When the cops came calling to arrest Peter Mandelson this week, he was already lawyered up. And he’s secured the services of the best – and most expensive – lawyers in town. Mandelson is now staring down the barrel of a legal bill running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds – very possibly the millions, given the mammoth number of documents in the Epstein Files his lawyers will have to trawl through. Add in the forensic examination of government emails swapped in the build-up to Mandelson’s catastrophic appointment as British Ambassador to Washington – and the lawyers’ tills will be cheerfully ringing away.
Before Mandelson was arrested, he’d already been visited at his Regent’s Park home by Adrian Darbishire KC, 59. A trifling discount on Mandelson’s thumping legal bill -Darbishire didn’t have to come far, cutting down on his travel costs. He lives in Primrose Hill, a five-minute bike ride from Mandy’s charming neo-Gothic house, and Darbishire is an avid cyclist. He lives with his adopted daughter, 15, from Mongolia, and his wife, Lauren Child, the author of children’s books, including the Charlie and Lola series, which have sold over six million copies.
Darbishire is one of the top dogs in corporate and financial crime. Mandelson’s charge – misconduct in high office – is a relatively rare one. But it’s right up Darbishire’s street. He is joint head of chambers at QEB Hollis Whiteman, a leading corporate and financial crime set, a little east of the Inns of Court, in the City of London.
Darbishire’s greatest triumph was in the Supreme Court last year, when he brilliantly managed to overturn the conviction of Tom Hayes, the ex-UBS and Citigroup trader in the Libor-fixing scandal. Hayes was convicted in 2015 for fixing inter-bank borrowing rates. The Court of Appeal turned down his appeal, but Darbishire prevailed in the Supreme Court.
Hayes said, ‘He’s just so sharp and he’s a really nice bloke. He’s humble – he’s not one of these TV lawyers who want the attention. I used to row with him about our legal arguments. I wanted to run different ones, but he was right, as usual, and I was wrong. The ones he wanted to run were successful.’ Naturally, Darbishire came up with the killer point in the Supreme Court – the judge had unfairly directed the jury in his original case.
His other high-profile case was in 2019, when he successfully represented Boris Johnson, just before he became Prime Minister. The Brexit Justice group tried to prosecute Johnson for misleading the public, when he claimed Britain would gain around £350m a week from Brexit. Thanks to Darbishire, the High Court threw out the case. ‘Adrian’s a first-rate guy,’ Johnson says.
For a top KC, Mandelson will be looking at around £1,000 an hour
As well he might. Darbishire was two years below Boris at Balliol College, Oxford – the university’s most planet-brained college. Prior to Oxford, he attended a comprehensive before Charterhouse, where his father taught. His mother was a therapist. Called to the Bar in 1993, Darbishire took silk in 2012.
Despite all that, Darbishire isn’t your conventional KC. No Rumpole of the Bailey, basso profondo, maximo pomposo guff – more the quiet but deadly, understated cross-examination by stiletto. He wears a fleece, not a waistcoat.
His undergraduate degree was in English before he completed the law course at City University, London – the elite conversion course – before doing his LLM (or Master of Laws degree) at King’s College, London. I went to City, too. The best dons were brought in from across the country’s best universities to give you a crash course in the basics of law.
Darbishire will be familiar with the prosecution’s game in the Mandelson trial – if there is a trial. He is poacher turned gamekeeper: from 2007 to 2012, Darbishire was Junior Treasury Counsel at the Central Criminal Court – aka the most famous criminal court in the world, the Old Bailey.
No surprise then that this sort of AAA-list lawyer doesn’t come cheap. Criminal barristers are usually at the bargain end of the scale, compared with commercial lawyers. But Darbishire toils in the gilt-edged crime world – where fraud hits intellectual levels, and the defendants hail from the Square Mile, not from the East End.
Fees at Darbishire’s chambers vary according to the seniority and level of expertise but, for a top KC, Mandelson will be looking at around £1,000 an hour. And Darbishire will be accompanied by junior counsel, who will charge around half that.
Don’t forget the solicitors! Mandy has instructed the most famous firm of all, Mishcon de Reya, founded by Victor Mishcon in 1937. Among Victor Mischcon’s clients was Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed for murder, in 1955. In 1995, Anthony Julius, one of the firm’s solicitors, represented Princess Diana in her divorce.
Now employing over 1,400 people, Mishcon de Reya, based in Kingsway, Holborn, charges top dollar. Partners are paid from £580-£1,240 an hour, plus VAT. Non-partners charge from £230-£745 an hour, plus VAT. Mandelson is bound to engage the services of at least one partner and one non-partner.
Inevitably, the costs pile up. If a trial goes ahead, there will be weeks and weeks of planning before the trial itself – which, given the complexity of the case, is bound to last weeks. Two top solicitors and two top barristers, working at least 40 hours a week? Bank-breaking. Still, Mandelson can’t begrudge m’learned friends coining it in. As he once said, he’s ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes’.
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