Dying regrets of Britain’s most feared lawyer. George Carman’s beautiful case for Jeremy Thorpe and battle in opposition to the Yorkshire Ripper’s spouse made his title. But as he succumbed to most cancers, he made a startling revelation…

Get Carman by Karen Phillipps

(Biteback £25, 352pp)

When 56-year-old thrice-divorced George Carman QC first met blonde 30-year-old barrister Karen Phillipps at the Daly wine bar on the Strand in 1986, she told him she had a boyfriend whom she hoped to marry one day, and was prepared to wait.

‘You’re wrong,’ George told her. ‘You should marry me.’

Taken aback, Phillipps politely turned down his proposal. ‘So began a deep and enduring platonic friendship,’ she writes in the introduction to her illuminating tribute to Carman’s powers as Britain’s most-feared barrister.

The two never became a couple, but Phillipps spent her weekends with Carman at his Wimbledon des res, experiencing at close hand his workaholism, his chain-smoking, his charm (when he wasn’t in court demolishing someone on the other side).

She looked after him till his death from prostate cancer, aged 71, in 2001.

Her title, Get Carman, is a quote from the then Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, when Jonathan Aitken was suing the paper for libel in a row over his dealings with Saudi arms traders in the 1990s. ‘We’d better get Carman before Aitken gets him.’

The Guardian did ‘get Carman’, and won the case, after Carman pulled off his famous trick of presenting new evidence to the jury at the eleventh hour: in this case, air-ticket records which proved that Aitken’s wife Lolicia couldn’t have paid the bill at the Paris Ritz (as Aitken said she had) because she had not been in Paris at the time.

Anyone who listened to Carman as a castaway on Desert Island Discs in 1990 will recall the way he batted away Sue Lawley’s probing questions with the same kind of prickly impregnability with which Prince Philip responded to Fiona Bruce’s questions about his early life in a BBC interview to mark his 90th birthday.

So it comes as a bit of a shock to read the first 24 pages of this book: the opening three chapters of Carman’s autobiography, which he began when he became ill in 2000, but never completed.

Staring death in the face, he opens the floodgates and lets his emotions pour onto the page.

‘I say to you all,’ he writes, ‘do not leave it until time is coming to a closure for you to express your own feelings.

‘Crying, laughter, sadness and joy have been given to human beings as a release mechanism for healing . . . I wish I had done more crying in the psychological sense.’

He’s riddled with remorse: ‘I regret hurting all three of my wives. . . I should never have walked down the aisle.’

Of his son Dominic, he writes, ‘I want to tell him I love him and that I’m sorry. My profession took precedence.’

Carman expresses loathing for his father, who saw no successful future for him and was ‘damning, sarcastic and brutal . . . he never once told me he loved me’.

Of his own powers in court, he writes with pride, ‘Once in for the kill, I am ruthless . . . I would home in on it, like a boxer punching his opponent when off guard. I love it. I was wanted, I am needed and I am talked about.’ And ‘I am small in stature but in court I am a giant of a man.’

After that, with the admiration of a Dr Watson, Phillipps takes us through his most renowned cases, with clients including Jeremy Thorpe, Ken Dodd,

Richard Branson, Elton John and Gillian Taylforth. We see the way in which Carman (height: 5ft 3in) conducted himself at eye level with the seated jury, using all the guile and Shakespearean quotes he could muster to get them on side.

The Jeremy Thorpe case made his name in 1979. Thorpe was accused of hiring a hit man to murder male model Norman Scott, who alleged that he and Thorpe had been lovers. The hitman had killed Scott’s dog Rinka but not Scott.

Thorpe himself had not gone into the witness box, as Carman had strongly advised him not to: ‘It is a right, invested by the law, that a defendant can remain silent. We are not here to entertain the public or to provide journalists with further copy.’

Then Carman proceeded to do exactly that, uttering the quotable words, ‘Mr Thorpe has spent 20 years in British politics and obtained thousands of votes in his favour. Now the most precious 12 votes of all come from you.’

He walked close up to the jury and looked each member in the eye with a pointed finger. ‘Yours, and yours, and yours …’

‘It was as if he was hypnotising them,’ Phillipps writes. After 50 hours, the jury reached their unanimous verdict: ‘Not guilty’ for all four defendants, including Thorpe.

Then, at the Ken Dodd trial on charges of cheating the Inland Revenue and false accounting, Carman used the ploy of showing the jury a video of the chaotic state of Dodd’s property at Knotty Ash, in Liverpool, stuffed with old stage props, and waist-high in weeds.

He wanted to show them that ‘the world of accountancy was as fanciful to him as the world of the Diddy Men which he created’. Then he spoke the immortal words: ‘Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants.’

Verdict: Not guilty. Dodd was so grateful to Carman that he went on to name one of the Diddy Men after him.

His pale hands, ‘so delicate that they could be the subject of a Fairy Liquid commercial’ (according to one reporter), belied the brutal ruthlessness he could deploy in court.

‘He combined a Balliol intellect with a street fighter’s pugnacity,’ said his junior, Michael Brompton KC. Richard Branson (for whom he won two cases) said ‘he had the subtlety, tenacity and killer instinct of the praying mantis’.

Representing the News of the World versus Sonia Sutcliffe (wife of the Yorkshire Ripper), Carman produced incriminating documents proving she’d lied. In summing up, he said, ‘The truth and Sonia do not make good bedfellows … She has danced on the graves of her husband’s victims.’ She didn’t stand a chance after that.

‘It might come as a shock,’ Carman said on Desert Island Discs (and Phillipps quotes him on this), ‘that the art of advocacy is not the search after the truth. It’s the presentation of a case, and it’s for the court to decide where the truth lies.’

In this art, Carman was a wizard.