'You were thrown in at the deep end and if you weren't very good, you'd sink' - Retired Old Bailey judge Paul Worsley KC draws on barrister career for new novel

Paul Worsley is a King’s Counsel who sat as a Judge at the Old Bailey for a decade. He tells Laura Reid about his novel showcasing life at the Bar through his protagonist.

A fees and expenses book from more than 50 years ago was a stark reminder of how much the world had changed during his time as a barrister and judge – long gone were the days of a car service costing a mere £14. It prompted Paul, of Sawdon, North Yorkshire to begin to write down his recollections of the characters and cases he has witnessed in his time.

Whether it was as a barrister when he successfully prosecuted so-called ‘Wearside Jack’ - the man who years earlier pretended to be the serial killer eventually unmasked as Peter Sutcliffe - or as a judge at the Old Bailey overseeing terrorism cases, he has locked eyes with plenty of notorious figures.

"I thought it would be interesting to put together some thoughts really just for me,” he says. “And if the kids (both his children are also now King’s Counsel and, like him, came up through chambers in Leeds) and grandkids later wanted to read about it, fine. But then I thought, actually, you could make a story out of it and have a barrister who begins back in the 1970s, as I did, trying to get pupillage, trying to get a place in Chambers, and getting his first cases.”

The result is Lysander Laithwaite KC, a novel in which Paul recreates aspects of his professional life in the criminal courts in a fictionalised manner through his protagonist. “The characters here may appear larger than life,” the 78-year-old notes. “The judges more outrageous. The criminals more villainous. The victories sweeter and the disasters far more catastrophic than they really were. But that I hope is half the fun.”

The tale isn’t Paul’s first published work. His first novel The Postcard Murder: A Judge’s Tale, which is a reconstruction of 1907 murder case tried at Old Bailey where the defendant was acquitted, was released two years into his retirement in 2019 and came after two children’s books, The Mango Monkey and The Adventures of Cato the Cayman Cat.

“It was fun telling the tale from the judge's point of view,” he says of The Postcard Murder. “I thought having just retired as a judge, one thing I do know is what it's like to sit on the bench, what it's like to be a judge. And I'd sat at the Old Bailey as well. I'd sat in the same court where this trial had taken place.”

Paul spent the last 11 years of his career as a judge, serving at the Old Bailey. It was quite different to his previous 35 years as a barrister. “When you're at the Bar, you are a mouthpiece. You are representing someone. You're putting forward the evidence on their behalf. And you're putting forward the legal arguments,” he says. "But as a judge, instead of thinking of the arguments, preparing the arguments, presenting the arguments, you sit there I would say in the middle as a referee...You have to listen to the arguments and come to a view.

"It's very important that you can be decisive - you make up your mind that this piece of evidence is not going to be admitted before the jury, for example, and you give reasons for it. So you are listening much more than you're talking and that was a big change after 30 odd years of talking. Good judges keep their mouths shut in my view.”

Paul, who grew up in Hull, the son of a physics lecturer and housewife, has a classmate to thank for his decision to pursue law. “A boy at my school said he was going to go to the be a lawyer and go to the Bar and I'd not thought about that at all...I'd never met a lawyer. I didn't know any solicitors. I didn't know any criminals then. So it was a bit of a leap but my parents were very supportive.”

Paul read law at Oxford before he was called to the Bar in 1970, driving around the Yorkshire circuit in his Morris Minor. He first worked from chambers in Leeds and in 1990 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel (now referred to as King’s Counsel). His first case as a barrister was at the age of 22. “You were thrown in at the deep end and if you weren’t very good, then you would sink,” he says. He could be dealing with hardened criminals, or those who had never been in court before, and sometimes people who were wrongly accused.

“You've got to come on board pretty quickly and get reasonably confident in dealing with people who know their way around the courts as well as those people for whom it's the first and hopefully the only time they'll ever be in court.” You have to learn quickly how to address both a judge and a jury, he adds. “Some people on a jury won't want to convict just as a natural reaction. Other people can't wait to get their hands, if you like, on someone whom they see as a rapist or a knife wielder...If you're prosecuting, you're putting a case together which is sufficiently watertight to enable you to invite a jury to convict…

“If you're defending, you're seeking to raise a doubt in the mind of the jury as to the reliability of the prosecution evidence…Some juries you can see are stonefaced and they're not taking your arguments on board or if they are they're not treating them very seriously. But that's all part of the challenge of being a barrister whether you prosecute or defend."

Paul hopes to capture this in his book, shedding light on the life and times of an advocate at the criminal Bar. “And who knows?” he muses. “Perhaps a second volume to follow called ‘For now I’m a Judge – and a good Judge too’.”

• Lysander Laithwaite KC will soon be released by Sawdon Press and will be available at Kemps Bookshop in Malton.