Which sportsman played World Cup football and test match cricket for his country? How many prime ministers have served under our present Queen? What is Inspector Morse’s first name? All, it seems, perfectly easy questions for the profession’s intellectual elite, who – along with Obiter – last week competed in a fundraising quiz for the charity British Irish Rights Watch at London law firm Hodge Jones & Allen. The quizmaster, HJ&A’s Andrew Ewbank, was doing a sterling job of controlling the unruly mob of solicitors, barristers and media types when a gentleman in an audaciously coloured tie shouted him down. It was none other than TV newsman Jon Snow, there to conduct an auction scheduled for half time. The question had been: what is the only country in the world named after a desert? To which most of those present were able to reply: Namibia. Snow, however, begged to differ. What about Western Sahara? he bawled. Were we so resistant to change, he wanted to know, that we were unwilling to recognise this emerging nation? The quizmaster backed down and Snow got his point – for a country that does not exist. Western Sahara is a piece of land that used to be a Spanish colony and is now disputed by Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario movement.

Compared with the team from Tooks Chambers, however, Snow had nothing of the Blarney Stone about him. Tooks seemed to have fielded every Irishman east of Tipperary, for how else could its team have identified every county in Ireland? Tooks emerged overall winners of the quiz, while national firm Tuckers got the prize for best name: Tuck That. For any readers still pondering the opening questions, the answers are: Sir Viv Richards (football for Antigua, cricket for the West Indies); 12 prime ministers (some of whom served more than one term); and the erudite fictional copper’s first name is, of course, Endeavour.