Only a few days after the prime minister - in his keynote speech at the Labour Party Conference - attacked elitism and vested interests within the professions, it is extraordinary that the Lord Chancellor publicly defends an old-boy, secret-soundings approach to the appointment of Queen's counsel and the judiciary.

No wonder those few days were allowed to elapse before Lord Irvine, ever the politician, responded to the Law Society Council's overwhelming decision to withdraw from these outmoded - and, one would have thought, politically incorrect - processes.However, comfort can be taken from the fact that those who side with the Lord Chancellor regarding this issue form a predictable group.

They include Keith Vaz, a minister at the Lord Chancellor's Department, the leaders of the Bar - although at its annual conference a few days ago its membership voted overwhelmingly for a new approach, despite having been served well by a system designed by and for it - and one or two of the only four solicitors who have made QC rank and who might now have gone native.A better measurement of the correctness of the Law Society's decision not to validate an unacceptable and outmoded approach to Bar and judicial advancement by continuing to participate is the number of interest groups which agree with the Law Society.

They include the Commerce and Industry Group, which represents many in-house lawyers; the Trainee Solicitors Group; the Association of Women Solicitors, the Local Government Group and the A frican Caribbean and Asian Lawyers Group, all of which take the view that the system of secret soundings discriminates against them and prevents our judiciary from more widely representing modern society.

It is unusual for all of these diverse groupings of solicitors to be as strongly behind a Law Society initiative.

But this support is not confined to solicitors.

Judging from the media, the Lord Chancellor could find himself isolated.However, there is a risk that concentrating on who is lined up against whom will obscure the real issue, which is that the Lord Chancellor has set himself against the four principles of transparency and open competition which the government itself has recently adopted for appointment to the important panels of Treasury Counsel.

Those four principles require: vacancies to be advertised; applications to be considered by a selection board; the Attorney-General not appointing any candidate not recommended by the selection board; and - of considerable relevance to the present debate - the Attorney-General not seeking opinions from persons other than the selection board and the candidate's referees.The Lord Chancellor, in continuing to support a system of secret soundings, is out of kilter with what appears to be the approach of the prime minister as head of a modernising government, with the practices of the Attorney-General regarding the appointments he makes and with the government's otherwise unreserved support of the Nolan principles.

Also, he once again appears to be angry with the Law Society for doing no more than standing firm as a matter of principle in resisting an opaque and discriminatory approach regarding high-level legal and judicial appointments.

Not for the first time he is oversensitive to his own powers of patronage being challenged.I am relieved, as the person who has been the Law Society's national co-ordinator for silk appointments for the last three years and one of its consultees on judicial appointments, that I will no longer be required to respond to the LCD's secret soundings.

I am convinced it is a process flawed beyond redemption.Please, Lord Chancellor, do not carry this rotten system into the 21st century.