My choice of career had brought me to a country with whose culture, comedy, literature and politics I had bonded since childhood, but in which I had not a single living relative and indeed not even a dead one since the famine in Skye in 1837. The Heath government introduced a ‘patriality’ test for immigration in order to disqualify entrants from the black Commonwealth, but its requirement of a paternal link to the UK excluded many Australians like me, and even ‘non-patrials’ who planned to marry an English partner. I took my plight up with Ted Heath himself, whom I met at a Young Conservative conference (I had been invited there to debate Mary Whitehouse). I had an English girlfriend, I explained: why should I not stay if I married her? ‘Ho ho ho,’ he replied (Heath laughed like Santa Claus). ‘Why can’t she join you in Australia?’ Instead of proposing to Jane Turnbull, I tried another tack: I wrote a book, and my literary agent, Deborah Rogers, told the Home Office over-optimistically that I would be able to maintain myself royally on royalties. That did the trick, and my grant of ‘permanent residence’ came in 1976 in the same month as the book’s publication.
This was despite the fact that Reluctant Judas was severely critical of MI5 and secret policing of Irish Republicans (‘a book that knocks the wigged stuffing out of British Justice’ said the review in the Irish Times).34 So the really nice thing about my welcome to residency – perhaps one reason I have stayed for so long – was that I was the beneficiary of a tolerance that few other countries would extend to their critics, particularly to critics of their security services. I forbore for some years from taking the formal step of becoming a citizen, which would provide me with a British passport but mean automatic loss of my Australian citizenship. This became an inconvenience: at one point Australia fell out with France and diplomatic pressure had to be exerted to allow me to enter Strasbourg to argue a case in the European Court of Human Rights. Eventually, in 2003, Australia allowed dual citizenship, and I acquired my UK passport.
Nonetheless, I still had no relatives in Britain, and nor did my wife. But I had, since the Oz trial, been adopted into the large and loving family of John Mortimer, centred on the small house with a large garden in the Chiltern Hills, the setting for his play A Voyage Round My Father. At weekends it was the most joyous place of laughter and gossip and gumboots and children – eventually our children as well – enjoying lazy Sunday lunches warmed by a roaring fire in winter and bluebell picnics in the woods each spring. It was a privilege (although John and Penny never made us feel we were privileged) to be part of this quintessentially English family. Guests came from film and television – I was seated at my first lunch beside David Niven, a man as charming and fastidious as his screen persona. For all his fame, he was self-deprecating in his stories, telling how he had been lured into doing his first television commercial, for a brand of Japanese camera, but to save embarrassment had insisted it should be shown only in Japan. To his horror he was now being followed around London by Japanese tourists, brandishing the camera and imitating, with loud squeals of laughter, his actions in the advertisement. ‘There is no hiding place,’ he said with resignation.
In summer, the Mortimer caravanserai moved to what he dubbed ‘Chiantishire’ – a Tuscan villa outside Siena. With friends Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack, Neil and Glenys Kinnock and others, we would spend days in the pool looking over the olive trees, visiting places where Shelley was shipwrecked and Frankenstein was written. There were nights at the opera – Verdi, invariably, with passionate Italian singers – although the Romanian Angela Gheorghiu, her voice carrying over the main square in Siena as she died in La Traviata, remains a memory. It was a night our young Georgie shared the unisex toilet at the interval with Jerry Springer and rushed back to our box to report: ‘Jerry Springer doesn’t wash his hands.’ (‘Well, darling, that’s his job…’) Tuscany in summer was full of the same literati we saw in Hampstead in winter – they took the same BA flights to Pisa, to drink excellent reds from the same chateau and villa-hop to each other’s parties to talk about their latest BBC dramas. John would become bored with sleep at 4 a.m., spend the morning writing another Rumpole adventure and then join us for a late lunch by the pool and the evening excursion. He was forever genial and generous – non-judgemental but sharp in observing the vanities of the world through the blur of diminishing eyesight. He taught me, as his junior, the trade, and enjoyed in retirement sitting by the fire in his carpet slippers listening to the news I brought back from the Old Bailey.
