Mum, she of the far reaching voice, (well she was a military nurse in the war) used to boom: I hope you’re minding your manners or I’ll want to know the reason why.
The remembered childhood frisson of nervous sniggering was my companion, plus outright hilarity, as I began to read Minding the Law for such is Scott’s style. Crikey, what a task though and just as well he led the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards in the Falklands War, amongst other triumphs – not that Scott would have been a match for my mum, let me tell you. But how on earth did Michael Scott arrive at the gates of the first Complaints Commission? Indeed, what is the Complaints Commission?
As civilian life loomed for the author, The Bar Council which regulates the behaviour of barristers, interviewed and appointed Michael Scott, with his distinguished war record but no legal experience – crucial to an unbiased approach – to head its first Complaints Commission. Whose complaints? The public’s complaints against the legal profession.
In at the deep end doesn’t really cover it, because who would show Scott the ropes when the ropes were as new as he?
So off the author goes, drawing us into a different minefield to that experienced in the military world. It is, however, still a place in which one should tread carefully in the search for justice, as he encounters hostility, distress, desperation, not to mention scrutiny by others, including journalists.
In Minding Your Manners – oh sorry, Minding the Law, we laugh, wince, bury our heads in our hands overcome with sadness, narrow the eyes aghast at the complainant, muttering, ‘What were you thinking?’.
Minding the Law is a marvellous page turning book: accessible, fascinating, and in his silent responses to some legal beagles and those from the other side of the coin I heard my mum’s voice. It is not only hilarious, but also sobering as we meet many of the disparate characters and complaints, some, by no means all, worthy of a second look. But that’s the thing: that has to be decided by the Complaints Commission. It is a world with which we are mostly unfamiliar, though I did go to Winchester Prison to ask our builder, in for GBH, to return on release and finish the job. (He did, dear reader)
But back to Minding the Law. As well as amusing, it is thought provoking, absorbing, worrying, never patronising and most importantly, revealing on so many levels. Read it, I insist, as the Complaints Commission endeavour to decipher the wood from the trees.
Michael Scott Minding the Law. The hazardous and hilarious world of handling complaints against barristers. HB. Marble Hill Publishers £16.99 Available on Amazon Prime.