Speaking for Myself (24 page)

There was a broader point, too. Tony wanted to bring a good standard of education to everyone, whatever their religion or lack of religion. That was another of his goals: to show people that they could be aspirational yet at the same time care about what happened to others. Above all, he wanted to jettison the idea that once people did better in life, the Labour Party was no longer their natural home.

When John Smith took over as leader from Neil Kinnock in 1992, the party paid £70,000 for his apartment to be redecorated, on the grounds that he needed somewhere suitable for official entertaining. Now that Tony was Leader of the Opposition, someone from the party came to look over our house in Richmond Crescent and, taking a dim view of the holes in the carpet, suggested we should use John Smith’s flat.

“If I’m having to entertain,” I said, “I am not going to entertain in somebody else’s house. It has to be done in ours.” As for bringing Richmond Crescent up to scratch, neither of us felt we could take any more money from the party, which only two years previously had spent so much doing up John Smith’s place.

The moment we began to look beneath the surface, it was apparent that a face-lift would not be sufficient. My dad was always complaining that he got ill every time he stayed in our spare room in the basement, that it was damp and unhealthy. It turned out he was right. The whole of the downstairs had to be damp-proofed and replastered, which involved borrowing £30,000 from the bank. Tony’s attitude toward money has always been “I just want to do what’s right, and somehow or other we’ll sort it out.” Although I had long before accepted that I was the major breadwinner, it sometimes rankled that he would get the credit for maintaining the moral high ground while the responsibility of funding an increased mortgage, as in this case, would fall on me. It didn’t strike me as odd, however. It was how things had been when I was growing up. My grandma was always in charge of the family finances. Grandad would hand over most of his pay, and my mum would hand over half of hers.

When I moved to Michael Beloff’s chambers in Gray’s Inn Square in 1991, Leslie Page, the chief clerk, told me that chambers’ “game plan” was that within the next five years, I would take silk. As we were now coming up on 1995, it was time to think seriously about what I should do.

Acceptance as a Queen’s Counsel, or silk, was far from automatic. At that time, the view of the senior judges was what ultimately decided the matter, so if a junior barrister was thinking of applying, it was a good idea to talk to a senior member of the Bench to see what he or she thought.

Becoming a Queen’s Counsel wasn’t guaranteed to give a junior a higher income. There was even a risk he or she would see a drop. Someone with a good junior practice could earn well in excess of a silk whose practice was limited. In those days silks couldn’t work without a junior. Not only could they not appear in court without a junior supporting them, but they could no longer do pleadings or draft court documents. And it was often the case that the junior brought in the work in the first place. If a junior didn’t like a silk, he or she was in trouble.

By 1995, however, such rules were already bending because of murmurings concerning restrictive practices, and by the end of the nineties, they were largely gone. Even so, after I made silk, I rarely did things on my own, simply because the economics were better for the client. A junior was cheaper than I was and could easily do the background stuff. Why pay my hourly rate for this work? Roughly speaking, a silk is paid to shape the case and provide the eventual advocacy. Once in court, the junior is there to assist the silk, to make sure he or she covers all the points and generally to act as the silk’s assistant. Whereas the junior will help the silk draft the written argument that is filed with the court, the silk presents the oral argument. When a trial involves examining witnesses, the silk might even let the junior do some of the minor witness evidence. In my situation, however, most of the cases I dealt with didn’t involve witnesses, because they were about legal points, so my work mainly involved arguing the point of law.

I had moved chambers in order to give my practice a boost, and the move had certainly been effective. I had stopped doing the routine stuff and was doing more High Court work, specifically judicial review cases, which were both interesting and — because they often involved challenging government decisions — quite political and high profile. As a consequence, they brought me to the attention of the High Court judges, the people who ultimately decide who gets silk and who doesn’t.

A classic example of public law was the poll tax. Officially known as the community charge, it had been brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1989 and levied on every citizen. The tax was unrelated to an individual’s wealth or ability to pay and so was perceived as being grossly unfair by the majority of the population.

