Lord Reed

Professor MacQueen, who studied alongside Lord Reed, says the pair were “swots”.

“We spent a lot of time in the library. He and I, I suppose might have been put amongst the swots in the first year LLB degree, and we were a bit shaggier in the mid-70s.”

Professor MacQueen adds: “I think he was going his own way and he knew more or less what he wants to do, from quite an early stage.”

Dame Eilish Angiolini QC says that his rise was “meteoric”. She once asked him to do a paper on public interest immunity and suggested he take two or three weeks to complete it.

He appeared in her office with the completed paper the next day.

“When I got home and began to read it it was like the scales falling from my eyes, he produced this masterpiece, it was an outstanding piece of very learned work.”

Lord Reed sat in the Court of Session for 13 years, which he is said to have compared at one stage to working on the tills at Tesco.

Former Supreme Court colleague, Lord Sumption, says: “He is not a swaggerer. He is not a bully. He doesn’t raise his voice. But he doesn’t need to because he’s highly respected as a thoughtful and highly intelligent judicial figure.”

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