In due course I became a man of property – mortgaged property in the form of a small two-bedroom bachelor flat in Notting Hill Gate. It was located in Pembridge Crescent, an address which features in English literature only in a Clive James poem (‘Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage’), where it is used, somewhat ham-fistedly, to rhyme with ‘dined on pheasant’. Notting Hill was a congenial place to live in the ’70s, not unlike the Hugh Grant film, with Portobello Market, a good range of restaurants and reasonable proximity to Heathrow. After some years I bought a real house in Islington, a borough at the bottom of the Monopoly Board but gaining in value by then because of its proximity to the City. It was called the ‘People’s Republic of Islington’ because of the progressive policies of its council, which had taken feminism to extremes by offering to provide a women-only cemetery for ladies who did not want to lie in proximity to abusive (but dead) males.
London was a perfect place to indulge my love of opera. I began as a poor student, standing in the gods of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden watching Tito Gobbi’s unforgettable entry as Scarpia in the Zeffirelli Tosca. From there I descried the two seats in the middle of the front row, discounted in price because the conductor might obscure the view. I usually obtained them – head-twisting when the conductor was the towering Colin Davis (who also had the irritating habit of humming loudly along with the orchestra) but a great bargain when it was the tiny Charles Mackerras. Fortunately, I was seated well back in the stalls when ‘our Joan’ made her final appearance in her signature piece, Lucia di Lammermoor. From my vantage point, she pulled off an optical illusion with her voice: this large middle-aged soprano became in the mad scene a slim, love-crazed sixteen-year-old. La Stupenda indeed – I have never seen so many flowers as were thrown towards her that night.
Not far from Covent Garden was the Coliseum, where the English National Opera strove to achieve the socialist aim of its founder, Lilian Baylis, to provide opera in English that workers could afford. It did have some great successes – Orpheus in the Underworld was the comic one – and under the magisterial baton of Reginald Goodall it introduced me to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with the immolation of the great Rita Hunter (who later joined Opera Australia but could never do her magical Brünnhilde there – the Sydney Opera House stage was too small).
John Mortimer always said that he was glad he did not discover Wagner until he was sixty, otherwise he would have spent months of his life Ring-cycling (it would have been his only exercise). I discovered Wagner when I was thirty and must have spent months absorbing his leitmotifs (the length of attendance at the Ring compares with a flight to Australia). Degas’s drawings excepted, I can’t help but find ballet silly and I do not have the patience to sit through orchestral concerts. I cannot actually sit still in a living room on a wet Sunday afternoon and listen to or watch an opera: I need the expensive thrill of a live performance. After a long wait in the queue I have become a member of Glyndebourne, a special treat in Britain’s most beautiful countryside. We took my brother Tim and his mother-in-law, who looked out from our picnic on the sun-drenched lawn during the interval and announced, ‘This is the most wonderful day of my life.’ Sadly, it was also the last, but it was a consolation after her heart attack the next day to know that she died happy.
There has been other music, of course. The sounds of the ’60s are stored in a special compartment of my generation’s brain and replay themselves constantly. When battling the police in cases at the Old Bailey, I would drive to court in a souped-up little pink Renault playing Dylan and, later, Springsteen to rev myself up for the fight. Driving home, however, would be the time for one of my favourite ’50s Broadway musicals, to which I would tunelessly sing along. I did go through an early folk music period and actually wrote a play (unperformed) about Phil Ochs, the American troubadour of the anti-Vietnam movement. Ochs was hailed (mistakenly) as the successor to Dylan after the latter ‘went electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and he wrote my favourite put-down of people like me, ‘Love me, I’m a Liberal’. (We need a revival of the caustic humour of the late-1960s folk movement to deal with the advent of Donald Trump.) My guilty pleasure, which I indulge whenever I come home from a visit to Sierra Leone or death rows, is Ivor Novello. After supping full of the horrors of the world, I think I am entitled to a short stay in Ruritania.
Theatre is my first and main love: in London the National, and in Stratford the Royal Shakespeare Company are delights that may keep me returning to Britain after Brexit. My own performances tend to be confined to lecture rooms, although I did tour a one-man show, Dreaming Too Loud, around Australia in 2015. It was nerve-racking at first to face theatre audiences of up to 2,000. Although I was initially rehearsed in London by a director who was taking time out from Jesus Christ Superstar, I owe what stagecraft I displayed to the great Australian theatre director Gale Edwards. I needed it – the opening scene had me blowing fake dust off an old law book, and on opening night I blew it right into my eye, half-blinding myself for the first act. John Mortimer, of course, also performed his own show – Mortimer’s Miscellany. His doctors warned him that it might bring on a heart attack, but he was delighted at the prospect of dying on the stage like Molière. John’s shows were popular, although he had the advantage of pulchritudinous props – two actresses who read his favourite poems. Much as I would have liked to have Amal Clooney and Jen Robinson read extracts from my legal opinions, the language would not be quite so poetic.