People sometimes ask me how I deal with cases involving a law I don’t particularly like. While I didn’t think the poll tax was a good idea politically, I also believed that as Parliament had passed that bill, people had to pay the tax. That is, you can change the law, but you don’t disobey the law. It’s the old question that all law students have to decide: do you have an obligation to obey the law? For example, Gandhi and his followers, who flagrantly disobeyed the law, accepted that as a consequence, they would be sent to prison.

A friendly solicitor in Manchester brought me a series of interesting cases against a body called ICSTIS, set up to monitor child chat lines in order to prevent children from running up huge phone bills that their parents would have to pay. Some of these lines turned out to be sex lines, so I found myself defending the existence of sex lines that were being closed down by ICSTIS. It would start with a nice intellectual argument, but then the judge would say, “Well, let’s see some of these transcripts,” and I’d have to read out what people were actually saying on the sex lines. And as I was standing there, reading out this stuff, I could see my case disappearing down the plughole. The judge, being only human, would think,
I don’t care how clever this legal argument is; those lines must stay closed.
And that’s what usually happened. Often in such instances, I knew I was not going to win. Good as the intellectual case might be, it was morally indefensible.

The reason I took on these cases — and others that I didn’t necessarily approve of — was the cab-rank rule. It arose in the eighteenth century, when John Wilkes and others like him were being tried for sedition and couldn’t find lawyers to represent them, because the lawyers were frightened of being punished by the government. If the legal system was to work properly, it was reckoned, the defendants had a right to be represented. According to the cab-rank rule, it is a matter of professional misconduct to turn down a case if you are available and if you have been offered a reasonable fee.

Some barristers say, “I will not represent rapists” or “I won’t do this or that.” To me, the advantage of the cab-rank rule is that no one can claim that I picked a particular case because I espouse the cause. Of course, sometimes I do espouse the cause, and it could be argued that I am likely to make a better job of it. But that’s completely and utterly irrelevant.

Once Tony was Leader of the Opposition, it became even more important that I stick to this rule. I had to ensure that I remained totally untainted by politics, especially when my field was so bound up with governmental decisions.

It was through doing public law that I also started doing education law. In the 1990s a whole system of special-needs education was starting up, responding to children with physical, mental, or behavioral difficulties. Because I was experienced in family law and was thought to be good with children, many of these cases came my way. In one case, we managed to get the court to overturn the local authority’s decision to move a girl out of her special school. This girl had cerebral palsy. There was nothing wrong with her brain; it was just her body that was damaged. I also did the first case concerning a dyslexic girl who sued her local authority for failing to diagnose her condition. The issue was whether the local authority was liable to a charge of negligence. In 2002 I wrote a book on the subject. As the field was so new, there wasn’t one that dealt with it.

Because education was a very new field in terms of the law, I argued before the highest courts in the land, which meant that my visibility was becoming much greater among the judges. I’d got to know several of them quite well, so I went to talk to some of them about applying for Queen’s Counsel. Their response was encouraging. My practice, they felt, would justify my taking silk, and they suggested that it would be better to apply while there was still a Tory government. If I waited until Labour was in power, it would be harder to avoid allegations of favoritism.

I applied in 1995 — one of only six women who took silk that year. By sheer chance, on the day it was announced, Tony and I had been invited to Windsor Castle. Traditionally the Leader of the Opposition stays the night, but that year — much to our relief — this was impossible because of ongoing repairs following a serious fire in 1992. It wasn’t that we had anything against staying, but the following day was Easter, and we wanted to set off early for the constituency.

So it was that on the day it was announced that “Her Majesty is pleased to have appointed . . . Cherie Booth as her Counsel,” I had dinner with the Queen. It wasn’t the first time I had met her. New MPs are always invited to Buckingham Palace with their spouses, and at that first meeting I remember being struck dumb, not knowing what to say and getting terribly confused as to how to curtsy. When I was little, I had been taught to curtsy in ballet class, but a ballet curtsy seemed a bit over-the-top for this particular occasion, so I managed a vague kind of bob. (The accusation that I refused to curtsy, either then or later, is a complete load of rubbish, though now I tend to bow. As a barrister, I bow all the time — lady barristers are not expected to curtsy — out of respect to the court and respect to the Crown, so that comes completely naturally.)

