Peter Anthony Grayson Rawlinson was born in Oxton, within Birkenhead, on 26 June 1919; he grew up in Sussex.

[1] However, he only completed one year at the university, moving on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, on the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

He was also a junior counsel in the unsuccessful defence of Peter Wildeblood, tried with Edward Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers for gross indecency in 1954.

A year later in 1955, he was junior counsel for Melford Stevenson in the defence of Ruth Ellis, who was hanged.

A member of the Conservative Party, he stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Hackney South in the 1951 general election, losing in a landslide to the Labour incumbent, Herbert Butler.

He was appointed Solicitor-General by Harold Macmillan in June 1962,[14] following the Night of the Long Knives, receiving the customary knighthood,[15] and served through the prosecution of the spy John Vassall (and subsequent resignation of a junior minister, Tam Galbraith) and the Profumo affair, in which his offer to resign was declined.

[3] He was sworn of the Privy Council in the 1964 New Year Honours,[16] and remained on the front benches in opposition, after the government lost the 1964 general election, but returned to the back benches after unsuccessfully supporting Reginald Maudling as new party leader.

Unusually, he conducted many prosecutions in person, including that of the Hosein brothers for kidnapping and murdering Muriel McKay (whom they had mistaken for Rupert Murdoch's wife).

[19] He harboured hopes of being appointed Lord Chancellor or Lord Chief Justice (the law having been changed in 1974 to permit a Roman Catholic to take the former position, widely seen at the time as a measure to permit Rawlinson to take the job) but his politics diverged from those of the new Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, and he was never offered either position.

[1] Later that year, he married Elaine Dominguez, an American citizen from Newport, Rhode Island; they had three children.