Labor's Lord High Chancellor

Sweating uncomfortably under the incongruous TV lights, Britain's nobly dressed bishops, judges, peers and politicians jammed the House of Lords last week as Queen Elizabeth arrived in a glass coach and took her seat on a gilded throne. Up strode a graceful man in a wig, damask robe and black velvet breeches. Kneeling, he handed the monarch her speech. Kneeling, he took it back after Elizabeth had read it -- thus opening Parliament with a rit ual that has scarcely changed at all since the first Elizabeth performed it 400 years ago.

His task done, Gerald Austin Gardiner, 64, the Labor Government's Lord High Chancellor, returned to the 20th century and a tough legal challenge: a complete reformation of outdated British law.

Infants & Idiots. With its costumed ceremony and appointed judges, its strict division between solicitors who do office business and barristers who try cases, British law combines a reputation for incorruptible justice and maddening resistance to change. As one archaic result, British laws, which have no written constitution behind them, are now so entangled in 43 volumes of parliamentary acts going back to 1235 that finding the law on a single point may require a look at 60 different acts, 99 volumes of legislative orders and 350,000 reported cases. "What sort of system of law is this?" asks London Barrister Gardiner. "English law is in a state in which it cannot be allowed to remain."

In giving him power to prune the legal thicket, the Labor Government has chosen a barrister who is said to know more about common law than any man alive. Rarely has a new Lord Chancellor been so acclaimed. Gardiner is "probably the only left-wing lawyer unreservedly admired by a right-wing bar," says the London Sunday Times. The nonpolitical English Law Society predicts that "he will make the form of the law a living thing in the lives of the people."

Lord Chancellor Gardiner has a job centuries older than the Prime Minister's, a title once held by two English saints (Becket, More) and Francis Bacon, a $34,000 salary that is tops in the British government, and the unique power to simultaneously help make, execute and interpret the laws of Britain. As the government's chief legal adviser, Gardiner is a top-level Cabinet officer. As head of the legal profession, he appoints judges and Queen's Counsel (senior barristers). As Speaker of the House of Lords, he perches on the symbolic Woolsack, also presides when the Law Lords (selected lawyer members) act as Britain's final court of appeal. Besides all that, he is guardian of all British infants, idiots and lunatics.

Blue-Blood Socialist. The tall, brilliant son of a British shipping tycoon and a German baroness, Gerald Gardiner seemed destined to be a Tory rather than a Laborite. He grew up on a vast Kent estate, went through Harrow, the Coldstream Guards and Oxford's Magdalen College. So elegant that he used only French toothpaste, he inspired Oxonians to form the "Society for Ruffling Gerald Gardiner's Hair," won glowing tributes as an amateur actor, and debated his way into the presidency of the Oxford Union. Oxonian Evelyn Waugh later wrote that "he had then the same elegance of appearance and cold precision of phrase and enunciation that have impressed themselves on so many juries."

Avid to be an actor, Gardiner turned to law only when his father threatened to cut him off without a farthing. Though it took him three years before his profession earned him three guineas of profit, he was a noted junior barrister well before World War II, during which he served as an ambulance driver.

In 1948, he "took silk" as a prestigious Queen's (then King's) Counsel. Known for hot preparation and cool pleading, Gardiner was soon earning $84,000 a year in famous libel cases involving litigants as diverse as Liberace and Winston Churchill. In 1960 Gardiner won a slander suit for Randolph Churchill (called "coward" by a Tory M.P.), and defeated an obscenity charge against the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover. In 1961 Gardiner successfully prosecuted Communists who captured the Electrical Trades Union by rigging an election-thus cleaning up the biggest labor fraud in British history.

Had he not been a passionate opponent of capital punishment, let alone a Socialist, Gardiner would have been appointed a judge long ago. Now he can be all three. Besides pressing to end the death penalty, Gardiner is expected to lobby for tighter corporation laws, broader legal aid, improved legal education and anti-discrimination laws aimed at Britain's growing racial problems. Gardiner personally favors liberalized abortion laws and the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, but he recognizes that decision on such issues belongs to Commons. Gardiner's top priority is a permanent government commission "to survey the whole field of English law and gradually try to bring it up to date," notably in relation to science and technology. If his commission fulfills his dream, the Lord Chancellor can take credit for a legal miracle.

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