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October 26, 2002, Saturday London Edition 1, FT WEEKEND - THE FRONT LINE; Pg. 3 [pictures added by this website]
A law unto himself By Julia Llewellyn Smith
ANTHONY Julius arrives slightly late for lunch at Six-13, a "kosher-fusion" restaurant in central London. The late Princess of Wales's divorce lawyer has a round face and a pasty complexion. "I have a migraine," he apologises, swallowing some pills. Softly spoken and blinking behind round glasses, Julius, 45, is that comparatively rare British phenomenon: a celebrity lawyer. His cases range from the glossy (defending Stephen Fry, who described him as "probably the most intelligent man I have ever met") to the worthy (defeating the racist historian David Irving in a libel case.) Like most lawyers, however, Julius is a target for hostility. In the legal fraternity, he bears the sarcastic nickname "Anthony Genius" - a nod to his polymathy. He has written several academic books, including one on T S Eliot and anti-Semitism and, now, Transgressions, about taboo-breaking art. As you would expect from a top litigation lawyer, Julius comes across as laid-back, yet totally in control of his brief. He laughs frequently and, however contentious the subject, his voice remains unemotional, his sentences perfectly structured. Only when I mention the "Genius" tag does he look momentarily flustered. "I don't think people really call me that, do they?" I nod. Julius frowns. "I'm slightly embarrassed by it. A genius is innovative, he gets people to see things in a different way. I don't think anyone could say I do that." But he does have a dauntingly wide portfolio. He shrugs. "I don't see why people think it's so amazing. Having a career and being a full-time mother seems a rather more extraordinary thing than being a lawyer and writing a few books." Such utterances may sound sententious, but Julius comes across as genuinely self-deprecating. It is easy to see why Diana warmed to him: he is charming company and a good listener: much happier posing questions than parrying them. He enjoys his food, looking covetously at my starter of chicken soup (his gazpacho is clearly inferior) and surveying his main course of steak and chips with undisguised glee. "The pills have kicked in," he confirms. Formerly a partner at Mishcon de Reya, Julius now consults for the firm three days a week. "Well, that's the theory but in practice it works out as more. But I only take on the cases that I want to do. I probably turn down more stuff than I take on." The rest of the time is devoted to his real passion: researching and writing his books. At Cambridge he read English. "I always wanted to do research, but I didn't think I'd get a good enough degree," he recounts with characteristic diffidence. "In the end I did (a first), but I stuck with the law. I didn't really give becoming a lawyer much thought, but I was a partner within a few years of qualifying." Born in north London, where he still lives, Julius describes his life as "quite prosaic, quite average". The eldest of four sons, their father was a menswear retailer who left school at 13 and became "a fantastically successful entrepreneur". Julius attended City of London - a boy's public school - then Cambridge. He married at 23 and had four children (the oldest is now 21 and at Cambridge himself) but five years ago left his wife, Judith, for Dina Rabinovitch, a journalist he met in the course of defending her father, an ultra-orthodox rabbi who runs a theological college near Jerusalem.
His children have all received a state education and Julius has always voted Labour. "I find it hard to imagine what the circumstances might be when I would not. I'm not a Conservative by temperament or political inclination. I am a member of the party in that I have a card, but I've not been a dutiful member for a number of years in that I've done nothing but pay my subscriptions." He shrugs, poker-faced. "Actually, they may have lapsed." His politics are typical of the coterie selected by Diana after her separation. Julius was introduced to her by Lord Palumbo, a Mishcon client, when she was suing the Daily Mirror for publishing photos of her exercising in a gym, and won her a favourable settlement. "Then she asked me if I would represent her during the divorce. I said: 'I'm not a divorce lawyer, if I acted for you it would be my first divorce case.' She said: 'It's my first divorce.' She was really stalwart. She was impressive. It was a very difficult time for her. We used to have lunch once a month after that. I liked her." After her death he helped establish the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, initially acting as its chairman. "It's the one thing I'm most proud of, we've raised Pounds 100m." Yet Julius was viciously attacked after it was revealed that Mishcon had charged the fund Pounds 500,000 for its services. "That was incredibly upsetting for me, incredibly," says Julius quietly. "For all of my time working for the fund I was completely unremunerated and for the first year or so it was taking up 60 to 70 per cent of my time, which was quite a challenge. Mishcon did all the complicated legal agreements at a significant discount." He pops a fat chip in his mouth. "I was working incredibly hard, so to be attacked by the very newspapers that had made Diana's life so miserable was almost insupportable. But there was never anything in it. There was nowhere to go. They hadn't uncovered any scandal. You just had to work very hard to shut it out."
