After receiving a BA degree in 1974, promoted in 1976 to an MA by seniority, Smith briefly practised in Liverpool before becoming a law lecturer at Manchester University from 1977 to 1983.

It later transpired that the judge gave a series of email hints about the code, which was finally announced as "cracked" on 28 April 2006, by Daniel Tench, a lawyer and media journalist for The Guardian newspaper.

[6]In 2007, Smith spent some months in communication with a London solicitors' firm, Addleshaw Goddard, relating to the possibility of employment by them.

However, in July 2007, about a month after the conclusion of those negotiations, the judge refused to recuse himself from a heavily contested case, Howell v Lees Millais & Others, involving a partner in the same firm in his capacity as a trustee.

Second, the submission by counsel for the applicant that the judge had given evidence was in the circumstances unsurprising, and the concerns he expressed on this topic were validly made.

[8] By 13 July 2007, Joshua Rozenberg, a legal journalist, was suggesting in The Daily Telegraph that it was time for the judge to stand down.

[9] On 16 July 2007, it was announced in a press release from the Judicial Communications Office that the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, had referred the judge's behaviour in the case to the independent Office for Judicial Complaints (OJC).

[citation needed] Following investigation under the Judicial Discipline Regulations 2006, the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice have carefully considered the Court of Appeal’s comments on the conduct of Mr Justice Peter Smith in the case of Howell and others v Lees-Millais and others and have concluded that the conduct in question amounted to misconduct.

In August 2013 the Court of Appeal held that Smith should have recused himself from hearing an application for wasted costs against a firm of solicitors.

Lady Justice Arden observed in her judgment at paragraph 59 that there was 'apparent bias stemming from the facts of the case which meant that the judge should have recused himself from hearing the wasted costs application' and at paragraph 62, that 'the judge should certainly have recused himself from hearing the wasted costs application.

'[13] In July 2015, on application by the parties, Smith recused himself from being the judge in long running multi-party proceedings between various airlines.

During the hearing, Smith repeatedly asked counsel for BA what had happened to his luggage, receiving the response that the proceedings were not appropriate for dealing with a personal dispute.

[19] Following the British Airways recusal application, an article by Lord Pannick QC appeared in The Times newspaper.

Smith's reaction was to write to Anthony Peto QC, one of the joint heads of Blackstone Chambers, where Pannick practised, complaining in strong terms about Pannick's "outrageous" article and saying that Smith would no longer support members of Blackstone Chambers.

However, in the course of the judgment of the Court (Lord Dyson MR, Moore-Bick and McFarlane LJJ), Smith was heavily criticised for his conduct in writing the letter.

We greatly regret having to criticise a judge in these strong terms, but our duty requires us to do so.In a column in the Guardian newspaper, Joshua Rozenberg returned to the theme of Smith's suitability for judicial office, repeating his contention, first raised in 2007, that it was now time for Smith to resign.

Smith had "agreed to refrain from sitting" before the Harb appeal, and this effective suspension from work was to continue.

[21] On 2 August 2016, writing in The Times Frances Gibb reported that Smith had "been signed off sick and may never return to work", being mentally unfit to defend himself in a disciplinary inquiry, which could mean that a decision may not be made for several months.

Rozenberg speculated that Smith would retire from the High Court once he attained 65 years of age in May 2017, qualifying for immediate payment of his judicial pension.