I thought he was going to hit me, if he didn't fall over first.

He hated effing lawyers, he said. He was a bulge-eyed roaring drunk and had got it into his befuddled brain that I was a lawyer, rather than someone who wrote about the law. An effing judge has just told him he must pay £50 maintenance a week to his ex-wife, he disclosed, not the £100 that he was effing willing to pay.

Surely that's good, I ventured.

Effing lawyers, he said. Always telling you how to run your life.

And then there was the time I introduced an old mate of mine to my partner, a solicitor. We had known one another for years and much of his income, as it happened, derived from work I was putting his way. That didn't stop him regaling her for the next half an hour with an account of why he loathed lawyers.

Now I'm no shrinking violet. I used to be a tax inspector, so I know what it's like to be unloved. Journalists, for that matter, are not universally admired and adored.

But how did lawyers get it so very, very wrong?

There are lots of answers. Legal advice is a stress purchase – we only go to lawyers when someone has died, or we are getting divorced, or something else stressful is happening in our lives.

Lawyers use long words that we don't understand, too, and they earn more than us.

And then there is all that nonsense about human rights (said with a sneer), where the bad guys get all the rights and the good guys, like us, get all the wrongs.

Lawyers are the villains of the piece because human rights – let's face it – are just another way for fat cat lawyers to get their snouts in the trough (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors).

This commonly held perception is fuelled by journalists, and indeed was the subject of a Chatham House debate, hosted by the Law Society in November, on Human Rights and the Media.

A well-known legal journalist, whom I can't name, told the meeting how the mythology around human rights has been allowed to grow in the media. Journalists know that some stories fit into 'train lines' that are sure to get a reaction from the readers.

A prisoner was allowed pornography because of his human rights, it was widely reported, except nobody can actually point to an article in the European convention that covers the provision of erotic materials.

This was not an isolated example - journalists all too often get the facts wrong. It was widely reported that the Afghans who hijacked an aeroplane, but were not returned to Afghanistan, were allowed to stay because of their (sneer) human rights. This is not true. They were allowed to stay because of the protections we afford refugees under a convention to which we are signatories.

Learco Chindamo, the murderer of headmaster Philip Lawrence, escaped deportation from this country not, as reported in the press, because of his human rights, but because he was born in the European Union – in Italy. The free movement of people is central to membership of the EU. So even if we could find a pretext to deport the guy to Italy, there is nothing to stop him turning around and coming back here, the country where he has spent most of his life.

And so it goes on. Sympathetic claimants, such as little old ladies who don't want to change their nursing home, merit scant column space because human rights by definition must be wrong – and scant column space means scant exposure for the good work done by the lawyers.

In a nutshell, fat cat lawyers exploiting human rights law make good copy, nice ones do not.

And yet people generally approve of human rights. How many Daily Mail readers would really like their right to a fair trial withdrawn? Anyone want to forfeit their rights to freedom of expression or to marry and found a family?

It's lawyers that people turn to when these rights are threatened. They should be the good guys.

Anyway, the wife comes home with the car covered in mud and scratched by branches. 'I ran over a lawyer,' she sobs. The husband asks: 'But why is the car in such a mess?' She shrugs. 'I had to chase him across a field and into the trees.'

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