Unlikely ally Pannick has thwarted PMS before as someone who relishes an unfashionable cause

On the face of it, Lord Pannick may seem an unlikely ally of Boris Johnson in his fight to clear the Prime Minister’s name over partygate. After all, it was the eminent QC who twice thwarted the country’s leaders in their efforts to push through Brexit.

In 2016, representing Gina Miller, the anti-brexit campaigner, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the then prime minister did not have the authority to trigger Article 50 and the UK’S exit from the European Union without a vote in Parliament.

And in 2019, again representing Ms Miller, he headed the case that overturned Mr Johnson’s shock prorogation of Parliament that the PM had sought to prevent MPS from blocking a no-deal Brexit. It was the zenith of the anti-brexit movement – the closest Remainers came to preventing Brexit before the election wrecked their dreams. Even now, he continues to criticise the Government’s behaviour over Brexit.

In June, he wrote a letter to The Times that called the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would allow ministers to ditch the Brexit deal, “a clear breach of international law”.

Yet, scratch a little deeper and it would seem to be a case that perfectly fits the Oxford University alumnus.

For he has a track record of taking on unfashionable or unpopular cases where there is the possibility that political power has been wielded unjustly.

The year he took up Ms Miller’s crusade, Lord Pannick also worked for Sir Philip Green, the fashion mogul, co-authoring a legal opinion that defended the Topshop owner against criticisms by a parliamentary inquiry over his role in the collapse of British Home Stores.

The opinion dismissed the inquiry as “bizarre” and “unsupportable”, and claimed that MPS had already decided who to blame before beginning their work.

Not long after his second Brexit triumph, Lord Pannick took up yet another unfashionable cause, this time that of Shamima Begum, the so-called Islamic State bride who went to Syria to join Jihadists. He argued that the Government had overstepped its powers by effectively making her stateless.

In 2021, he condemned Labour and other critics who said that British lawyers and judges should stop working in Hong Kong due to China’s brutal crackdown on dissent. He argued that the British legal community should be trying to uphold the former British colony’s independent legal system rather than abandoning Hong Kong to its fate.

Most recently, the QC has been working for the BBC in its efforts to name a man who allegedly was an informant for MI5, who was accused by the broadcaster of domestic abuse.

Lord Pannick won a scholarship to Bancroft’s School in Essex before heading to Hertford College.

He won a prize fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford. In 1999, he co-edited a leading textbook on the thennew Human Rights Act, while he became a QC at the early age of 36.

Lord Pannick sat as a part-time judge but chose not to pursue a judicial career, reportedly because he felt it lacked the intellectual stimulation provided by life as a barrister.

In taking on Mr Johnson’s case, Lord Pannick finds himself on the side of a man whose ambitions he has usually thwarted. Yet in standing up to what he has reportedly argued to be an unfair investigation, the QC is very much acting as he long has.