Yeah, but the old records still had LordPaul as the registrant. I did change the email address, but was still a bit paranoid it might somehow get stuck in limbo until I could contact LP to convince Nominet to authorise it, but then it would have expired and made things more complicated.
As it was, I'm not sure what (if any) validation was performed - no secret code matching, no email to say "hey, do you agree to move domain X between registrar Y and Z" - only setting the registrar-specific IPS tag; if someone with the same registrar had put in a transfer request at the same time, how would it have known the right one...
*shrug* Guess I should just be happy it worked.