Inevitably, Heather Mills-McCartney has been photographed with her bees-knees divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius, just as Diana, Princess of Wales, was snapped with him on the way to her £17.5 million settlement. His presence at the side of a separated female is a sign of indomitable fighting power, and of her intention to wring every last buck out of the wealthy husband. With Julius as her representative, she doesn’t need a spouse, she is saying.
That is the reputation that Julius’s work for the Princess brought him, even if it also earned him the displeasure of the Royal Family whose coffers he depleted. He was adversarial, it was said, but, as Lady McCartney evidently noted, he did the job he was paid to do, and that is why she is now prepared to part with £500 an hour to engage his services.
Julius is spectacularly clever — not for nothing is he known as Anthony Genius — and he is said to be charming and persuasive, though not everyone likes him. It is hard to tell whether this is because he can be arrogant and pompous or because he attracts envy for being so good at his job. Commentators rarely describe him with warmth.
The eldest son of a Jewish draper in North London, he showed a prodigious capacity for learning at his boys’ public school. At 8 he read Homer and Mallory, and at Cambridge he took a first (and learnt German in two terms in order to read Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind).
By 30 he was a partner with Mishcon de Reya, one of London’s smartest law firms, and made his name as a libel and media law specialist. The Princess of Wales liked his sceptical attitude to the monarchy — he is left-wing and in private he jokes about being a republican — and after her death he was an obvious choice to chair the trustees of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
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He likes to parade his credentials as an academic and literary critic, though while his treatise on T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism attracted some support, other critics have been sniffy about his turgid writing. In 1996 he asserted that his professional success was grounded in his stable family, but the following year his 21-year-old marriage to another lawyer broke up when he fell in love with Dina Rabinovitch, a journalist.
Between them they have eight children, including their own young son. As Rabinovitch has written about her treatment for cancer over the past couple of years it has become obvious that, at 50, the hotshot lawyer finds time to care for his wife and to remain close to his children. One can only hope that the McCartney-Mills settlement pulls off a similar humanitarian feat.