the Industrial Relations Act 1971 until it was abolished in 1974. The trades unions, pointing to his Tory inclinations in his youth, nicknamed him "Black Jack", and 181 Members of Parliament (MPs) signed a House of Commons motion calling for his dismissal. Two months after Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979, he became a Lord Justice of Appeal, thus was automatically appointed to the Privy Council. He replaced Lord Denning as Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England in 1982, becoming the presiding officer of the civil division of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, where he pushed forward modernisation efforts, including the introduction of skeleton arguments in civil appeals, judgments being "handed down" rather than read, and enhanced case management. Donaldson decided in O'Kelly v. Trusthouse Forte plc [1983] ICR 728, Donaldson's early reforms would later be overtaken by the Civil Procedure Rules introduced by a later Master of the Rolls, Lord Woolf. On 15 February 1988 he was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer as Baron Donaldson of Lymington, of Lymington in the County of Hampshire. In his various roles, Donaldson was involved in many high-profile cases from the 1970s onwards. He presided over the trials of the Guildford Four in 1975 and the Maguire Seven in 1976, and was later criticised in Sir John May's interim report of his inquiry into the miscarriages of justice. The inquiry by Sir John May into the injustice suffered by the Maguires said that Mr Justice Donaldson, as he was then, had failed to appreciate that the sudden emergence of new evidence on the last day of the trial removed the whole basis of the prosecution case. He also allowed inadmissible evidence to be presented to the jury, the report added. At the trials, he achieved notoriety for declaring in his closing remarks that he wished the men had been indicted for high treason, which still carried the death penalty, rather than for murder, which by then no longer carried the death penalty. These remarks bore an uncanny resemblance to the words of another leading judge of the era, Sir Nigel Bridge, who commented in a similar IRA-based miscarriage of justice, the Birmingham Six trial, that he wished that he could still hang murderers. Donaldson refused to prevent newspapers from publishing the Spycatcher memoir of Peter Wright in 1988, against government