The judge in the spotlight

IN her early days as a barrister, Dame Janet Smith was renowned as a beauty, but she has now completed inquiries into two of Britain’s biggest beasts.

A decade before being appointed to lead the Jimmy Savile inquiry in 2012, she conducted a report into Harold Shipman, the general practitioner who became the country’s most prolific serial killer.

Born Janet Hilary Holt, in Stockport, Cheshire, the daughter of a bank manager, she attended Bolton School in Lancashire. Dame Janet, now 75, mar- ried Edward Smith at the age of 19 and had two sons and a daughter with him.

She began studying law in her 20s and was called to the bar aged 32, spending the next 20 years specialising in personal injury and medical negligence.

Dame Janet married again in 1984, this time to Robin Mathieson, a nowretired teacher.

She became a QC in 1986, a High Court judge in 1992 and became the fourth woman to be promoted to the Court of Appeal in 2002, a role from which she has since retired.