IN HIS pinstripe suit and club tie, James Hanratty looks every inch the austere and flinty defender of the law. But he has a glint in his eye, and his recently released memoir is not, he assures us, “yet another boring and self-important memoir from a pompous judge”.

The Making of an Immigration Judge (Quartet, £15; Tablet price, £13.50) draws on a lifetime spent in the justice business. One of Hanratty’s trickiest briefs was to sort out what he describes as a “mildly shambolic” Royal Courts of Justice, “I was one of Dominic Cummings’ ‘weirdos’, able to manage large organisations without the usual Civil Service qualification of a first in Greats from Oxford.”