I have always empathised with actors – there is a ham in every barrister. I was first introduced to Cate Blanchett by Emily Mortimer, who was playing her serving maid in Elizabeth I, and I was struck by her intelligence and compassion. My favourite memory of Nicole Kidman is not from her films – not even from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It is from a New Year’s Eve party on Sydney Harbour. We were discussing a common trope among successful artists – the danger of crooked accountants (they need to have two, one to keep an eye on the other) – when Nicole suddenly leant forward and kissed me, and I really thought I saw stars. I did – behind us on the Harbour. I had not noticed, as she had, that it was midnight, the moment when the fireworks explode over the bridge and opera house.
Working through the years as what someone described as a ‘cause célèbre’ lawyer brought meetings with individuals whose notoriety outlived them. Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer, sought my help to get out of jail thirty years after her unspeakable crimes: she sat beside me like an old maiden aunt, plucking threads from her cardigan. A different person, of course, from the vile young sadist who tortured small children, but by now so frail and institutionalised that it would actually have been cruel to release her. There was, at the opposite extreme, Linda Lovelace, whose exertions I had defended at the Old Bailey. I was taken to dinner with her in Soho by a film producer who had bought the rights to Deep Throat – a deal I had to advise him would not stand up in English equity courts, which apply the principle that ‘he who comes to equity must come with clean hands’. Ms Lovelace struck me as naïve, continually repeating that her performances were helping lots of marriages. ‘You should see my postbag,’ she said, although in later years Ordeal, the book and movie, told a different story.
* * *
In due course my bank manager’s faith in my financial future was justified, although, as the Beatles put it, I never cared much for money. When Tatler published a list of the remuneration of the ‘top silks’, I was charging the least – so little, indeed, that the others said I was letting the side down and demanded I increase my fees. Barristers pretend to have nothing to do with filthy lucre – they let their clerks ‘negotiate’ their large emoluments. I could never accept this subterfuge and often negotiated fees myself – invariably, I was a soft touch, offering discounts and often acting for no fee at all in cases which concerned human rights. I can understand the satisfaction that comes from an hourly rate which shows the labourer is worth his hire, and it must be said that my fees from wealthy American media corporations, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Penthouse, subsidised all the pro bono work I did on death sentences and the like and allowed me to take time off to write books, which do not make money because they are about law. The Bar is a ridiculous profession in financial terms: solicitors pay themselves millions as partners, have big offices lined with fine art, and retire with large bonuses. For barristers, retirement does not even bring a gold watch – we are independent of our colleagues and our chambers, and can accept no perks. Independence is worth it, of course, despite the loneliness and lack of resources, but if you want money, become an estate agent or a hedge-fund trader or property developer.
In 1993, when as a newly established silk I should – or could – have been earning the large sums that would cushion a retirement (or a retirement to the bench), instead, for six months I was working for free, fourteen hours a day in my basement study, on a death penalty test case, Pratt v Attorney General of Jamaica.35 My son had just been diagnosed with autism, and my wife had to bear the brunt of his behaviour during this period. The result of my work was that hundreds of men – most of them, I suppose, guilty of murder – were saved from the gallows after a month-long hearing in the Privy Council, but was it necessary for me to devote so much time to saving them, at the expense of my family? At the time, I guess I was driven by a sort of ambition (although success in such cases never brings material reward or popular applause, other than in the cells of the condemned) and by a fear of failure – a bug that sits deep in my stomach and has always driven me to succeed. Or at least to ‘strive to achieve’, and I wonder whether my insecurity may stem from those lowly school origins (would it have been different had I gone to Eton?). These are thoughts that come only on a psychiatrist’s couch (or when writing an autobiography) and I have never felt the need to be shrink-wrapped.
