16 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesD
arren McGarvey doesn’t like it
when middle-class journalists
like me remark on the quality of
his written and spoken lan-
guage. Or, more specifically, he
doesn’t like it when we sound surprised.
Having grown up in a deprived area of
Glasgow, and now finding himself rubbing
shoulders with bigwigs in the media class,
he often encounters condescending ad-
mirers who are amazed by his “ability, as a
working-class person, to string a coherent
sentence together without soiling myself”.
The point is well made. But I hope
McGarvey will forgive me for remarking
that he does write and speak extraordina-
rily well, with a wit and energy rarely
found elsewhere. McGarvey, who won the
Orwell prize for his 2017 book Poverty
Safari, begins his new one with a quote
from George Orwell’s 1946 essay Why I
Write: “I do not think I can assess a writer’sLook at what you’ve
done: a working-class
writer makes it clear
who causes poverty,
says Louise Perry
singing purely for the joy of it and hitting
every note with a tenderness not often
associated with these parts.”
This singer’s lungs are failing him
because, like so many people living in de-
prived parts of Britain, he is beset by what
epidemiologists refer to as “lifestyle dis-
eases”. Where McGarvey’s book differs
from Orwell’s is that while the poor of
1930s industrial Britain could easily locate
the cause of their misery in a simple lack of
material resources, the poor of McGar-
vey’s 2020s postindustrial Britain are suf-
fering from a more diffuse and complex setof problems. Generally not too little food,
but too much of it, and of the wrong kind;
not too many hours in the factory or down
the mine, but too few hours of any work.
We now have a social safety net that did
not exist a century ago, but it is capricious,
and McGarvey speaks to people who
spend much of their lives trying to jump
through flaming hoops held up by the
state. There is the homeless man with a
broken jaw afraid to go to hospital in case
he loses his room in a halfway house,
and the mother whose child is being
made ill by poor quality social housing
that she cannot persuade anyone in power
to care about.ridden kitchens of Britain’s poor. Look, he
says, speaking directly (sometimes very
directly) to his middle-class readers, look
at what you’ve done.
This book bears comparison with Or-
well’s classic 1937 book about British
poverty, The Road to Wigan Pier. McGar-
vey is not quite as skilled as Orwell (no one
is), but he shares a novelist’s eye for detail.
As when he writes of the man in a Glaswe-
gian pub who stands up to sing.
“His throat seems obstructed and he
gasps for breath as he belts out his tune...
here he is, in the twilight of his years —
which here is around the age of 60 –class act Glaswegian Darren McGarveyAn Orwell for today’s poor
motives without knowing something of his
early development.” This is an observation
that McGarvey has clearly taken to heart,
since his book is brimming with personal
experiences that make clear to us where he
is coming from.
The Social Distance Between Us is a book
about poverty, and the ignorance of people
who have never personally experienced it.
The title and introduction apply a pan-
demic spin on the subject, emphasising the
various ways in which distance — physical,
social, emotional — makes it more diffi-
cult for the powerful to understand the
lives of the powerless.
“How many MPs have experienced
poverty?” McGarvey demands. “How
many have had their toilet breaks timed,
their in-work benefits slashed or the in-
dustries and amenities around which their
communities were built closed down or
demolished?” I think we all know the an-
swer to this question, since we should all by
now be familiar with the data on social in-
equality and the dearth of working-class
people in elite professions, including poli-
tics. By the end of this book readers will be
left in no doubt about the fact that our
society is still riven by class inequality.
McGarvey won’t allow us to doubt it. He
grabs us by the collar and drags us into the
food banks, GP surgeries and mould-I
t was apparently said of Coleridge that
he was the last person to have read
everything. On the strength of Mich-
ael Beloff’s enjoyable memoir, MJBQC,
it may come to be said of Beloff that he
was the last person to have met everybody.
Illustrious names bestrew the landscape
of Beloff’s life, often enough as clients but
also as dinner guests at the high table of
Trinity College, Oxford, where Beloff pre-
sided as a benign president for ten years.
