Chapter 13
In 1989 I received the ultimate accolade for a junior barrister when the Queen’s Counsel who had led me in a very difficult wardship case gave me a red bag. All barristers carry their robes in a blue bag, but a red one can be given only by a Queen’s Counsel for what he or she deems exceptional work. There is a whole ritual surrounding the presentation, including the £10 tip you are supposed to give the junior clerk who delivers the bag to your chambers.
Maggie Rae was the instructing solicitor in the case concerned, and everything about it had been difficult. The family of the children who had been taken into care were involved in prostitution. The grandmother was the madam of a brothel, and the mother was now putting her own children “on the game.” The evidence was harrowing. Now that I was the mother of a daughter myself, I was finding these family law cases increasingly hard to cope with. I remember one case involving a woman whose newborn baby had been taken into care. She was devoted to her child, but the baby had drug withdrawal symptoms when it was born. The mother was a heroin addict, and the medical view was that she was going to die. She was devastated when the baby was placed for adoption.
In another case, a young woman was accused of injuring her baby, but she denied it. We argued her case, and I convinced the magistrate that it hadn’t happened. The baby was delivered back to the woman on a Friday. By the next Monday she had called social services and said, “I did do it, and I can’t cope. Please take him back.” Otherwise, she said, she feared she’d hurt him again. The saddest thing about it was that now she was going to be prosecuted for perjury on top of everything else, and I thought, Please, don’t do that.
It was very difficult not to get emotionally involved. I represented one client who was accused of sexually interfering with his children, which he denied, but I was deeply dubious about his denials. His defense was quite straightforward: “Yes, I did beat them, I did commit physical violence against them, but I didn’t sexually abuse them.” After the second day of the trial, things were looking bad. When we arrived at court the following morning, we were told that he had committed suicide overnight. That wasn’t the end of it, however. The judge said that we had to continue with the case. The local authority wanted to make the findings a fact and to take the children into care. They didn’t want them to be handed back to the mother, who they believed was, at worst, complicit in the abuse or, at best, prepared to turn a blind eye. So that’s what happened: the defendant had given his evidence, and the judge duly found against him.
There came a point where I could no longer face the hideous things that some people do to their children. It seemed rarely to be a matter of simple sexual intercourse. A lot of it involved horrible acts that these people forced their children to perform, things that I then had to stand up and talk about in court as if it were the stuff of everyday life. Although the judges are all family law judges, and thus are familiar with most of these practices, barristers are obliged to go through the evidence point by point. I still think it’s a really important job — so many women’s issues throughout the world revolve around children and what happens when family relationships break down — but on a day-to-day basis, it was hard going, and luckily I had another string to my bow.
Through my work in employment law, I had come to the notice of Michael Beloff, a brilliant man with impossible handwriting — even worse than mine. When I joined 5 Essex Court back in 1977, I thought I was there for life. Then, during the eighties and certainly by the end of the decade, there was a movement for change at the Bar. It was no longer unheard-of for people to move chambers. Specialization became the hot topic, and life in general common-law sets became more precarious. And not only did commercial members of chambers earn much more money than criminal barristers, but to add insult to injury, they would complain that their well-to-do clients had to sit in the waiting room with people who were quite likely to take their wallets.
Employment law was still a fairly unusual specialty. Like any other area of expertise, the more cases you do, the more people are likely to come to you. If you can’t do a case yourself, you want to be able to pass it on — to “return” it — to someone else in chambers, and so it was becoming increasingly difficult to be a lone specialist in chambers.
In addition to employment law, I had also done a bit of public law, which was Michael Beloff’s field, and this, too, was starting to build up as an independent specialty. Public law is about challenging government decisions, and education was one of the areas in which I had become involved early on. Foremost among the cases I had worked on were those challenging school closures or the provisions that local authorities made for children with special education needs.
The planning barristers who largely made up Michael Beloff’s chambers were great advocates who could cross-examine witnesses till they were screaming for mercy, but their interests did not lie in analyzing and debating the exact meaning of a word in a piece of government legislation. Although I believe I am a good trial lawyer, I enjoyed this type of intellectual argument more. Moving to Michael Beloff’s chambers would mean moving into that more stimulating arena, where cases I was involved in would set precedents.
Tony has always been totally supportive of my having a career — he is not one of those men who are threatened by successful women — and by “supportive” I mean real, practical support. Without his help with child care, both on weekends and on holiday, I would have found it much more difficult to cope. As he had a parking space at the House of Commons, we would usually travel to work together, and when he dropped me off that morning for my interview, he said I had to go for it.
“You would be completely and utterly mad to turn down Michael Beloff just because you feel loyal to Freddie and the others,” he said.
As it turned out, I didn’t turn them down because I wasn’t offered the tenancy. Michael rang me later to say the chambers had been very divided, but in the end they had decided against taking me on. He added, however, that he thought this would not be a long-term decision, and he would get back to me. Sure enough, in the following year he did, and I was offered and accepted the place at Gray’s Inn Square.
Although my husband was not a senior MP, he was definitely starting to appear on the radar. In 1988 he got into the Shadow Cabinet in charge of energy, and after impressing with that, he was given the employment portfolio. This was a significant appointment. At the time I was first approached by Michael Beloff, the big issue was how we would deal with Thatcherite workplace reforms, in particular those dealing with the closed-shop rules requiring workers to belong to the relevant union. These rules’ original purpose had been to protect union members from being discriminated against by employers bringing in cheap nonunion labor. But the Thatcher government was eager to dismantle this tradition. In 1989 Tony committed the Labour Party to accepting the reforms, and the following year closed shops were outlawed by the 1990 Employment Act. He might have outraged the left wing of the party, but he made it far harder for the Tories to attack. These, of course, were all issues that I was familiar with because it was my field of law, and though there were some areas of policy that we disagreed on, this wasn’t one of them.
