic, part egomaniac – when old friends he’s lost touch with ring up out of the blue. He knows almost instantly they’re going to ask for free advice: ‘Well, I had been drinking, Luke, but I was only just over the limit…’
Luke is inured to the most graphic details of individual, grisly crimes. But the relentless tide of human misfortune – even or especially the pettiest offences – is getting him down.
It isn’t all over yet. George Carman became a QC in his forties, didn’t he? And he only got his big break, defending Jeremy Thorpe, when he was 49. Luke had never worked with George but he’d seen him once – when he was doing a mini-pupillage and Carman was at the end of his career – in Daly’s, near the Royal Courts of Justice. Carman was toasting a victory with two much younger, taller women – fellow lawyers. ‘What a life!’ Luke thought then. Like Carman, he now drank far too much – two bottles of claret last night. Suzannah never said anything directly but he knew she minded the drinking and wondered whether that was why he’d shut up shop downstairs.
There’s still time to become Carman, isn’t there? Next year, he would take silk. Next year, he would have his Jeremy Thorpe moment.
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