The ceremony where you actually take silk immediately follows the Easter bank holiday and takes place at the Palace of Westminster. This requires a trip to Ede & Ravenscroft to purchase a new silk gown and a full-bottom wig. Lady barristers traditionally wore long skirts for the ceremony, but since 1991 we had been allowed to wear the men’s costume of knickerbockers, which were much jollier, so I decided to go for them. When I tried them on, I was surprised at how ill fitting they were at the front, with so much loose material. A red-faced assistant had to explain to me why. In the end I got a pair specially made.

It was a real family celebration. My dad came down, and my mum, Lyndsey, and all three of my children were there. Tony couldn’t be there for the whole ceremony, as he was needed in the House of Commons, but at about eleven o’clock he came over to Westminster Hall to watch the proceedings.

After a little celebration in chambers, we went over to the Lord Chief Justice’s court. There, in precedent order, we were presented to the Lord Chief Justice. By this time the kids were getting a bit restless and were rather bemused by all the bowing and scraping, not to mention their mum in this ridiculous outfit looking like a pantomime Prince Charming. My dad, meanwhile, was getting himself photographed by the waiting press: no show without Punch. Even so, I knew he was very pleased. I remember him saying, “Your grandma would have been so thrilled that you matched Rose Heilbron.” And it’s true; she would have been.

Finally it was party time. The car took us back to the house, and everyone — friends and family — turned up to celebrate. Later that evening we ended up at Tony’s brother Bill’s and had Chinese takeout. It was the end of a fantastic day: a very proud moment for me, a proud moment for my mum, and even the kids were marginally impressed. They were used to their dad being the Big Thing, but at least I got to dress up for my moment in the sun.

Around the time the London Oratory story first broke, I had a phone call from a very irate Fiona. Anji Hunter had told her that I thought Alastair had leaked the story. I had no idea where Anji had got that, I said. Certainly not from me, because it wasn’t the case. Fiona was clearly very upset and stressed, and it emerged that despite what I had promised her about not losing sight of family obligations, life in the Campbell-Millar household had gone rapidly downhill.

“He goes off in the morning, then when I’ve just about given up on him ever coming back, he reappears. And when he is here, he’s on the phone. Frankly, I could be an umbrella stand for all the notice he takes of me,” Fiona said. This sounded all too familiar. Tony was doing his best to stay involved, but his job was an endless series of obligations, morning, noon, and night. I thought,
Join the club.

“Believe me, Fiona,” I said, “I know exactly how you feel.”

After this conversation the idea emerged that if she was more involved, things might improve on the home front. Perhaps, Tony suggested, I could do with some extra help? Fiona was a freelance reporter. She had started on the
Daily Express,
where her father had been a journalist. She sometimes did things for the in-house magazine for the House of Commons and had always been political.

Fiona is very attractive, with a shock of blond hair, and also strong-minded and determined. But she can be very unforgiving. At that time it’s fair to say I didn’t know her very well, but we were friendly, and I trusted her. The first thing she did in her new role was to get Philip Gould, the Labour Party’s poll adviser, to slip a few questions into some of his focus groups to find out what people thought of me. As she was friendly with Lindsay Nicholson, then editor of
Prima,
a women’s magazine, Fiona arranged for me to be a guest editor for the tenth-anniversary issue. Lindsay’s husband, John Merritt, had been a trainee reporter with Alastair, and they had become great friends. John had died of leukemia in 1993, leaving Lindsay with a three-year-old and pregnant with their second daughter — a terrible story. I took to Lindsay immediately — a really nice woman, a fantastically capable editor, and a good Catholic girl like me.