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Lawyer and MP who endured a turbulent time as Attorney General in John Major's Conservative government

During the long years of Margaret Thatcher's dominance of Conservative and national politics, Nicholas Lyell occupied a somewhat anomalous position on the political spectrum and never gained the advancement which, his friends believed, his talents merited. He served for seven years from 1979 as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Michael (later Lord) Havers, who became Attorney General in the 1979 government. It was a long time for an able young man to serve in the ranks of those commonly described as "the lowest form of parliamentary life". He subsequently held junior office at the then Department of Health and Social Security before becoming Solicitor General in 1987 and – his final appointment – Attorney General in 1992. After the Conservative general election defeat of 1997, he accepted William Hague's invitation to serve as Shadow Attorney General.

Nicholas Walter Lyell was born on 6 December 1938 into a legal family, his father, Sir Maurice, being a High Court judge. He was educated at Stowe and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a good degree in history. He had long been of a mind to follow his father in the profession of law, but along the way he worked at his stepmother's family firm of shipbuilders, Walter Runciman. He was called to the Bar in 1965 and decided to specialise in commercial and industrial law.

Lyell was, almost certainly, the last political figure to be, at one and the same time, a fully active lawyer and a fully active politician. Unlike predecessors of his such as Quintin Hailsham, Geoffrey Howe and Patrick Mayhew, all of whom had been Law Officers of the Crown, he never went on to enjoy formal Cabinet office. And this, many of his Conservative friends concluded, was a great pity, for the precision of his legal mind would have been of great advantage to Conservative governments in the closing years of the 1990s had he held Cabinet office.

However, there was always a struggle in his mind about whether he was a politician or a barrister. He liked (as one of his friends recounted to me) to boast – and he was not a man given to boasting – that he was the longest-serving Law Officer of the 20th century. His record gave him a joy which was not available to him either in his legal or his political career.

Though precise and assiduous in his work, Lyell was not, perhaps, the most brilliant of lawyers but, then, he served in a set of Chambers headed by Lord Alexander of Weedon, one of the most outstanding barristers of his time; and his colleagues were, generally, exceptional practitioners. In Parliament, however, he enjoyed a relatively tranquil time as a Law Officer – though he did contribute to Margaret Thatcher's revolutionary reforms of trade union law – until the arrival of John Major as Prime Minister in 1990. Thereafter, complicated and controversial problems fell, one after another, on his hapless head, as the Major government, despite an unexpected general election victory in 1992, fell headlong to destruction in the general election of 1997.

It should be understood that a Law Officer, though a politician and a member of a government, owes his principal duty to the law itself and, from time to time, the line between politician and lawyer is a difficult one to draw. His primary political duty is to advise his colleagues on whether or not any course of action upon which they propose to embark is, in the current state of the law, legal or illegal, or whether the law needs to be changed to advance a given policy.

drive from www.independent.co.uk