There are good reasons why English law is famous around the world, and there are equally good reasons why English lawyers tend not to be. They are mostly too rarefied, too shrouded in formal garb, too satisfied with their Latin vocab.
But occasionally one comes along who catches the limelight. Their courtroom gestures are more theatrical, their phrases more entertaining, and their lists of clients would make the producers of I’m a Celebrity faint with envy. This distinction was once the libel barrister George Carman’s. Today it belongs to David Sherborne.
“You’re meeting David?” asks the very friendly manager at his chosen Chinese restaurant in north-west London. “We know David here.” I find myself unsurprised.
Before our lunch, Sherborne’s professional website informs me: “Although the majority of the high net worth individuals, world politicians, entrepreneurs, blue-chip companies and other influential organisations David has acted for are confidential” — followed by 29 names including Diana, Princess of Wales, the Beckhams, and Donald and Melania Trump.
Sherborne represented Johnny Depp in his unsuccessful 2020 libel claim against the Sun, and Coleen Rooney in her victory in last year’s so-called “Wagatha Christie” trial. “There’s always a perception that all my clients are uber-famous people,” he says innocently when he arrives. “Some are. Some are wealthy individuals who literally want no profile at all. And a lot are people who find themselves in a newsworthy situation.”
Over the past 20 years, Sherborne has been one of the lawyers who have pushed forward privacy law, limiting what the media can say about people’s private lives unless there is a strong public interest. He has continued to win compensation for the famous and not-famous individuals whose voicemails were hacked by tabloid newspapers.
The hacking affair has cost Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers £1.2bn, including £128mn in the last financial year. Mirror Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, has spent £100mn on settlements, £55mn of which has gone to the claimants’ lawyers, including Sherborne, whose hacking work is no win, no fee. Following a trial earlier this year, it is waiting to hear whether it will have to pay out to others, including Prince Harry.
After 13 years of litigation, the end is still not in sight: Sherborne is demanding damages from the publisher of the Daily Mail, for claimants including Harry and Sir Elton John. The Mail denies any illegal practices, but last month Sherborne defeated its attempts to have the case struck out before trial.
Barristers espouse the cab rank principle, to represent whichever customer turns up, but Sherborne’s sympathies are clear. “It’s not just an intellectual exercise. Libel — you can act for a claimant and a defendant, and I have. Privacy is different. My belief more naturally falls with what claimants believe.”
Against Mirror Group, which has admitted at least some wrongdoing, “I regard myself as on the side of the angels. I have no sympathy for media organisations who say it’s awful that we have to go through these trials. There were ways to deal with it. They chose to cover it up and not admit it. So of course the process is going to be painful.”
It’s not just the media who find it painful: plenty of Sherborne’s peers do too. In court, he needles them by submitting flurries of late documents. “This simply has to stop,” Mirror Group’s counsel despaired. Sherborne’s hair is such that a barrister’s wig makes him look more normal. His critics take one look at photos of him, ever coiffured, ever tanned and ever present alongside his clients outside court, and grumble: is the celebrity barrister eager to be a celebrity himself?
“There’s all sorts of myths,” sighs the man himself.
Sherborne has been coming to this restaurant for years, and instinctively picks out a couple of chicken dishes. I order some fried vegetables and spicy tofu. Soon we are two over-educated men pretending we know how to use chopsticks.
We talk about the famous. “Success when you’re older is much better,” says Sherborne, 54. “People who I grew up with who were well-off never quite had that same level of desire to achieve.”
Sherborne attributes his own drive to his father, a criminal barrister for whom “no result I got was ever good enough . . . I was always trying to please him.” Sherborne senior “was quite Victorian. He wanted me to call him ‘sir’, and I ain’t going to call him sir.”
Sherborne junior won a place at his father’s college at Oxford aged 16, got a first-class degree in Classics, and became a criminal barrister. None of it led to the praise he wanted. “When I stopped being a criminal barrister, that was the trick.” His father, 92, is now “one of my biggest fans. I could have saved myself a lot of angst growing up.”
If I had to guess what endears Sherborne to celebrities, this ability to tell stories would be a start.
