Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories – stories of a devil’s advocate

Thomas Grant’s life of the celebrated QC Jeremy Hutchinson shows how, from Profumo to Howard Marks, he loved to skewer hypocrisy and defend rogues

I was prepared, I admit, to dislike Jeremy Hutchinson on principle. Here is a man whose life has been an exercise in clannish, well-connected endogamy. His mother was a Strachey, so as a child he was dandled by the grandees of the Bloomsbury group. At Oxford he fell in love with a Bonham Carter, while his sister sagely married a Rothschild. Hutchinson’s first wife was the actress Peggy Ashcroft; his second had been previously courted – not very ardently, I imagine – by Cecil Beaton and Edward Heath. He spent the war on a destroyer commanded by Lord Mountbatten, and when it was sunk David Lean’s film In Which We Serve turned the defeat into a triumph for patrician stoicism.

Inherited advantages were topped up by windfalls. A friend who died left Hutchinson a Monet; 10 minutes after taking delivery of the canvas, he sold it in Mayfair and snapped up a house in Hampstead with the proceeds. He currently lives in Sussex, in a former rectory of “magical beauty” which he paid for by disposing of an island he just happened to own in the backwaters of unbeautiful Essex. A tree in his garden was a gift from Leonard Woolf. And to add to his offences against the humble human average, he has survived, physically hale and intellectually acute, to the age of 100.

Continue reading...