Geoffrey Cox has been MP for Torridge and West Devon, now Torridge and Tavistock, since 2005, and he was Attorney General for nineteen months under Theresa May and Boris Johnson. He is one of the highest earning barristers ever to sit in the House of Commons. He is also a study in how a brilliant legal mind, applied to politics, can produce some very ordinary judgements.

The talent is real and theatrical. Cox became a Queen's Counsel at forty three, co-founded his own chambers, and built a leading commercial and serious fraud practice while serving as a backbench MP. At the 2018 Conservative conference, then newly Attorney General, he delivered a baritone defence of Theresa May's Chequers plan that closed with Milton's Areopagitica and was widely cited as the best conference speech of the decade. As a constituency MP he won safe Devon seats with thumping majorities, peaking at sixty per cent of the vote in 2019. The presence is genuine.

His record as a law officer is harder to defend. In November 2018 he gave the Brexit cabinet his formal advice that the Northern Ireland backstop would, in his own words, endure indefinitely until both sides agreed otherwise. When the government refused to publish the full advice, the Commons found ministers in contempt of Parliament, the first time in its history, and the advice was duly published. The contempt finding was an indictment of the government as much as of him, but he was the law officer at the heart of it.

The defining episode came less than a year later. In August 2019 he advised the cabinet that Johnson's plan to prorogue Parliament for five weeks was lawful. The Supreme Court, on 24 September, ruled by eleven judges to none that it was not. The unanimity of the verdict against him was unprecedented for an Attorney General's advice in the modern era. He was sacked from the cabinet by Johnson five months later and has never returned to office.

The record after office has been worse. In November 2021, with the country still in the long shadow of the pandemic, it was reported that Cox had earned more than a million pounds in the previous year from private legal work, including representing the government of the British Virgin Islands in a UK inquiry into corruption, and had spent around a month in the Caribbean during which he voted in the Commons by proxy. Boris Johnson said no rules had been broken. The picture, an MP working from a tax haven while voting on the country's laws from a distance, was the cleanest single image of what the second jobs row was about.

In 2024 he held the new Torridge and Tavistock seat with a majority of 3,950, the Liberal Democrats in second. He was knighted in 2021 and continues as a consultant at Withers, where his recent register entries show fees of tens of thousands of pounds a quarter.

Cox is a formidable lawyer and a serious advocate, and on the day he speaks at the despatch box he can lift the chamber in a way few of his colleagues can. He is also a cautionary tale about the lawyer in politics, an Attorney General whose advice on prorogation was rejected unanimously by the highest court in the land, and an MP who spent the years after office representing offshore clients for sums most of his constituents will never see. The eloquence is undeniable. The judgement, on the things that mattered most, was not.