The case list of George Carman QC, who died on January 2nd aged 71, was matchless: Jeremy Thorpe, the spy Geoffrey Prime, the Sun against Gillian Taylforth, Elton John, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Ken Dodd on charges of tax evasion, Imran Khan against Ian Botham, the Guardian against Jonathan Aitken, Mohamed Al Fayed against Neil Hamilton.
He said that other QCs, in tax and shipping for example, were equally adept, but the difference was that his cases were the stuff of life, each one an unmissable piece of theatre.
George Carman was frequently criticised for character assassination in court - one victim, Jani Allan, whose sex life was held up to universal derision - told him that "whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money".
There were also dark suggestions of skulduggery concerning the way in which last-minute pieces of evidence would suddenly appear. George Carman put it down to good fortune. "A lot of things turned up by chance."
In the Gillian Taylforth case, in 1994, George Carman successfully defended the Sun's allegation that the EastEnders actress had had oral sex with her fiancΘ Geoff Knights in a Range Rover on a slipway off the A1 road. It made George Carman a household name and the barrister whom everyone wanted on their side in a libel action.
In 1996, the Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan hired George Carman to defend him in a libel case brought by England cricket stars Ian Botham and Allan Lamb. The two Englishmen sued Khan after he said that illegal ball tampering was common among fast bowlers, and over a newspaper article in which he allegedly accused them of racism. Again, George Carman won the day.
The following year, he represented the Guardian against Jonathan Aitken, who had sued the paper over allegations of improper contacts with middle eastern arms dealers. Aitken's case collapsed following another of George Carman's trademark 11th-hour revelations.
"The records of his wife and daughter's air trip to Switzerland emerged in the course of the case. We didn't have them at the start. We didn't know it was coming. More importantly, neither did he."
His last major case was at the end of 1998, when another former Tory minister, Neil Hamilton, failed in his spectacular libel battle with Mohamed Al Fayed.
George Carman was born in Blackpool. Both his parents worked in retailing, his father in furniture and his mother selling women's clothes. He was educated at Upholland College in Lancashire, a Roman Catholic seminary, and briefly considered becoming a priest, though he later said it was only because he was attracted by the idea of delivering sermons. He studied law at Balliol College, Oxford, after doing national service. He became a QC in 1971.
He accepted that the Jeremy Thorpe case, in which he successfully defended the former Liberal leader against charges of conspiracy to murder the model Norman Scott, was the watershed in his career. It brought him south and put him on the front pages for the first time.
Now based in London, a string of headline-grabbing cases cemented his reputation. He defended Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ spy; a scion of the Vestey family who had beheaded his wife and put her head in the freezer (George Carman secured a verdict of "diminished responsibility"); Maria Aitken - the sister of Jonathan - against charges of smuggling cocaine, and Ken Dodd against charges of tax evasion: "Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants."
He secured the freedom of Dr Leonard Arthur, the paediatrician charged with attempted murder after prescribing "nursing care only" for a Down's syndrome baby. George Carman's summing up was a masterpiece. "He [Arthur] could, like Pontius Pilate, have washed his hands of the matter. He did not, because good doctors do not turn away. Are we to condemn him as a criminal because he helped two people at the time of their greatest need? Are we to condemn a doctor because he cared?"
George Carman is likely to be remembered primarily as a libel lawyer, but his remarkable run of successes in criminal cases in the 1980s should be given due weight. He described libel as the "last chapter" in his career, and did not make his first serious incursion into the field until the Sonia Sutcliffe case in 1990. He was invited to become a judge in Hong Kong in the 1980s, but declined. He said later he would have found it hard to keep quiet on the bench, and preferred the "blood and sand of the arena".
George Alfred Carman: born 1929; died, January 2001.