Menu
The Good Earth
143-145 The Broadway, Mill Hill, London NW7 4RN
Shredded smoked chicken £12.80
Lettuce wraps £14.80
Sizzling chicken with black beans £22.80
Ma-po tofu £22.40
Steamed rice £6.80
Dry-fried French beans £13.80
Sauvignon blanc, 2 glasses £18
Coffee £3.40
Double espresso £3.60
Total £133.79
Criminal law gave Sherborne the court experience that other media barristers lack. In the “Wagatha Christie” trial, he cross-examined Rebekah Vardy, the footballer’s wife who argued that she did not know who leaked Instagram posts of another footballer’s wife, Coleen Rooney. When Vardy began an answer with the words, “If I’m honest,” Sherborne snapped back: “I would much rather you are honest because you are sitting in a witness box.”
In June, Prince Harry became the first British royal to sit in a witness box for 130 years. He said that he’d got the idea for a hacking claim from meeting Sherborne (“a lovely fellow”) at Elton John and David Furnish’s house in France. “I didn’t encourage him to do anything . . . I was there and he was there . . . I don’t have to encourage anyone to bring a claim. To be honest, everyone is so keen to bring a claim.”
Mirror Group complained of “lawyer-driven litigation”, arguing that Harry could not link published stories to his voicemails. The unlikeliness of a case only spurs Sherborne on. “It’s David and Goliath stuff. I remember being told we were going to lose in [Max Mosley’s privacy claim]. We were going to lose in Rooney.” He started early with lost causes: at an interview for a posh private school, he told the headmaster how Harold could have won the Battle of Hastings. He was immediately given a place in the year above.
Are wealthy celebrities really David fighting Goliath? And was Sherborne always so confident in his slingshot? Mark Lewis, a solicitor on the first ever hacking claim, says that Sherborne “felt there was not a way to plead it”. He says that, if he’d taken Sherborne’s advice, “there’d still be a News of the World on Sunday and no hacking claims.”
“It’s not true!” says my guest, smiling. “I said, we need more information, and we can ask for 14 days’ extension. He said we can’t get more time. The next thing I know he’d gone to [another barrister].” In and out of courtrooms, recollections do vary.
Hacking voicemails and ransacking bins are no longer press tactics. Aren’t hacking cases just sucking money from much-needed journalism? “I don’t believe it is historic, because the same people who did it, a lot of them are still in senior positions.” Will he still be doing cases like these in a decade? “Maybe! I genuinely don’t know.”
Sometimes Sherborne is told he’s going to lose, and does lose. In 2020 Depp sued for libel over the Sun’s claim that he had beaten his ex-wife, the actor Amber Heard. Depp lost, although he won a subsequent jury trial against Heard in the US.
For Sherborne, it was his worst case. The judgment was “utterly perverse . . . That is the one case I can point to and say that was an unjust result. If we’d had a jury, we would have won. I do love juries. When you read the judgment, there was almost no reference to the evidence in court. It was as if we didn’t turn up to that trial. I honestly can’t point to another case where there was a sort of miscarriage of justice.”
Many observers’ sympathy was for Heard, who suffered online abuse arguably as intrusive as phone-hacking.
Due to Covid restrictions, Sherborne lived with Depp for two weeks in France before the trial. Did Depp hold the result against him? “Far from it, quite the reverse. We stayed in touch for quite a time after the trial.”
The main courses arrive on the carousel between us. “Next time, I’m going vegan, OK?” Sherborne tells the manager, jollily. He can play the showman. When Vardy’s team did not produce a key witness, he declared: “We have Hamlet not just without the prince, but also the entire royal court.” The line was so good that he used it again when Mirror Group decided not to call former journalists including Piers Morgan to testify. The theatre matters. “There is always going to be the court of public opinion, because your clients want you to be aware of that.” Would he allow cameras into English trials? “Televised court probably would be helpful.”
Unlike nearly every other barrister of his renown, Sherborne hasn’t acquired the status of Queen’s or King’s Counsel. Why? “I’ve never really wanted to be a QC. I did apply once about 15 years ago, because I thought my dad would like it . . . I had this interview. I was asked this question: do you think you put your relationship with your clients above your relationship with your peers? I was honestly quite shocked by it, and I answered: I thought that’s what we were meant to do. Apparently, that was not the right answer.”