I am still, in principle, a Gladstonian liberal, and in practice a Cromwellian puritan. My credo is human rights, interpreted commonsensically in the secular way I have argued in my books, although I have never denied (and sometimes proclaimed) the influence of Jesus Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Christians irritate me only when they are cruel, as they sometimes are, and so do Muslims when they want to impose sexist customs like Sharia law, and likewise Jewish people who believe Israel can do no wrong. I love the Enlightenment because of its preference for rationality over dogma. As a puritan, I regard relief of the poor as an overwhelming imperative. Whether it fast-tracks you to heaven or not, it is the standard by which all politicians should be judged in their obituaries. Inequality is the gravest problem of our society and we should begin to address it in advanced countries by, for example, reforming the tax system, by publishing everyone’s tax returns and ending overseas trusts and by imposing statutory caps on executive salaries. My main concern has not been for those workers who have trade union protection but for those who are out of regular work or otherwise disadvantaged – those who fall through the cracks of a well-resourced society. I would like to see a war on greed. I generally prefer Labour because it promises more for the poor, but governments of any political stripe can become calcified and corrupt if in power for too long. Labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ are pinned by lazy journalists: what matters is a government that can provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number and the least misery for the rest of us.
Occasionally I come across blogs which accuse me of being a ‘liberal interventionist’ who was in favour of the disastrous and illegal 2003 Bush– Blair invasion of Iraq. This is at worst a lie and at best a mistake – the Gulf War that I favoured was the first, under George Bush Sr in 1990–91, which pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, a country that he had illegally invaded. Rightly, his ‘coalition of the willing’ did not go on to invade Baghdad.
Another criticism I notice when I make the mistake of reading comments attached to my articles on newspaper websites is that I supported the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945. I was not alive at the time, but this opinion is singled out on Wikipedia by I don’t know whom and has been seized upon to accuse me of being a militarist. In fact, my historical research leaves no doubt that Truman was justified in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima (but not the second on Nagasaki) because it terminated a war that would otherwise have had to end with the invasion of Tokyo, in which hundreds of thousands of Japanese as well as Allied soldiers and airmen would have died, perhaps including my father. I have written a book (Mullahs Without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons) about how the scramble for nukes by brutal or unstable regimes poses the clearest present danger to the peace and the climate of the world, and suggested ways in which international law might assist the elimination of a weapon with the power to destroy us all.36
* * *
I did not meet my wife until I was forty-one; before then, I was fortunate in lovers and friends who still remain (in the words of Lennon and McCartney). One is Jane Mills, whom I met in my early days as an Old Bailey defender. She had been a researcher for Harold Wilson, and then a producer at World in Action. We had some fine times – in Cyprus, where we narrowly escaped the invasion by fascist Greek colonels, and in other parts of the Mediterranean. I took her away for some solitude because she had been nursing her dying parents; it was somewhere in the Aegean Sea that the ferry tannoy crackled with a call that her mother had died. We realised, as we saw the British consul waiting at the wharf, that there really is no hiding place.
With Jane, I embarked on probably the silliest adventure of my life, in a boat we hired in Corfu at a time when it was dangerous to sail close to communist Albania, a dark presence across the channel, with gunboats that intercepted trespassing tourists, who would be flung into jail. With some Australian friends, including Richard Neville and Julian Disney, we set out in a hired motor launch, curious to look at the forbidden land, having taken aboard too many bottles of Metaxa, the Greek brandy that is much more potent than ouzo. Jane had brought, in her bluestocking way, the latest copy of the New Left Review. This sparked an argument with Richard, which ended with him flinging the magazine into the water and Jane jumping in to retrieve it. By the time we had cut the engine and fished her out, the boat was dangerously close to the Albanian shore, and drifting closer because the engine would not start. Suddenly, from a hidden harbour, there appeared an Albanian gunboat. I was still sober enough to be terrified, although Richard, roaring drunk, seemed to think that a few nights in an Albanian prison would be worth writing about (fortunately, he then passed out). The gunboat was getting closer – they could see the bloodshot in our eyes – when I took command and broke out the oars. We had two Oxford scullers – Rhodes scullers, no less – and with Jane as coxswain, Julian and I rowed for our lives back towards the Greek shore. It was a superhuman effort – the gunboat followed for a bit, but then turned back. At the wharf, the watching fishermen had been highly entertained by our drunken adventure. ‘Ouzo?’ they shouted. ‘No,’ we called back, ‘Metaxa.’ The rest of our crew staggered off to bed, as Jane and I made for a tavern and ordered Amaretto and whisky, so we could feel grown up.
