Lord Mishcon

When the final agreement came, he considered that the sum that the Princess got was right and fair. What surprised him, however, was that the points of difference and the legal niceties were smoothed out and agreed much more quickly than he had at first anticipated. His private assessment was that, at worst, it could take up to 15 years.

Most of Mishcon’s life was given to the law but, above all, he was a man of influence who could, and did, make a mark on international affairs, town and country planning, local government finance and the lives of countless people whose divorces he handled. Deep knowledge of a subject, charm, clever advocacy and immense persistence all played a part. And, like most of his kind, all he would say afterwards was that he was far less important to the result than his peers and opponents contended.

In a period of high Middle East tension he was a trusted emissary between 1984 and 1990 in the at first informal conversations that resulted in the Jordan-Israel peace treaty of 1994. He crossed the Allenby Bridge between the two states many times bringing secret messages from one side to the other, returning each evening to his Israeli home. King Hussein and Shimon Peres, then the Foreign Minister of Israel, used Mishcon’s country house in England a number of times for private meetings.

There was praise afterwards of the man who gave generously of his time and would drop his own legal business at short notice to help the peace process. “Nobody could do what he did,” Yossi Beilin, then the Deputy Foreign Minister, told the Knesset. It was typical of Mishcon that he declined an invitation to attend the signing of the treaty. He was a man who had a passion for solving problems while hating any sort of personal fuss over the result.

The Jordanians had an unusual way of showing their appreciation. King Hussein and Queen Noor gave an 80th birthday party for him in 1995. Mishcon, the so-efficient competent lawyer, never leaving things to chance, met his Waterloo. He huffed and puffed but failed to blow out the candles on the cake. It wasn’t that there were so many of them. Queen Noor, an American with a sense of fun, had used candles that don’t blow out but just flicker along merrily. At least Mishcon thereby gained an addition to his fund of after-dinner stories.

It was in 1978 that he was raised to the peerage by the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. In the Lords he became a close ally of Lord Elwyn-Jones, then Lord Chancellor, who made continuous use of his legal expertise after the Labour Party left office in 1979. From 1983, for seven years, Mishcon was principal opposition spokesman in the House of Lords on home affairs. Neil Kinnock, then the Labour leader, told him to hold himself in readiness for office should the party win the 1987 election. It was not to be. Margaret Thatcher won her third election victory.

After the death of Elwyn-Jones, Mishcon became Shadow Lord Chancellor. When he was only two years into the job, the Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, recommended him as an honorary Queen’s Counsel, something that gave Mishcon great pride. He was the first practising solicitor to become an honorary QC. When in 1992 he gave up as principal opposition spokesman on legal affairs in the Lords, he was succeeded by Lord Irvine of Lairg, who became Lord Chancellor when Labour returned to government in 1997.

Victor Mishcon was born in Brixton, South London, in 1915. His father, Arnold, was a rabbi, who had emigrated from Poland. His mother, Queenie, who hailed from the West Country, was a teacher at an elementary school in Stepney. It was thus in a household very conscious of education that Victor was brought up.

He went to Dulwich College Preparatory School but could not, as a Jew, go on to the college proper because at the time it had Saturday morning lessons. He went instead to the City of London School. When he left at 17, his father had him articled to a solicitor. Victor himself would have liked to be a barrister but the family’s modest economic circumstances ruled that out.

Four years later he qualified as a solicitor and set up on his own, an audacious thing for a young man to do in the late 1930s. (His father had died two years earlier, aged 55.) Mishcon’s office in Brixton was a rented room up a rickety staircase. There was a smaller room halfway up the staircase used as a waiting room, and he used to give his part-time clerk firm instructions: “When you put anyone in there keep a close eye on them. If there is a bit of a wait, don’t let them escape — they could be next week’s rent.” Clients were slow to come, but they were sufficient in number to allow Mishcon to help his mother, who was by then retired and living on a rabbi’s widow’s pension.

Mishcon was always a man in a hurry and never more so than when he returned from the Second World War, in which he served with the Army. In 1945 he was elected a Labour member of Lambeth Borough Council. He had already become a member of the Labour Party at 17, shocked by poor schools and housing without basic facilities in the area. In 1946, he was elected to the London County Council and the next year became Lambeth’s chairman of finance.

In 1954, at the age of 38, he was nominated by the dominant Labour group to be the youngest chairman of the LCC of the century. This largely honorific post meant virtually giving up his legal practice for a year. As chairman, he visited New York to promote London and his reputation as a speaker and a politician preceeded him.

