Louis Blom-Cooper was for many years a valued, but often critical, friend of the Home Office, both through his informal contacts with ministers and officials and through his membership of the – for some people much-missed – Advisory Council on the Penal System, under its chairman Sir Kenneth Younger.
With his friends Lady (Barbara) Wootton and Terence Morris, he was always a source of wisdom and good sense, especially on sentencing, relations between the Home Office and the judiciary, and the law on homicide, and he had an important influence even if his advice was not always accepted. Relationships became more distant in recent times, but he remained active until a few months before his death, for example through his membership of the pressure group Modernising Justice. Its book The Case for a Review of the Law of Murder was published in April.
