Counsel

When it finally becomes public, the Dame Janet Smith Review into Savile-related bad stuff at the BBC will demonstrate the questioning skills of her chosen leading counsel, Christina Lambert, QC.

Christina, whose parents were both GPs, went to Central Newcastle High School, then studied history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before heading home to join a publishing company where she indulged her love of modern poety for three years. Then followed a diploma in law at City University, and a call to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1988. She took silk in 2009, and has specialised in medical negligence cases.

In 2010, she unsuccessfully defended George Osborne's brother Adam in front of the GMC for some unorthodox prescribing. (En passant, Adam was suspended again by the GMC in March this year).

The call to the Janet Smith review came in October 2012, and Christina was pretty fully engaged, but still found time to weekend at her cottage in Chatton, near Alnwick “I feel my blood pressure drop as I go further and further north” she told an interviewer.

Since her part in the process was completed, she's been leading counsel to the fresh Hillsborough inquests, which provided a much more public platform for her cross-examination skills.