But anyway, I sent the joint opinion down to Sydney's chambers and within half an hour Sydney's office rung me and said let's have a conference so we got Anthony and Laurence and I down to a consultation with Sydney Kentridge and that's how we got the case going. The involvement of Kentridge in what would become the I Bancoult (No 1) i litigation and continue to the I Bancoult (No 2) i litigation was a surprise to Gifford, as he noted: So, I thought we need a really top leader so funnily enough I heard Sydney Kentridge QC was a personal friend of Cyril, my partner who had dealt with the [earlier] case and I suggested to Cyril that we should instruct Sir Sydney [Kentridge] and he did not like that at all. In terms of the judges involved, Lord Hoffmann politely declined to be interviewed and Sir Stephen Sedley, who had been one of the judges in the Court of Appeal, kindly referred me to what he had written extra-judicially about the Chagos litigation, specifically I Lions under the Throne: Essays on the History of English Public Law i .[56] I was also in communication with Dame Margaret Beckett who had been the Foreign Secretary during the early stages of the present litigation. Lester was full of praise for Kentridge as her senior counsel: Sydney was an absolute expert on all the constitutional issues and he being from the generation, I mean he never used a computer Sydney, he researched everything in the old fashioned way with text books and law reports, you know hard copy law reports, so I remember him thinking that if I managed to find a case online it was the most, it was like magic for him, and so I think my role was very much supporting him. [Extracted from the article]