Dyson to straighten things out

Lord Dyson is to help the BBC understand why and how Martin Bashir secured the interview everyone wanted with the Princess of Wales back in 1995. 

Like many who engage with the BBC, he has a book to plug: "A Judge's Journey", published last year with glowing reviews from Joshua Rozenberg and Shami Chakrabarti. It tells of his upbringing in Leeds - his parents, mother Bulgarian, father of Lithuanian heritage, ran an upmarket dress shop ("Chanal") and, as a teenager, he had piano lessons from Fanny Waterman. He came through Leeds Grammar School, via classics at Wadham, Oxford, to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1968. He admits to using the Nutshell books to get him through the Finals, and says he learned the law on the job - sufficiently to rise to Master of the Rolls.  

Since retiring, he's taken on a range of tasks - adjudicating the Peter Beardsley racism case for The FA in 2019, and the Saracens Salary Cap case for Premiership Rugby later in the same year. 

Lord Dyson will have the services of staff from Fieldfisher, who've been advising the BBC off and on since 1998, most recently servicing the four-year-long inquiry by Dame Janet Smith into the activities of Jimmy Savile.