I did one great thing for Jane – I took her to Australia. First, to acclimatise her to local culture, we went to see Bruce Beresford’s latest film, Puberty Blues. The co-author of the book, one Kathy Lette, was by this time (1983) an enfant terrible babysitting for mutual friends who thought her too enfant to take to dinner with me, and so we did not meet until 1988. Jane and I spent happy days at ‘Happy Daze’, Richard Neville’s property in the Blue Mountains. He had married Julie Clarke there, under a waterfall, the previous year – an event the artist Martin Sharp (my passenger that day) and I had almost missed when my Mercedes, borrowed from my father, exploded in a cloud of smoke, and we had to hitch to the nuptials. Jane was so entranced by my country that she applied for the next available post at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and reckons her naturalisation ceremony was the most exciting moment of her life, other than her almost-trip to Albania. She now lives in Bondi with her partner and is a professor of film studies at UNSW – and I still take her to the opera.
Jane was followed in my affections by Bel Mooney, a New Statesman journalist (the first to be described as a ‘busty hackette’ in Private Eye), who was married at the time to Jonathan Dimbleby. She too came to Australia, to swim with me at Balmoral Beach and to gaze like a burnished goddess (at least in sunset photographs) on rocks at Hayman Island. It was an exquisitely romantic albeit difficult relationship: Jonathan and I got on well, but they had two young children and love did not find a way. Bel is now the agony aunt for the Daily Mail, dispensing wisdom, some of which may have come from our youthful entanglement.
Another love traveller to Sydney was Jeananne Crowley, an effervescent Irish actress who may still be seen tending to the Singapore wounded in box sets of Tenko, being seduced by Sam Neill in Reilly, Ace of Spies, and playing Michael Caine’s long-suffering wife in Educating Rita. She was feisty and funny and we had good times, especially with her writer and artist friends in Dublin, but eventually she found me beyond domestication.
Nigella Lawson, of course, is as wonderful as she appears on television. We were introduced by the novelist Jill Neville, Richard’s sister, who assured me Nigella would make a terrific wife – which I am sure she would have done. Jill’s intuition was right, up to a point – we were instantly attracted, and I loved Nigella’s intelligence and her wise insights into the literary and political by-ways of London establishments. She was a restaurant reviewer when we met and she began to cook after we parted (although if she had started earlier, who knows?). She became a literary editor at the Sunday Times and said to me at one point ‘the on dit is that there is a remarkable Australian novelist soon to be published here – Kathy Lette.’ I had heard the name, of course, as an author of Puberty Blues.
Nigella was used to invasions of privacy, but they affected me and still do – celebrities may be fair game, but the intrusive gossip columnist is the British nation’s nastiest trade, and they dogged our relationship. Nigella effortlessly negotiated intellectual society – when I took her to meet Zelman Cowen at Oxford, it transpired she was on first-name terms with all its great philosophers (her mother had been the third wife of A. J. Ayer) – and she attracted politicians and journalists from all sides of politics, but lacked the confidence which she later found to recognise her own great talents. What most appealed to me – and it is not evident from coverage of her career – was her empathy with those who were sick or suffering; she devoted much of her time to consoling friends in need.
Nigella was my partner when I became a QC and finally made it into Who’s Who (‘Never make jokes in Who’s Who,’ she cautioned, much as Michael Kirby had warned against jokes in court). It was strange to be with someone who was already so well known. She did not share her father’s politics and nor did I, but our relationship was a gift to the gossip columns. The very first party we attended – and left – together gave rise to instant comment in every tabloid, and soon to invented stories that we were engaged and that Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer disapproved.
I was close enough to Nigella to decide that she should meet my parents. Providentially, I had arranged for them to travel around the Med on a Swan Hellenic cruise – a rather upper-class experience on a ship with Oxbridge professors describing the ancient history of the stopping places. When it docked in Corfu, Nigella and I, who were holidaying there, went to meet Frank and Joy, and had lunch with them on the ship. ‘How are you getting on with the other passengers?’ I asked.
‘Well, of course, they are English,’ my mother replied, ‘and so they look down on us a bit. We are seated furthest from the captain’s table.’ They were enjoying the cruise, however, and I thought nothing more of their remarks until I spoke to them again afterwards. ‘Oh, things changed quite dramatically after you visited,’ said my father. ‘The passengers became far more interested in us and we were put on the captain’s table for the rest of the cruise.’
