\n<\/p>\n
James Mackay, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who has died aged 99, was unique in modern legal history in being made lord chancellor at the head of the profession in England and Wales despite having spent his career as a lawyer in the Scottish courts system rather than the English, until made a law lord. He was also almost certainly the last to be appointed for his legal expertise and distinction, rather than his party political qualifications.<\/p>\n
A man of unbending rectitude, deep religious faith and high principles \u2013 inscrutable, in the words of Kenneth Clarke, one of his successors \u2013 Mackay was lord chancellor for nearly 10 years, from his appointment by Margaret Thatcher in October 1987 following the resignation of Lord (Michael) Havers, until the fall of John Major\u2019s government in 1997, when Mackay was succeeded by another Scot, Lord (Derry) Irvine, who had been Tony and Cherie Blair\u2019s pupil master and had spent his career as a barrister in England.<\/p>\n
The office of lord chancellor, one of the oldest and the most senior in government \u2013 outranking the prime minister, dating well back into the middle ages \u2013 has since been drastically reformed. Holders now also hold the post of justice secretary and still oversee the judiciary, but no longer chair the House of Lords and have lost their judicial function.<\/p>\n
It fell to Mackay at the cabinet meeting at which Thatcher resigned in November 1990 to read out a tribute to the prime minister on behalf of the cabinet. In fact he nearly had to read out her statement as well, since she was on the verge of tears. Cecil Parkinson urged her to let the lord chancellor, sitting on her left, read it, but Mackay demurred. \u201cI felt she would regret it all her life if she did not do it herself,\u201d he said later, and Thatcher struggled through the two sentences she had prepared.<\/p>\n
Mackay\u2019s career eminence was not a result of long antecedents in the legal profession. Indeed he might well have spent his career as a mathematics academic instead.<\/p>\n
Born in Edinburgh, he was the son of Janet (nee Hymers) and James Mackay, both from the far north of Scotland. His father was a railway signalman originally from the village of Clashfern in Sutherland \u2013 Mackay would many years later take it as part of his titular name in tribute to James \u2013 and his mother had moved south from Caithness in search of work. An only child in an impoverished but devout Presbyterian household, the young James secured a scholarship to George Heriot\u2019s school and went from there to Edinburgh University, where in 1948 he obtained a first in mathematics and philosophy.<\/p>\n
Mackay tutored in maths for two years at St Andrews University before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, to take a second degree, where he again received a first and became senior wrangler \u2013 the highest scoring maths undergraduate.<\/p>\n
Despite this, he switched to law, explaining later that this was the result of seeing that his colleague Michael Atiyah \u2013 a future president of the Royal Society \u2013 was a better mathematician than he would ever be, and of a chance visit to the court of session in Edinburgh. He took a law degree back in his home city, graduating in 1955.<\/p>\n
His diligence as an advocate and his perceptiveness and persistence soon became recognised in Scottish legal circles. Mackay became a law commissioner, a member of the law reform committee and eventually vice-dean and then dean of Scotland\u2019s Faculty of Advocates.<\/p>\n
He might then have become a Scottish law lord but for the advent of the Thatcher government in 1979, when the new prime minister was faced with a choice for the post of lord advocate \u2013 Scotland\u2019s chief legal officer and prosecutor \u2013 between him and the erratic and bibulous Scottish MP and lawyer Nicholas Fairbairn.<\/p>\n
Mackay was chosen and given a peerage on becoming a member of the government, with duties that took him not only regularly to appear in the Scottish courts but also to Westminster, the House of Lords and the courts of the European Community.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Lord Mackay of Clashfern, left, during his time as lord chancellor with Margaret Thatcher, centre, and other members of the cabinet before a dinner in London, 1988.<\/span> Photograph: Dave Caulkin\/AP<\/p>\n His most severe challenge came in 1982 over the notorious Glasgow rape case, which arose after a woman was abducted, raped and slashed with a razor by three men while walking home after a night out. Despite abundant forensic and witness evidence of the men\u2019s identities, a decision was made not to prosecute them, with Fairbairn as solicitor general weighing in to a journalist about the woman\u2019s credibility as a witness.<\/p>\n In the face of a public and media outcry, Mackay authorised permission for a very rarely used private prosecution. The woman stood up to cross-examination and the men were duly convicted.<\/p>\n Mackay became a Scottish judge and was appointed a lord of appeal in the House of Lords, but his surprise appointment as lord chancellor came following the early retirement of Havers through ill health. Mackay\u2019s relative lack of experience in England meant he had few allies in London, f and he faced fierce opposition from members of the bar, especially as Thatcher was pressing for reforms to the legal system, including a revision of their fees. He nevertheless largely devised and steered through the Courts and Legal Services Act of 1990, which implemented wide-ranging changes to the judiciary, ended solicitors\u2019 monopoly on conveyancing, and gave them the right to appear in higher courts alongside barristers.<\/p>\n This last reform of the barristers\u2019 closed shop provoked particular outrage from what one of Thatcher\u2019s advisers called the middle-class equivalent of the National Union of Mineworkers, with one of Mackay\u2019s predecessors, Lord (Quintin) Hailsham, declaring that \u201csolicitors, barristers are not like the grocer\u2019s shop in Grantham\u201d. The reform was passed for England, but paradoxically not in Scotland.<\/p>\n Mackay\u2019s lifelong membership of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, of which he had become an elder, also aroused controversy that was harder to understand south of the border.<\/p>\n Throughout his career he had declined to work, travel or give interviews if they were to be broadcast on the sabbath, which caused difficulties. It was his decision, however, to attend the memorial masses for two Roman Catholic judges, Charles Ritchie Russell in 1986 and then his friend John Wheatley in 1988, that caused conniptions because of Presbyterian rules forbidding any support for the \u201cspurious and idolatrous\u201d doctrines of Catholicism.<\/p>\n Mackay\u2019s excuse \u2013 that he was merely paying his respects to dead colleagues \u2013 cut no ice. He was denounced as sinful, suspended from membership of the kirk and, when later told not to attend further popish services, he chose to withdraw from the church instead. He latterly worshipped with the breakaway Associated Presbyterian Church. Mackay remained president of the Scottish Bible Society.<\/p>\n He retired as lord chancellor following the election of New Labour in 1997, becoming instead editor-in-chief of Halsbury\u2019s Laws of England and a lord high commissioner of the Church of Scotland between 2005 and 2007. In 1999 he was installed as a Knight of the Order of the Thistle at St Giles\u2019 Cathedral in Edinburgh; he was appointed to the order by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.<\/p>\n Latterly he held the largely ceremonial posts of lord clerk register and keeper of the royal signet. He finally retired from the Lords in 2022.<\/p>\n He was garlanded with honorary degrees from 16 universities including Edinburgh, Dundee, Strathclyde, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Cambridge, where he was also an honorary fellow of his old college.<\/p>\n He married Elizabeth Hymers, a cousin, in 1958. She survives him, along with their son, James, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Shona.<\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em>James Peter Hymers Mackay, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, lawyer and cabinet minister, born 2 July 1927; died 7 July 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" James Mackay, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who has died aged 99, was unique in modern legal history in being made lord chancellor at the head of the profession in England and Wales despite having spent his career as a lawyer in the Scottish courts system rather than the English, until made a law lord. 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