Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a barrister, a virtuoso of the courtroom he's made his name

successfully defending the famous from the former liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe to show

business celebrities such as Peter Adamson, Maria Aikin and Ken Dodd. His education did not at first prepare him for such public

activity. Indeed, for two years he studied to become a Roman Catholic priest. In the end,

the secular world of the Oxford Union, public speaking and the bar were to prove more inviting.

Now age 60, he is one of this country's most expensive and sought after QCs.

His clients pay him for the elegance of his legal mind and not least for his

persuasive manner with juries. He is George Carmen. It's a life synopsis which attempts one to wonder if there are any

links between the priest you didn't become and the advocate you did. Do the two roles

have anything in common, do you think? Well I doubt if they have except that I

imagine both wish to convey messages to the general public at large. The police

message I imagine is a spiritual one and the barrister is the message of his

client. But there's an element is there not of the confessional surely when people

come to you and sit in your chambers the client coming to tell you his troubles isn't he turning to you

for absolution in a way? I don't think he turns to me for absolution he turns to me to

obtain absolution for him. But in that moment when he sits before you, feeling terribly vulnerable,

don't you feel sometimes like a priest? No, I think as I've said to medical friends,

one feels more like a doctor. The difference being

that the doctor only sees the patient naked physically, we have to see them

naked mentally. By the way why did you give up the priesthood? Oh I hadn't

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