‘Yes,’ added my mother. ‘Someone had recognised Nigella.’
* * *
My personal life changed dramatically in August 1988, when I was asked to do one of my Australian Hypotheticals TV shows on the subject of child abuse, at Brisbane Town Hall.37 There were to be 2,000 people in the audience for this charity event. If it was Queensland, it must include Joh Bjelke-Petersen, its rabidly right-wing premier. Who would I seat next to him? I liked to surprise with juxtapositions, so I asked my producer to find someone the very opposite of Joh – young and attractive and uncorrupt. Kylie Minogue was first choice. She accepted at first, but just before I left for Heathrow, a telegram – yes, we used telegrams in those days – came from my producer: ‘Kylie suddenly unavailable. You will have to make do with Kathy Lette.’ For three hours, I thought, not thirty years.
Our first meeting was recorded thus: the panellists were at a Sunday school picnic in Melanoma, and I asked Kathy whether she would breastfeed her baby in front of Joh. Of course she said she would, and the startled premier pretended to be unconcerned at the hypothetical sight of her tit.
Afterwards, Kathy and I talked, and did not stop talking. We arranged to meet back in Sydney, where I took her to the opera, and we happened to be seated behind Gough and Margaret Whitlam. Kathy leant forward teasingly to Gough: ‘What’s the goss?’ He turned around, looked at us both, and expostulated, ‘You are!’
By this point, we were both in love, ‘whatever “in love” means’, as Prince Charles had unhelpfully put it. We certainly knew, in August 1988, that it meant making mischief together for an unforeseeable future. I was forty-one, Kathy twenty-nine: I think we both felt the urgings of our unborn children to get on with it. Kathy quickly checked me out with her friends, but most of them thought I was gay. One rather ungraciously observed that marrying me would be ‘a good career move’. I checked her out with my friends – ‘I’m thinking of marrying Kathy Lette,’ I confided in Julian Disney. ‘Well, I’ve never thought you really wanted to be a High Court judge’ was his elliptical reply. My mother was delighted – that I was marrying anyone – although my father was, I think, disappointed that he would not have the opportunity to advise the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Meanwhile, Kathy was determined to keep her promise to abandon her husband, home and hemisphere. I bought her a Qantas ticket (how embarrassing to remember that I booked her economy, but she was only small in stature) for a flight to arrive shortly before Christmas. Her arrival made me apprehensive – how could I welcome her in a way that would show she had made the right decision, that we were true soulmates? My greetings with other girlfriends hot off QF1 had not been markedly successful – I met one of them, I seem to recall, in midwinter with a car that broke down on the motorway and a house where the heating had failed. I racked my brains: how could I possibly give Kathy a welcome that became her? The day before her arrival, I had a brainwave: I would take her to the toilet.
Not just any toilet, the toilet. The toilet that had been on the front page of every Australian paper for a week – the toilet where Alan Jones, the country’s most reactionary shock jock, had been arrested and charged with gross indecency. I had no axe to grind with him – I had never heard his show – but I was aware of how much he was loathed by Kathy’s Sydney circle, at a time when Sydney really was ‘Jonestown’ and his influence on behalf of the conservative cause was massive. And so it was that I collected Kathy in a car freshly oiled and greased, and headed from Heathrow to Soho’s Broadwick Street public convenience, which is directly opposite (Alan, how could you have been so blind?) a police station. There we met his arresting officer, who chatted to us about the case (which was later dropped) and took the picture of the youngish lovers, beginning life together at the Alan Jones Memorial Toilet.
We repaired to my home in Islington and, after an unpleasant time with certain journalists, who thought I had committed treason by parting with Nigella (I was described, with alliterative waspishness, as the ‘legal Lothario’), we settled down and married. Our marriage came to many as a surprise, although not to an uncle of mine, a Wollongong bus driver who knew my love of comedy and said with a grin, ‘I know why you married her, you lucky bastard. You will spend the rest of your life laughing.’ It didn’t quite work out like that, but undoubtedly our love of wordplay and the endless possibilities of contorting the English language had played its part in our attraction.