OK, but working with others is simply a box to tick: another barrister would’ve reapplied the next year. “Yeah, they would.” Then again, another barrister wouldn’t have been invited to Elton John’s. “Probably not.” I ask Sherborne if he sees himself as more of a peer to his clients. “I think that’s right. Everyone was like, ‘There’s Depp hugging you on the court steps, that’s not really . . . ’” He interrupts himself. “I am very passionate about clients.”
Celebrities, he insists, are not what we think. “You’re talking about human beings who just happen to be famous . . . When you see them in the context that I see them in, they’re dealing with a situation that is quite levelling . . . The whole myth that footballers are overpaid stupid people actually is not true at all” — he says, pointing to how hard they trained as kids. If I were a judge, I might arch my eyebrow.
Author Tom Bower described Sherborne as “media-hating”. “I don’t hate the media at all!” he protests. Even so, he may have a motivation to keep pursuing privacy claims. In 2013, after he represented victims of press intrusion at the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, the tabloids revealed he had a relationship with one of the inquiry’s barristers. The couple insisted they had gone to the island of Santorini to discuss the possibility of a future relationship, and that their romance itself didn’t begin until after the inquiry’s report was published.
The Sun milked it, offering “two romantic readers” their own holiday to Santorini. There were paparazzi, there was doorstepping. “That added fuel to the fire,” says one person who knows Sherborne.
Was he a victim of press intrusion? “Yeah, there were things done . . . and that was not nice for the people around me. Some people said to me, ‘Now you understand what your clients go through,’ and it’s true. But I knew that already . . . It was intended to undermine the inquiry. I feel very badly for the other person involved, because they did absolutely nothing wrong. It was so obviously political.” The couple have separated; Sherborne is twice divorced.
His belief is that people’s sex lives are their own. When Max Mosley, the late motor-racing supremo, came to him after a sex sting, “I said you’ve got a 100 per cent chance of winning. Your sexual interests are plainly private.” UK newspapers are now often unable to publish “kiss and tell” stories. “What business is it of anybody?” So if I knew that he had a relationship with an A-list celebrity, I couldn’t mention it? “If somebody has no objection to it, then you can publish it. It’s gossip. If somebody says, ‘I don’t want you talking about my private life,’ then that has to trump gossip.”
Privacy law has gone further. One of Sherborne’s cases provided an early signal that the media may not even be able to name a business executive who is under criminal investigation. “If you believe [there’s] no smoke without fire, then there is a real reason for protecting people’s reputation up to the point where they are charged.” This arguably misunderstands how journalism works: it is often only when unproven allegations are made public that more evidence emerges.
Meanwhile, celebrities have more power over their image, helped by Netflix documentaries that they themselves make. “They do. Is that wrong?” Well, take George Carman, celebrated as a great barrister. When he died in 2001, his son alleged that he’d been an alcoholic and a wife-beater.
“What’s the public interest in knowing that role models have feet of clay?” asks Sherborne. “Maybe it’s better that you don’t know what George Carman’s like personally.” He concedes that there should be exceptions for politicians and for criminal offences such as domestic abuse. But “say he was just rude and boorish and drank. Really do we need to know about that? He’s an impressive individual and you want to aspire to be an impressive individual.”
It’s a disconcerting new reality — that we may know less about the characters of eminent figures, except how they choose to reveal them. By now I have taken up two hours of Sherborne’s time, or, to put it another way, well over £1,000 worth. Thankfully on this occasion the FT is only paying for the food.
The cheerful restaurant has emptied, so I turn to a delicate matter. Is Sherborne’s tan as fake as the rest of the legal profession assumes? “You tell me: does it look fake?” It looked a different colour in court a week earlier. He insists he just loves sunny holidays, even if he spends most of them working. “No sunbeds, no fake tan. I do go away a lot . . . It’s like all the myths. It’s like the obsession with the suits I wear or my hair. You can’t stop people writing what they write.” Except, if you’re Sherborne, you quite often can.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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