When John Mortimer QC rose to defend the publisher Felix Dennis in the Oz magazine obscenity trial at the Old Bailey in 1971, his junior sitting alongside him was the criminal barrister Jonah Walker-Smith.
The case, a collision between the postwar establishment and hippy counter-culture, was one most senior lawyers were eager to avoid because of the notorious content of the issue of the magazine in question, which had been edited by secondary schoolchildren, and included a cartoon of Rupert the Bear having sex.
