RIP Terry Morris

Saddened to read in today's Guardian Louis Blom-Cooper's obituary of my old LSE colleague Terry Morris. By the time I got to know him, Terry was, shall we say, a mercurial character, as well as a charmer and a man capable of immense personal kindness - the latter of which I was on the receiving end of on more than one occasion. One thing that Blom-Cooper doesn't mention, but was, I think, important to him, was a certain sort of liberal Catholicism. I could imagine that this was one of the roots of his zeal for prison reform. Terry was still writing to the press as late as February this year on Catholic related themes. My office was in the same corridor as Terry's so we often ran into each other and occasionally drank a dram together in the Beaver's Retreat where he would regale me with stories about his latest cycling adventure.

One constant about Terry - at least in the time that I knew him -  was his rather relaxed attitude towards appointments. One day there was a loud knock on my office door and when I opened it I was confronted by a fuming Joan Bakewell complete with camera crew demanding to know where Professor Morris was. Having ascertained that I was not, as she seemed to assume, Terry's personal assistant, she  turned tail and stomped off with her retinue in search of the quarry. Just another ordinary day on the 8th floor of the St Clement's Building