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The Trial: The No. 1 bestselling whodunit by Britain’s best-known criminal barrister

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This is a book that takes you to the dark heart of the criminal justice system. They are all here - the good, the bad, the innocent and the guilty. I have not enjoyed a legal thriller this much since Grisham's The Firm' Tony Parsons Brilliant courtroom drama, humorous as you would expect from Rob, and one that I had to read slowly because I did not want it to end' Heidi Perks In 2010, Rinder went to the Turks and Caicos Islands as counsel to a team investigating and prosecuting allegations of fraud and corruption. Bored at the weekends, he started writing scripts. He worked with a production company and went to meet a commissioning editor at ITV. She thought his script was terrible – but she liked Rinder and asked if he would do his own Judge Judy-type reality court show. The Trial is in the best tradition of John Mortimer's Rumpole series. A hugely enjoyable British courtroom drama' Steve Cavanagh The evidence points to one man. Jimmy Knight has been convicted of multiple offences before and defending him will be no easy task. Not least because this is trainee barrister Adam Green's first case.

There’s a moment where you realise that what you’re doing has the most profound value to uphold democracy under the rule of law’ … Rinder on ITV’s Judge Rinder. Photograph: ITV There’s something enormously powerful about standing between the individual and the power of the state’ … Robert Rinder. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian Becoming a barrister suited Rinder’s relatively late-discovered love of learning, the debating skills he nurtured at university and a genuine desire for advocacy. “There’s something enormously powerful about standing between the individual [accused of a crime] and the power of the state. There’s a moment – it happens to all young barristers – where you realise that what you’re doing has the most profound value to uphold democracy under the rule of law. It sounds sanctimonious, or about your own importance. It’s not quite like that.” It’s not about him specifically, he says, more what it means for us all. Rob Rinder is a barrister turned writer and broadcaster. In 2014, while still a practising barrister, he began starring in his reality court show Judge Rinder, and he now uses his legal knowledge working in the media to make the law more accessible. He is also the author of three books and a columnist for the Sun and the London Evening Standard newspapers. His participation in Who Do You Think You Are? retraced the story of his Holocaust survivor grandfather and received a BAFTA. The BBC series he presented, The Holocaust, My Family and Me, was aired to wide critical acclaim. In 2020, Rob was awarded an MBE for his services to Holocaust education and an honorary doctorate for his legal work. The only thing that's certain is that this is a trial which will push Adam - and the justice system itself - to the limit . . .When hero policeman Grant Cliveden dies from a poisoning in the Old Bailey, it threatens to shake the country to its core. Rinder still practises law to the extent that he lectures, offers advice to some organisations and mentors young barristers. But he seems more keen to use his profile to highlight issues he cares about. “The reason I make documentaries is because I’m convinced, especially with social media, that political points of view have moved from the logical to the emotional hemisphere of the brain. That’s exacerbated by echo chambers.” People with an opposing view, he says, “interfere with your sense of identity and safety. So how can you have a conversation with goodwill?” He wants more listening, “to say: ‘I hear you’, and mean it. To say: ‘Let me tell you a story.’” Rinder still brings joy to TV – his facial expressions when he competed on Strictly Come Dancing are seared into my brain – but in recent times he has made serious and moving documentaries, including an exploration of Israel and Palestine and My Family, the Holocaust and Me, both for the BBC. His maternal grandfather, known as Morris, was born in Poland; his family were sent to the Treblinka camp, where they were murdered, but Morris, a fit young man, was sent to work in a factory, then to other forced-labour camps. Being the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, says Rinder, has “informed my politics, my view of the world, my instinctive reaction to people, this idea of who in the community is a bystander, a rescuer, a perpetrator”. In 1945, his grandfather was one of several hundred Jewish orphans who were flown to the Lake District to begin new lives; Morris lied, saying he was younger than he was to get here. There are parallels with today’s migrant crisis, with young people, particularly men, accused of “faking” their age to come to the UK. Rinder, who specialised in international fraud but also took on wider cases – he represented British soldiers charged with manslaughter after the deaths of Iraqi detainees – would often be “the de facto decision-maker on an extremely important decision. Would there be moments where I’d be in that room thinking: ‘What are you asking me for?’ Of course.” Rinder grew up in the north London suburb of Southgate, where his father was a taxi driver and his mother started her own publishing business from her bedroom. He went to grammar school, then the University of Manchester, but at the time he was called to the bar, in 2001, more than 80% of barristers had been to Oxbridge. Did he feel out of place? “There are two answers to that – yes and no, which is not very helpful,” he says. “The ‘no’ is, I think, being gay and growing up in a working-class community, you intuitively understand you’re outside, from the moment of consciousness of being gay, or even being culturally curious.” There was an idea that certain things – books, music – were for other people. “‘This is for the Hampstead Jews, not the Southgate ones.’ So there was a sense, from a young age, of wanting to reclaim my own thing. I remember, in the silliest way, feeling a different sort of impostor syndrome.”

He would go on a day trip to a stately home, for instance, “and think that it was preposterous that I didn’t live there.” He created his own identity, his own voice, with his clipped tones – “I describe myself as being mugged by a Mitford” – and I can picture Rinder as a sophisticated teenage raconteur amid bewildered school friends. “I didn’t suit the condition of childhood at all well,” he says. “I just thought the whole thing was pointless.” He used to enjoy listening to his mum’s friends complain about their difficult relationships, and although he was fairly popular, his best friend at school was the school nurse. Growing up with my incredibly emotionally literate mum has deprived me of a good five chapters of an autobiography Rob Rinder had fantasies about the kind of novel he would like to write. Something the literary giants, whose books lined his study, might create; something inspired by his life as a barrister, that said something big and important about justice, and who gets it. He is, he says with a laugh, someone who “disappears into their own imagination while they’re on a treadmill and has a deluded sense of their own cultural grandeur. Then I tried to sit down and write that earnest book, and it wasn’t emerging.” The ITV show, Judge Rinder, started in 2014 and he was a TV natural. There were some mild accusations at the time that disadvantaged people were being used for entertainment, but although Rinder could certainly be funny and withering, his fundamental kindness was never far from the surface. “Anybody who thinks [it was exploitative] can’t have watched it. Sometimes, you might laugh at somebody because of the silliness.” He gives the example of a woman suing her dentist: “‘Where did you get your teeth done?’ ‘In my mouth.’ You’re going to laugh, it’s funny.” Many of the cases were family conflicts and relationship breakdowns, and he says he was proud that, for some: “It was the first opportunity they had to be forced to be in a space where they would hear one another.” He wasn’t, he says, “eviscerated” by his fellow barristers “because at the heart of it was the integrity of the legal decision, even if it was a silly case”. A few months ago, Rinder was touted as a potential Conservative London mayor. Is he going to stand? “I think it’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” he laughs. Is he a Conservative? “I’m not a member of a political party,” he says, not answering the question. He likes to remain impartial, not least because he is an occasional presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, but also, I suspect, because he is so conditioned to sifting the evidence before making a decision that he can’t be a political tribalist. Rinder was 21 when he came out, “but I was meandering out at university. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about being gay, as much as doing something that would make my mum fearful for me. When I realised I was gay, HIV/Aids was a death sentence, a looming shadow. It was the time of section 28, where this was something dirty and furtive.” Also, he says: “There were so many complexities about disappointing my mum. We were the first divorced family [in her family], there was pressure on her as a single mum. At that time, being gay was cloaked in shame, and I was probably conscious about wanting to make sure my mum wouldn’t experience that.” He had also wanted to marry and have children. “That wasn’t part of the narrative for gay men then.” Accepting his sexuality “required a conscious loss”.

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