Instead, Irvine decided that Bingham would become senior law lord and his successor as Lord Chief Justice would be Lord Woolf, also moving to a post to which he was seen as better suited. Woolf was replaced by Lord Phillips, Bingham's eventual successor.

Bingham presided over nearly 200 appeals involving the Human Rights Act but the one that made the greatest impact was the Belmarsh case, named after the prison in which suspected foreign terrorists were being held indefinitely under post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws. The Court of Appeal had judged their detention lawful. But, shortly before Christmas 2004, Bingham and his fellow law lords found it disproportionate and discriminatory — and therefore incompatible with the detainees' human rights. 

A month later, the government announced a new system of control orders — in effect, house arrest. But Charles Clarke, the then Home Secretary, disclosed subsequently that he had been "frustrated at the inability to have general conversations of principle with the law lords". Shortly afterwards, I bumped into Bingham on the London Underground, and he agreed to explain Clarke's cryptic remarks in an interview he was due to give me at Gray's Inn the following month.

It turned out that Clarke was trying to open a "back channel" with the judiciary, hoping to learn what sort of restrictions on terrorist suspects a court would regard as lawful. But, as Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, remarked in a BBC tribute to his predecessor, Bingham could not get ministers to understand that it would be extremely difficult for judges to rule on legislation that they had helped to draft.

The senior law lord had been told that the Home Secretary wanted a "purely social meeting" with the law lords. "One was, perhaps, a little sceptical," he told the Gray's Inn lawyers, much to their amusement.

It was a typical Bingham remark — as modest as it was devastating. Unfailingly courteous, he sometimes seemed to be living on a higher plane than mere mortals. That, sadly, proved not to be the case. But Bingham the judge will live on for ever.