The councillors of the five boroughs of New York who were entertaining him were worried about one rumour that had crossed the Atlantic. They asked if it was true that he and his fellow councillors were not paid. He told them that this was indeed so. They begged him not to mention it publicly as they had put in for a rise: it was coming up the following week and things were a bit tricky.

He thoroughly liked local government and would say: “You find you are doing things on the ground to help people; in Parliament you are passing legislation and then handing over the interesting bit to somebody else.” Nevertheless he stood four times unsuccessfully for the Commons: Leeds North-West, 1950; Bath, 1951; and Gravesend, 1955 and 1959.

He came nearest at Gravesend the first time, being defeated by fewer than 3,000 votes. A by-election had been expected and Mishcon had the backing of the Labour national executive in what was expected to be a high-profile campaign. Gravesend had been previously held for Labour by Sir Richard Acland, who had resigned his seat in protest against the party’s policy on nuclear weapons and was determined to fight a by-election as an Independent on the issue. The sudden retirement of Sir Winston Churchill meant, however, that the pending by-election was absorbed into a general election campaign and the seat was won by the Tory — with Acland coming a bad third but sufficiently splitting the left-wing vote to ensure Mishcon’s defeat.

In 1959 there had been a marginally adverse boundary change. But more damaging to Mishcon as a candidate was that as a lawyer he was advising at the time Maxwell Joseph, the hotelier, about a takeover of a hotel group. Takeovers of all kinds were anathema to the Labour Party of that era. Mishcon did his best to explain his responsibilties as a lawyer and Earl Attlee, the former Prime Minister, spoke on his behalf from the same platform, but to no avail. The Tory majority sizeably increased.

At the time he was disappointed, but there were compensations. The fledgeling law practice started in Brixton had grown and grown. He re-started it after the war and by the mid-1950s had acquired additional and large offices in Holborn. Two floors of an imposingly large building were taken over and Victor Mishcon & Co was established. It prospered.

Although he spent most of his time encouraging clients to settle their differences quickly and amicably, Mishcon attracted a great many high-profile clients whose legal problems became front-page news: Lord Palumbo, some of whose children were in dispute with their father over their inheritance; Robert Maxwell; and Gerald Ronson, the jeweller. He acted in her divorce case for Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, but declined her request to represent her as a criminal defendant, pointing out that murder was not within his specialist field. He did, however, accede to her request to visit her in prison before she was executed.

Mishcon was seen as instrumental in Archer’s victory over the Daily Star, in which the peer was awarded £500,000 libel damages. The newspaper claimed that Archer had slept with a prostitute and Archer’s counsel demanded huge damages for “a public figure who has been crucified by a popular newspaper”. Archer won; but his legal team had been deceived. In November 1999 Ted Francis admitted having provided a false alibi for Archer and in due course charges were brought. In prison in October 2002, Archer agreed to pay the newspaper more than £1,850,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

It was unkindly said by fellow solicitors that Mishcon was a client-grabber when it came to the rich and famous. But very often clients came to him. King Hussein invited him to act for him after the development of a school friendship at Benenden between the King’s sister, Princess Basrah and Mishcon’s daughter, Jane. At least one of his Tory election opponents became a devoted and long-standing client.

In 1987 he celebrated the establishment of his first legal office 50 years before by having a party at the Law Society headquarters in Chancery Lane. It was a memorable occasion: good drink (though the food was a bit neglected), lively conversation and an evening that went on and on. There were a bevy of law officers from Parliament, a good sprinkling of High Court judges and QCs, and some of the biggest property developers in the business.

In 1988 he linked up his legal practice with Bartletts de Reya to become Mishcon de Reya and moved to bigger offices around the corner from his old premises in Holborn (the Brixton offices having earlier been given up). He retired as senior partner in 1992 and continued, seemingly as busy as ever, as a consultant.

During his working life he devoted much time to public causes. He served as a school governor and on the boards of the National Theatre (1965-67; 1968-90), South Bank Theatre (1977-82), London Orchestra (1966-67) and on the executive committee of the London Tourist Board (1965-67). He was vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (1967-73). Among many national and international honours and awards was the Star of Jordan (1995).

He married four times and is survived by his two sons and a daughter from his second marriage.

Lord Mishcon, solicitor and politician, was born on August 14, 1915. He died on January 27, 2006, aged 90.