Julius nods grimly when I read this to him. "A Kipling poem kept going round my head with the gist: 'We British aren't doing as well as we should, because unlike the Jews we play the game.' That was the thrust of that remark. Fiona Shackleton actually is Jewish herself." Readers complained and a retraction was printed. Such profiles regularly referred to Julius as an "outsider". "It's ludicrous," he says coldly. "I don't know quite what an outsider means. If I'm an outsider you are entirely including 99.5 per cent of the English population. All my four grandparents were born here." He is a practising Jew who attends synagogue and keeps kosher. ("Not all my life, no, but as a child and for the past few years.") "My father committed all his spare time to working for Jewish charities and Israel, so the Jewish aspect of my identity is a strong one. But there are multiple aspects to me." His brow furls. Julius has lived with anti-Semitism all his life. "It's all completely inconsequential stuff. It's not affected the way I have made my life, or the career decisions I have made. Asians, West Indians and Africans are much worse off than me. But there was a Jewish quota at my school. In Cambridge I had slipped through my letter-box a two-page note from the Little St Hugh society about the bogus blood libel going back to the 12th century. When I came down from Cambridge I was told not to bother to apply to certain law firms because they didn't take Jews. And I witnessed it at closest quarters litigating against David Irving." Did Julius ever fear he might lose against the notorious Holocaust denier? He shakes his head. "How could you lose against David Irving? How could one? He is just not a very interesting person. What he does is a form of attention seeking. What he suffers from is a lack of moral imagination, an inability to imagine someone else's pain, the Jewish pain. It's a kind of moral autism." In Trangressions he attributes the same insensitivities to some "Brit-artists", such as the Chapman brothers, who attempted to address the Holocaust with a grotesque tableau, Hell. "It's simply kids pulling wings off butterflies, showing a Beavis and Butt-head, callow pleasure in scenes of violence and destruction. There's no connection with any aesthetic meditation on the Holocaust. I compare the Chapmans to Christian Boltanski's photographs of pre-war Jewish life, which give a sense of the transience of human life reflected in the transient and understated nature of the art. That's the kind of art we need to move on to." He pauses to listen to the waiter outlining the sorbets on offer. "I'll have a mix of them, please!" His next book will be about anti-Semitism in Britain: generally more vituperative in literature, he says, than in actuality. "It's as if characters like Shylock and Fagin have acted as a safety valve." Recent events in the Middle East give him only "marginally greater cause for concern" for the safety of the Jewish population. "But so much of the material aimed at Israel is really deplorable. There's a fantastic animus, a one-eyed assessment of the dynamic of the conflict there. The cartoons coming out of the Arab world are couched in particularly anti-Semitic imagery of the Jew as hook-nosed and ringleted, behaving oppressively to the Arab. When you look at those, it's as if it's been put directly to you." Over coffee, conversation turns to his favourite form of relaxation: cinema. "The last two films I saw were Spy Kids 2 and Lantana." Which would he recommend? "Oh, definitely Spy Kids 2." At University College London, where he did his doctorate, he gave a seminar on Kant, Eliot and Tarantino. The usual adversaries snidely implied that a lawyer has no business pursuing such arty enthusiasms. Does Julius mind? "No," he smiles. "That's just England. We're
anti-intellectual and there's good things about that as well
as bad things. It's safer to be an intellectual in England
than in other places on the continent." | ||
LUNCH
WITH THE FT 
NOW
married, the couple have a one-year-old son. Julius is a
hands-on father (a subsequent call to his home to check a
fact is taken by a harassed Julius, preoccupied with
preventing the baby destroying his fax machine).
© Focal Point 2002
write to David
Irving