is a lawyer and a lawyer’s son. He was born in Plymouth,
to which town his family, leaving the line of Napoleon’s
retreat from Moscow, had come in 1813 in time to see the French
Emperor a prisoner on The Bellerophon in the Sound, all of which
explains his occasional references on cold days to frozen Frenchmen.
Plymouth provided formative influences: Drake; connections with
the Military (he served in the Plymouth College Combined Cadet
Force); the guns of the Royal Citadel, which point over the town
and not out to sea to subdue the pro-Parliament citizens.
From all this, he obtained a dislike for foreign dictators, a
distrust of overbearing executive bureaucracies, the knowledge
that you can finish the game and beat the revenue too and a valuable
aphorism which he never seeks to use as a weapon but bears in
mind whenever anyone speaks to him in jargon.
He has two children who no longer have homework for him to help
with; but, when they did, he found that his ability to factorise
quadratic equations was just the same as it was when he, himself,
had homework.
As a lawyer, his primary interests are planning transactions
in the most efficient manner, helping in what Mrs. Thatcher (as
she then was) once described in a letter to him as “the
battle against the Inland Revenue”, the control of executive
action and litigation, both on technical tax issues and at the
interface of revenue and administrative law.
Outside the law, he has too many interests to mention: he once
took strenuous exercise but gave it up after meeting a doctor
who told him that we are all born with a definite but limited
number of heartbeats, none of which should be wasted in the gym;
and he now models himself more on Mycroft than on Sherlock Holmes.
His published works include books and articles on legal topics
and, when he feels strongly enough, letters to the newspapers.
Recent cases include:
Wood v. Holden [2005] STC 789
Rafferty v. HMRC (not yet reported (2005))
HIT Finance v. CIR (not yet reported (2005))
MEPC Holdings Limited v. Crispin Mark Taylor (HMIT) [2004] STC
123
CIR v. Secan Limited and Ranon Limited 74 TC 1
CIR v. Arrowtown Assets Ltd. (4th December 2003 HKCFA)
IRC v. John Lewis Properties Ltd. [2003] STC 117
CIR v. Carreras Ltd. (Privy Council) [2004] STC 1377
Sports Club (1), Evelyn (2), Jocelyn (3) v. HMIT (Special Commissioners)
[2004] STC (SCD) 443 |
