Who is Hugo Keith KC? Meet the star lawyer keeping order in the Covid inquiry court

What a contrast the two figures made at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

There was Dominic Cummings in a too-big, wrinkled shirt. The inquiry proceeded to hear the effing and blinding in his WhatsApp messages.

Cummings said the cabinet were “useless f***pigs”. He called ministers “c***s” and “morons”. When accused of being a misogynist for calling a woman a c***, his defence was that he was much ruder about men.

And there, across the inquiry room, was his polar opposite: the dazzling, restrained, polite lead counsel to the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC.

Keith, resembling an Edwardian maiden aunt clutching her pearls, called Cummings’s language “revolting”. And what a pristine picture he looked, in a dark blue Savile Row suit, an immaculate white shirt, and an elegant, unshowy silk tie. His favourite pursuits? Tennis and sailing.

But who exactly is Hugo Keith KC? Well, to paraphrase the Ghostbusters theme, if there’s something legally tricky and it don’t look good, who you gonna call? The answer is Mr Keith.

The 56-year-old is the go-to guy for big names who have, um, found themselves in a little legal difficulty. The late Queen and Princess Anne, not to mention Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand woman, have all called on the comfortingly expensive services of Mr Keith (like the other best KCs in the land, he is thought to earn over a million pounds a year and command £800 for private work).

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And when an opponent has the temerity to cut up rough, Keith reveals the steel beneath the velvet glove. At the Covid inquiry in June, he swiftly took down Nicola Sturgeon as she ranted about Brexit. Keith stepped in to remind her that she was appearing in “a witness box, not a soapbox”.

Keith has taken the planet-brained road to the higher echelons of the legal profession. He studied law at Magdalen College, Oxford. I was at Magdalen just after him – the college was a magnet for legal brainboxes.

After qualifying as a barrister, he joined Three Raymond Buildings, the top criminal chambers in the country. Keith is now head of chambers – a position previously held by the late Alexander Cameron KC, David Cameron’s older brother, who sadly died this year at the age of 59.

Criminal law is normally the poor relation in the lucrative legal world. But not at Three Raymond Buildings, a handsome Georgian terrace in Gray’s Inn. If you’re a well-heeled, prominent figure up before the beak, it’s to Three Raymond Buildings that you beat a path.

And that’s been the way for decades. 25 years ago, when I trained to be a barrister at 5 Raymond Buildings, two doors down, No 3 was already the best criminal chambers in town.

Alexander Cameron represented, among others, Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer. As for Hugo Keith, he represented Princess Anne when she was in charge of a dog that bit two children in 2002. The Princess Royal pleaded guilty, becoming the first member of the royal family to be convicted of a criminal offence. Thanks to Keith’s silver-tongued advocacy, the princess’s dog, Dotty, wasn’t put down.

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In 2008, Keith took on the biggest client of all, the Queen, for the inquest into Princess Diana’s death. Thanks in part to Keith, the verdict was the one the royal family agreed with. The jury decided Diana had been unlawfully killed by the “grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul”. Mohamed Fayed’s crazed conspiracy theory about Prince Philip ordering a hit was discarded.

Keith also worked on the inquiry into the London murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by the Russian security services in 2006. He successfully represented the Metropolitan Police in the inquest into the killing by the police of Mark Duggan in 2011, the incident that sparked that year’s riots.

Keith is also involved in lucrative commercial work. In 2022, he advised Chelsea Football Club when it was sold by Roman Abramovich to Todd Boehly for a reputed £4.25bn.

He was lead counsel at the inquests into the 2005 London bombings, and appeared for Rebekah Brooks at the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 and 2012.

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No wonder Keith is praised to the skies by his legal contemporaries. In 2008, he won the Chambers and Partners award for Criminal Barrister of the Year, the legal equivalent of an Oscar. In 2015, he was called one of the country’s “Stars at the Bar” in the Chambers and Partners Guide to the UK Bar. He is top-ranked in seven practice areas.

He was a member of the Panel of Civil Treasury Counsel for eight years, appearing in public and criminal law matters for government departments. He has appeared in 15 cases before the Supreme Court.

So, for many years, he has been a mighty big cheese in the criminal legal world. But he hasn’t had the profile of other star KCs – until now, having shimmered into the limelight with his quietly penetrating questions and his delicate handling of Malcolm Tucker-esque expletives.

Harry Mount is a qualified barrister