My brush with Nigel Boardman – the hotshot City lawyer turned Greensill inquisitor

Nigel Boardman once did the most extraordinary thing. He granted me an interview – his first ever.

 The chair of the government inquiry into David Cameron’s lobbying on behalf of the now collapsed Greensill Capital was once the City’s undisputed number one corporate lawyer. He’d seen off Sir Philip Green’s two tilts at Marks & Spencer, going for the jugular on each occasion. He personally advised an astonishing 12 FTSE100 companies. 

Boardman, a partner at the leading law firm, Slaughter and May, said he’d come to my office for the interview. I said no, I preferred to meet him in his office, it helped set the scene and would provide “context and colour”.

When I arrived at Slaughters (as they’re known) in Bunhill Row, I was made to wait, and wait. Finally, I was ushered upstairs to see him. He was sitting behind a desk in an entirely empty room, his room. The only items on display were a few pictures of his family, some legal textbooks and a computer screen that was showing an Arsenal screensaver. Otherwise, everywhere was completely bare. There were no papers anywhere, no other mementos.

It explained the delay. While I’d been sitting downstairs munching my way through the reception’s supply of Jelly Babies, he’d been emptying his office. He’d not filed away the most sensitive documents or turned them face down; he’d taken out the entire contents. Neither had he booked a meeting room. I joked that pursuing a scorched earth policy was going too far. He smiled a thin, inscrutable smile.

Either, it was – what do we say these days? – an abundance of caution, in case I might have seen something I shouldn’t. Or, he was having a dig at my expense: which was that Boardman is a lawyer, the law comes first, he does not do “context and colour”.

I suspect it was probably both. He was a reluctant interviewee, even though he’d been voted “Best Business Lawyer” more times than any other in publisher

Chambers & Partners’ prestigious annual survey (later, he would appear in the GQ ranking of Britain’s most-connected men). He gave the impression, at least, of being reticent, but in fact his eyes twinkled throughout and he grinned a lot of the time.

Boardman bears an uncanny resemblance in manner and look to the Ian Richardson character in the TV drama based on Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards – the Chief Whip who is deadly but ever so courteous with it. He is deliberately enigmatic. He went to Ampleforth, the Catholic boarding school in Yorkshire. “They weren’t the happiest days of my life,” he said. “But they weren’t the unhappiest either.” As to which were the happiest and unhappiest, he of course would not say.

Even at Slaughters which does not do slouch, Boardman was famous for his work ethic, for putting in an 80-hour week. Indeed, he first suggested we meet at 6am.

There was the tale of the trainee who shared his office, getting up to leave at 8pm. As he reached for his coat, Boardman looked up and asked: “Are you cold?”

He was known, too, for being tough. Another story concerned Boardman dictating a letter of dismissal and giving it to a secretary to type up: the letter was intended for her.

Quite what Boardman will make of Cameron who reputedly loved to put his feet up given half the chance and was known for leaving the detail to others remains to be seen.

Son of the former Conservative cabinet minister, Lord Boardman, he is a part-time senior consultant to his old practice and a non-executive director of the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. Boardman, 70, previously led a Cabinet Office review into the procurement process of Covid contracts early in the pandemic.

Boardman is also on the board of Arbuthnot Banking Group, a private bank with close ties to the Conservatives and the government. Its chairman and majority owner is Sir Henry Angest, a large Tory donor and former party treasurer.

One of the claims swirling round Cameron centres on his contact with Rishi Sunak and whether as a result the Chancellor pushed his team to give Greensill access to the Covid corporate financing facility, or CCFF. Slaughter and May advised the Treasury on the CCFF.

At the firm, Boardman twice successfully defended M&S against Green – using sharp tactics that caught the rest of the legal community on the hop. On the first occasion, he served Green with a “section 212” notice, forcing the retailer to disclose any interest in M&S. This revealed that Green’s wife Tina had bought shares in the company – causing Green enormous embarrassment.

Then, when Green had a second crack at M&S, Boardman dealt another heavy blow by applying to the High Court for the billionaire’s lawyers, Freshfields, to be required to stand down because they had been advising the retail chain on its contract with designer George Davies.

Boardman pointed to a conflict of interest in Freshfields representing Green as well. The move was seen among City lawyers as ungentlemanly: a senior member of an elite “Magic Circle” law firm seeking to have another struck out. The court, and subsequently the Court of Appeal, agreed with Boardman and Green was obliged to switch advisor even before his offensive had begun.

That was followed by then M&S boss Stuart Rose’s claim that his phone bills and mail had been tampered with. In what is believed to be the first use of this tactic in a UK takeover, Boardman slapped Data Protection warnings on Green and his associates.

It was a clever ruse – there was no actual evidence they were behind the infiltration of Rose’s details, but the serving of the notices made it seem as though they were. “We worked within the laws of defamation,” said a grinning Boardman when I put this to him.

Eventually, Green withdrew. Boardman played within the rules – which will probably be Cameron’s defence on Greensill as well, that whatever anyone thinks, he did nothing wrong. This, in the end, is likely to be Boardman’s conclusion, that Cameron did not stray outside the boundaries. The former Prime Minister should have known how his behaviour would be perceived, but that did not mean he transgressed. It’s the regulations that are at fault and require tightening.

Such a conclusion will not satisfy the government’s critics, who will maintain that Boardman was not objective, that the probe was a smoke-screen, designed to get the Tories out of a hole.

Cameron, though, cannot afford to be cavalier with the facts. In his denuded office, surrounded by gaping shelves and clear sideboard and desk, Boardman said to me: “You never get anywhere by lying to people. If you behave in an underhand fashion, you will be found out.” The ex-PM will have to be on his guard.