Assailing us with the reams of the great
and good with whom be broke bread,
Beloff reports that “when I was indulging
myself by compiling a notional all-star
British athletic team out of my guests, I
realised that Roger Bannister was only the
sixth fastest miler on the list”. We are not
told where Ken Clarke ranked in terms of
the chancellors who graced his table.
Michael Beloff QC is not quite a house-
hold name, but he is in the small pantheon
of great civil barristers of the past half-cen-
tury. He brought a mixture of learning, ur-
banity and charm to his advocacy, which
achieved notable results. In practice from
1967 to 2020, he had a vast list of clients
that included Sebastian Coe, Mohamed Al
Fayed, Ian Brady and L Ron Hubbard.books
Highs and lows of the
busiest man at the Bar
The life of the leading
silk Michael Beloff is
crammed with big
names and cases,
says Thomas Grant
Beloff’s interests have always extended
beyond the law. An article about him in
The Daily Telegraph once asked whether
he was the most influential man in Eng-
land, on account of wide-ranging connect-
ions and intellectual influence across the
political divide.
Beloff is not backward in reporting the
plaudits of others. He has apparently been
portrayed (non-villainously) in two of
Jeffrey Archer’s novels (Archer was a close
Oxford friend; Beloff gave character
evidence at his criminal trial). He reminds
the reader that Cherie Blair described him
in her memoir as “a brilliant man with
impossible handwriting”. Her husband,
Tony, tells him that he is the “busiest
member of the Bar”. And we are informed
that Margaret Thatcher personally con-
gratulated Beloff on the speech he gave at
the Archers’ 40th wedding anniversary.
Certainly the glittering prizes have been
liberally bestowed upon him. Beloff was a
member of elite club Pop at Eton and a fine
sprinter; at Magdalen, he became the pres-
ident of the Oxford Union; he took silk at
the age of 39; acquired an early expertise in
discrimination law before becoming the
doyen of judicial review; as president of
Trinity he achieved a measure of contro-
versy for his periodic public interventions
on education policy (AN Wilson described
a particular article he wrote as “odious”);
he later served as master treasurer of
Gray’s Inn; and he claims with justification
to be the “godfather of sports law”.
In between all this Beloff seems to have
given hundreds of lectures and speeches
across the globe while also pursuing a sub-stantial journalistic career as a comment-
ator and book reviewer, though he reports
that he was once reminded by the editor of
The Times Literary Supplement that it was
the purpose of a review to focus on the
subject rather than the reviewer.
Amid the breathless recounting of
frenetic activity, Beloff gives little away.Personal life and family are largely absent
from these pages. Perhaps the most self-
revelatory sentence in the book is: “Re-
grets? I’ve had a few; but only in the sense
that you can’t have every chocolate in the
box.” There is a familiar barristerial will to
power on display here: the desire to be in— and win — every case. In the event it
seems that Beloff was in virtually every
legal dispute of significance over the past
50 years. We learn that he has appeared in
more than 475 reported cases, surely a
record, and one unlikely ever to be broken.
A memoir occasionally at risk of antago-
nising the reader through the full force of
the writer’s delight in his own undoubted
triumphs is saved by boundless enthus-
iasm for life, a consistently humorous tone
and, at times, self-deprecation. Beloff leav-
ens the highs with occasional lows. He is
candid about his failed attempts to get into
the House of Lords as a people’s peer. Nor
does he omit his forensic disasters, the
most notable being his representation of
the EastEnders actress Gillian Taylforth in
her libel action against The Sun.
This was the Vardy v Rooney of its day.
Taylforth had been accused of performing
a “sex act” on her partner in a slip road off
the A1; she claimed she was merely sooth-He’s been portrayed
(non-villainously)
in two of Jeffrey
Archer’s novels
JAMES GLOSSOP FOR THE TIMESMJBQC
A Life Within and
Without the Law
by Michael BeloffHart, 344pp; £29.99The Social
Distance
Between Us
How Remote Politics
Wrecked Britain
by Darren McGarveyEbury, 400pp; £20McGarvey feels a
fierce kind of love
for the people he
writes of – his people