It’s not surprising that much of my conversation with Adam focuses on his new book Emergency State: How We Lost our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters, published in October 2022 by Vintage. It tells the story of a time that I think many of us now can’t recall with any clarity but in a vaguely torpid way. I ask him why he wrote the book. ‘I felt if I didn’t write it then it would never get written,’ he says. ‘I was sitting on top of this story I didn’t think anyone else could tell. Not in an arrogant way, and not that I am especially skilled to tell it, but because I had followed it for two years, and it is the most unbelievable thing that has happened in my lifetime, in this country, and certainly from a human rights perspective.’

Adam had the source material as he was recording every change to the regulations during lockdown. He tells me that the book is basically his Twitter feed, which he downloaded and wrote up. Every one of the hundreds of regulations were documented in what Adam describes as his ‘COVID regulations table’. He says the table particularly came into its own during the Boris Johnson Partygate cases, in which he acted, as he was able to go back and check what was legal.

The book has had good reviews, although Adam has been criticised as a human rights lawyer for not being anti-lockdown. He confesses that the review he was most anxious to read was that of Lord Sumption, as his viewpoint was ‘the intelligent version of the anti-lockdown narrative’. Adam, however, doesn’t consider the quarantining measures during COVID-19 to be unusual and explains that provisions used during the Black Death were not too dissimilar: curfews, gathering bans closures of institutions, and taking beggars off the streets. The difference with COVID-19, though, was the internet – we could stay at home and eat and shop and work, in a way we have never been able to do before.

I was approached by Adam’s publishers to see if LAG wanted to interview him or review his book. We agree on a meeting, and as Adam wanted to stay close to Doughty Street Chambers, where he is a barrister, I decide on The Duke – a small backstreet pub at the end of Doughty Mews, where I have previously enjoyed a pint or two with friends. We agree on an early time of 5.30 pm and I walk from LAG’s office in Lady Hale Gate to meet him just as darkness falls.

Adam and I haven’t met before, but I am one of the thousands of people who follow him on Twitter. His feed was the go-to place for finding out which regulations and guidance were in force during lockdown. I ask Adam why he started to document the regulations. He tells me it was for three reasons: first, because he was specialist adviser to the Joint Committee on Human Rights early in the pandemic and in that role, he had ‘a standing brief to look at everything’; he also did it for his own professional purposes, as he ‘had a following on social media, a platform to do it and was trusted’; and finally, he laughs, because ‘I was the last man standing’. He tells me it was very much the story of the tortoise and the hare with him ‘plodding along slowly, slowly while the other lawyers dropped off’ as he continued to stay up until midnight to read the regulations.

There is no doubt that Adam has a huge commitment to writing about the law in an accessible way and to helping people understand their rights. The fact that a huge amount of people were relying on his analysis (I know that I did) was enough motivation for him to continue. I tell Adam I found it comforting and reassuring at a confusing time, and he confirms that others have told him the same. People were grateful and asked him what they could do in return. In his usual style of wanting to help, Adam turned this gratitude into something positive and set up a crowdfunding page to fundraise for Law Centres. He tells me he raised £10,000 in 10 minutes and £40,000 to date. Adam talks about ‘being on the zeitgeist’ and how (being on it) it worked with the Law Centre crowdfunding and again with the Reclaim These Streets case (which he talks about later), where the women raised four to five hundred thousand pounds, again in minutes.

Adam didn’t want to be a lawyer. His father was a solicitor who, he tells me, hated his job. His father had a small high-street firm and advised Adam not to follow him into the legal profession. His mum was a secretary and then became a full-time carer after having children. Adam grew up in South Manchester, studied PPE at Oxford and obtained a postgraduate political science degree at Columbia University. It was here that he started to think about the law. I ask him why he became a barrister, and he tells me it was because he wanted his independence but also because of his dad’s advice.

We talk about what it was like being in lockdown, with the state controlling every aspect of our lives, and we reflect on how, for many of our clients, this is a permanent state of being. Adam mentions Colin Yeo’s review of Emergency State on the Free Movement blog and his reflections from the point of view of an immigration lawyer. Colin concludes: ‘[T]he vast, invasive powers taken on by the emergency state during the pandemic apply day in and day out to the lives of immigrants in this country.’

We talk about the confusion everyone had over what was guidance and what was law during the pandemic, and how even the police were confused. He doesn’t see this as surprising, as the law was changing so frequently, and the guidance was often different from the law. It was this difference that Adam sees as the key problem, as the guidance was always stricter than the law. He views this as deliberate, a sort of trick by the government to prevent challenges to the law by enacting laws easy to justify, and then guidance that went further in its restrictions on liberty.

That said, Adam does feel there were certain cases where the police should not have been confused, where they should have got it right – protest, for example. I mention the Sarah Everard vigil case,1R (Leigh and others) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2022] EWHC 527 (Admin); October 2022 Legal Action 22. See also April 2022 Legal Action 5. in which Adam acted, and tell him I felt the police made the wrong decision to remove the women attending the vigil. He agrees: ‘They did, but they got it wrong with their eyes open. It was not that they misunderstood, that they really thought that was the law … there was a general theme arising from all those different authorities: we are not having protest.’

Adam tells me that he needs to leave, but I can’t let him go without talking about Partygate. His view is that Partygate did something to the bond of trust between people and government, and he thinks other governments will suffer for that – a bit like Watergate. ‘It was a live demonstration of why you can’t trust politicians or civil servants and it hit people hard personally. It was very personal as we had all been through it.’ He feels that the rule-breaking in parliament by civil servants (who had written the rules) was interesting, as it was more than just ‘let’s break the rules for a bit of fun’, that there was something psychological about the emergency. His explanation is that Downing Street became a bit like a palace because they had so much control and power, and were so isolated from the rest of the country. He thinks it was the image of the Queen sitting alone at Prince Philip’s funeral that ended Johnson’s premiership. The government failed to understand the symbolism of this act (although the Queen did) and how awful the government was at modelling the behaviour it expected of others.