Although being in the Shadow Cabinet did not increase Tony’s salary, it did give him access to what is called Short money, named in honor of Edward Short, the Speaker of the House. Short money is allocated on the basis of how many seats the opposition has, so in 1987, when we didn’t have that many MPs, we had to get money from other sources, mainly the trade unions. The idea was for Tony and Gordon to pool whatever extra money they raised, but somehow Gordon always seemed to have more staff than Tony. We weren’t the only ones who noticed that Gordon put himself first. Mo Mowlam, another northeast MP, was strongly of the opinion that Tony was being taken for a ride by Gordon and should assert himself.
When I was at the LSE, I had a twenty-one-inch waist and was so skinny you could see my ribs. With each pregnancy, I put on twenty pounds, then managed to lose two-thirds of it. So by the autumn of 1989, with Kathryn getting on for eighteen months old, I was about twenty-one pounds overweight and a size 10 instead of a size 6. Intermittently I’d go on a diet, but basically I was stuck. One day I came across a handout in one of those free magazines that come through the door. It was directed at busy working women and/or young mothers who were feeling daunted by not being able to get back into shape. I qualified on both counts. It was a completely different approach to losing weight, “freeing the body and feeding the mind.” I knew that I wasn’t eating properly. When you have young children, you tend to finish off what they’re eating and then sit down for another meal with your husband. But with a full-time job and the constant feeling of guilt that I ought to be at home, I was not thinking about eating sensibly.
The course was called Holistix, and it was run by a mother and daughter, Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Carole was a professional dancer, incredibly fit and with more energy than anyone I had ever met, and she made everything seem both easy and possible. I immediately signed up. The course basically involved exercise classes combined with workshops on healthy eating — a regime that was about as far away from my normal daily routine as could be imagined. “Pamper yourself” was one of Carole’s favorite phrases, and she introduced me to Bharti Vyas, who ran a beauty clinic in Chiltern Street. That was the first time I’d ever had a facial. I also had my first massage and signed up for a course to learn how to do it myself, which I thought would be useful. In fact, over the next few years I was able to put my new skill into practice on Tony. I didn’t take all of Carole’s advice, but I did begin to lose weight. At the end of 1991, Carole moved to New York, and once she was no longer around, I found I didn’t keep up with the classes as much as I should have.
Around the same time, Peter Mandelson came into our lives. Although he had been appointed the Labour Party’s first director of communications in 1985, I didn’t really get to know him until after the 1987 election. Peter was a politician to the ends of his fingernails. His grandfather was Herbert Morrison, who had been Home Secretary in Clement Attlee’s government after World War II and who, so it was said, believed that he should have been Prime Minister instead of Attlee. Peter was charming, sympathetic, cultured, funny, and clever, and I got on well with him from the start. Not being an MP, he necessarily worked in the shadow of elected politicians, namely — following the 1987 election defeat — Tony and Gordon. He was closer to Gordon, but he wasn’t partial and would make use of whoever was around at the time. As Gordon’s base was in Scotland — he was then dating a Scottish advocate — he was often not around when needed, so inevitably Tony did more interviews. Wherever we’ve lived, we’ve had an open-door policy, and with Peter regularly dropping in, he gradually became introduced to our social circle.
After Tony had failed to get elected to the Shadow Cabinet in 1987, an unreconstructed veteran Labour MP told him that his mistake had been not being seen around enough in the bars at the House. Unless Tony stopped going home between seven and ten in the evening, the times when votes were taken in the House, he would never get anywhere in politics. Fortunately Tony took no notice. Our children were far too important to him, and indeed, this so-called advice proved utterly wrongheaded. One of the things the public liked about Tony was the fact that he was a family man. The House of Commons’ timetable was not designed for fathers who wanted to spend a modicum of time at home with their wives and kids. By now, however, we had developed a routine. We continued our habit of driving in together, with Tony dropping me off at chambers, and this gave us time to talk. Evenings were more complicated and revolved around the time of the vote in the House. If there was an early vote, Tony would come straight home afterwards, by which time I would have returned under my own steam, put the kids to bed, and started dinner. If the vote wasn’t till later, he might pick me up at chambers around six o’clock and then put the kids to bed while I cooked dinner. Then we would spend some time together before he had to go back to Westminster to vote at ten o’clock.
Our time with the kids was obviously limited during the week, but we would always take over on the weekend, which the nanny had off. Once Euan was in nursery school, we no longer traveled up to Sedgefield every weekend; we’d spend every other weekend at home in London. In our working lives we met barristers and politicians, and that was about it. But St. Joan of Arc had, as we’d hoped, given us a foot in the local community. Through the church we met all different types of people. I was able to get selected as a Labour Party governor of the school, and I was also a governor of Highbury Hill, the local girls’ comprehensive secondary school.
Around the time I moved to my new chambers, a new building became available for Shadow Cabinet offices. Gordon had assumed that he and Tony would go there together. Although they wouldn’t share rooms, they would have offices next to each other. But Anji Hunter, an old friend of Tony’s and a political studies graduate, who now ran his office, was of the view that Tony should not move, and Mo and I agreed. Peter didn’t express it quite as directly, because of his relationship with Gordon. So when Gordon decamped to the new offices, Tony stayed where he was, with Mo Mowlam and the others down the corridor. It added a physical distance between him and Gordon — there was no more just popping in and out — and it also sent a message that Tony was his own man. I don’t think Gordon was very happy, but he had no real alternative but to accept the situation. As far as their ability to work together was concerned, however, nothing really changed.