Michael Seifert
Lawyer who worked for Arthur Scargill and communist regimes
MICHAEL SEIFERT, who has died aged 75, was a Left-wing lawyer whose clients included Arthur Scargill, Ken Gill, the American 1960s political activist Angela Davis, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, and many of the governments of the Communist bloc.
When he started his career, articled to Lord Goodman, Seifert helped with the legal affairs of the Beatles. He headed the family firm of solicitors, Seifert, Sedley & Co, supervising its closure in 1991 following the dissolution of the USSR, and personally assumed and paid off the firm’s large debts which had been run up by a rogue office manager.
Michael Seifert was born in London on July 30 1942 into a distinguished family. Richard Seifert, the architect of Centre Point, was his uncle.
Michael’s father, Sigmund, founded the law firm with his brother-in-law, Bill Sedley, and Sigmund and his wife Connie had both joined the Communist Party in 1935.
The children were brought up in a large house with an enormous garden bordering the playing fields of Highgate School, where Michael and his brother Roger were educated. Writing in BBC Magazine, they would recall how, in the 1950s, Paul Robeson “sang a full repertoire of his songs in our back garden after a dinner party” to raise support for Cheddi Jagon “the oft-ousted premier of what was then British Guyana”. Michael had memories of sitting on Robeson’s knee as he sang Old Man River to the family in a car on the way to Stratford upon Avon, where the singer was playing Othello.
At Highgate the Seifert parents held a Left-wing salon frequented by American exiles from Mccarthyism, British figures such as Vanessa Redgrave, diplomats from the Soviet bloc, and the Nigerian pharmacist (subsequently monarch), Prince Oyekan II Oba of Lagos, who arrived one evening with luggage and retinue, then stayed for three months while his case for the succession to the throne of Lagos was heard by the Privy Council.
At St John’s College, Oxford, Michael read History, joined various Communist and Socialist groups, and often spent Saturday mornings selling the Daily Worker. He had been a prodigy, winning a scholarship at the age of 17. But student politics diverted him from his studies, as did being chairman of the University Chess Club, and he took a disappointing degree.
Serving his articles with Goodman Derrick, Seifert gained unusual competence in intellectual property as Lord Goodman (as he became the following year) was a great expert on copyright. As another lawyer noted “[Seifert] didn’t go in for spectacular litigation. From Arnold Goodman he had learnt negotiating skills, and this was where he excelled – as a strategist rather than a tactician.”
Having joined Seifert, Sedley in 1966, he became senior partner following Sigmund’s death in 1979. Some of his first cases involved him getting the children of his friends off drugs charges, and dealing with a paternity suit by one of the stars of Hair against a famous pop star. He appeared in the news during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, when he acted as Arthur Scargill’s personal lawyer.
Seifert supported and advised a great many groups, including CND, the Cuba Solidarity Committee, the Morning Star, Marx Memorial Library, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, on whose board (among others) he served.
Seifert was an early member of the Groucho Club, and was a lifelong supporter of Arsenal and Middlesex County cricket. He had a string of glamorous girlfriends, but for the last 24 years he enjoyed a happy partnership with the food writer Caroline, Lady Conran, deriving much pleasure from her children and grandchildren.