At the age of nine, he was sent to Northaw Place, a preparatory school in Potters Bar, Middlesex, where he first met and was looked after by fellow student Clement Attlee, the future Labour Party Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

[1] Jowitt was re-elected, now part of the re-united Liberal Party, at the 1923 general election, and in 1924, he was a member of the Royal Commission on Lunacy.

Following the formation of a minority Labour government, he was offered the position of attorney general by the new prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.

As was still the custom for the attorney general, he occasionally prosecuted in high-profile cases, notably Sidney Harry Fox, charged with murdering his mother by suffocating her and then setting fire to her hotel room.

He was made a Privy Councillor but found himself in a difficult electoral position when he could not secure the withdrawal of the Conservative candidate in Preston in the 1931 general election.

Still a public figure, he was a critic of the National Government's policy of appeasement, and in 1937, he called for the state control of the arms industry and rapid rearmament to face the growing threat of fascism on the Continent.

In October, he was adopted as Labour's candidate at a by-election in Ashton-under-Lyne and was elected unopposed, due to the war-time electoral pact.

Jowitt dispensed legal advice to the government for two years in World War II before he was placed in charge of planning for reconstruction.

He resigned from the government when Labour left the coalition in May 1945, after Victory in Europe Day, and he was re-elected for Ashton-under-Lyne in the general election in July.

As soon as he was appointed, Jowitt met with US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to resolve outstanding points of contention over the draft London Charter, which would govern the procedures of the Nuremberg Trials.

He attempted to end political and social imbalances in the Magistrates Courts and is considered to have been the first Lord Chancellor to adopt a policy of appointing judges purely on the basis of merit.

[8] A senior figure in the party, and a member of the Shadow Cabinet, Jowitt was careful to keep the Labour peers out of the conflict between the Bevanites and Gaitskellites in the early 1950s.

Jowitt wrote two books on espionage and compiled a legal dictionary, which was published posthumously in 1959, completed by Clifford Walsh, and became a standard reference work.