Our house overlooked a church, which would have been convenient had the vicar not been Church of England and bound by its rules, which forbade it being used to marry a divorcée. In what was probably a spirit of ecumenicalism, he had allowed his building to be used by a voodoo cult, whose blood-curdling screams shattered our peace on Sunday afternoons, but our marriage was a bridge too far. In vain I pointed out that his church owed its existence to Henry VIII’s desire for one divorce after another. In the end, we settled on Islington Register Office, where a gay registrar with a ring in his ear did the honours. I arrived late from court, still in my Ede & Ravenscroft, to meet my best woman (Jane Mills) and Kathy’s literary bridesmaids – publisher Robert McCrum, playwright Dusty Hughes and poet (later Poet Laureate) Andrew Motion. The congregation quietly gambled on my middle name – the smart money was on Lochinvar – and when it turned out to be Ronald there were hoots of derision (Reagan has much to answer for). We held a party in the magnificent rooms at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, designed by Thomas Nash – I was a director of the ICA, and the setting was both bohemian and high establishment. Our son Jules was present, in utero.
Kathy and I were an unusual combination – Douglas Adams joked that my reputation for jurisprudential depth came to the surface after meeting my wife. My old friends were first to extend her a welcome to Britain – John and Penny Mortimer befriended her for life, Jeremy Hutchinson and Michael Foot bonded with her immediately. Of my own generation, Bernard Simons, the wonderful gay solicitor who advised the Terrence Higgins Trust for HIV/AIDS victims, was first to give his seal of approval – he owned a large house in Highgate which was shared, in various combinations, by Christopher Hitchens, Alan Rusbridger, Jeananne Crowley, Judy Daish, Duncan Kenworthy and other creative achievers. I would be there late on some Saturday nights, in Bernie’s kitchen-cum-lounge room, comforting MPs whose depredations had just been disclosed in the early edition of News of the World. After Bernie’s early death, his role in our life was taken by Mark Stephens, a mercurial litigator who shared our sense of mischief (although never at his client’s expense). As with Bernie, I entrusted American and Australian clients to him, in the belief they would be better (and less expensively) served than by stuffed-shirt solicitors in the big City firms.
Kathy and I were, nonetheless, regarded as an odd couple, at least by the gossip columnists, and news of our dinner parties was routinely telegraphed. I suppose the ultimate north London gathering was one we held for Tony and Cherie Blair to meet some of our friends – John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie, Billy Connolly, Pamela Stephenson and Ronnie Dworkin, the Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence, whose wife Betsy (a lecturer in social policy) was the only one who knew how to make a hollandaise sauce for the salmon. When we moved to Swiss Cottage, at dinners I played the role of wine waiter, despite my experience at a party thrown by Nicole Kidman of taking a glass of champagne proffered by a small chap who I assumed was a hired waiter – I just did not recognise Tom Cruise. I confess to the occasional faux pas of this kind – after a dinner party chez Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates (who were too spaced out to bother with placements), I said to my wife that I liked the saturnine fellow seated on my right – was he an Australian backpacker? ‘That was Nick Cave.’ ‘And there was a pleasant young man on my left who looked like the young John Lennon?’ ‘That is because he is Julian Lennon.’
There was one occasion on which my mind proved a real liability. The makers of a movie based on The Importance of Being Earnest decided to invite the smartest people they could find in London to a party in the French Champagne region, in which we would show off our Wildean witticisms. It was pretty much a second XI by the time we climbed aboard the private jet to Reims, for lunch with Monsieur Krug (yes, the real Monsieur Krug), who presided over the table without much understanding of the English aphorisms that volleyed across it. To make him feel – well, proud – I said how happy I was to be drinking Krug rather than Taittinger, whose patron had been convicted of collaborating with the Nazis. As I dramatically expatiated on Monsieur Taittinger’s crimes, I felt the satisfaction of a speaker whose words are having an impact on his listeners, notwithstanding kicks to my shin from underneath the table. Monsieur Krug started to splutter into his own vintage, all too well aware – as I was not – that all the great champagne families had collaborated: Taittinger was jailed because they needed a scapegoat. Much as I admire Russell Brand for refusing to brand himself by wearing Hugo Boss (who made prison uniforms for concentration camps), I now doubt whether historical awareness need extend to champagne. It flowed less freely after my well-intentioned interjection.
Only one of our dinner parties was designed to leak. Our friend Gordon Brown – a man even more serious than me – had become Prime Minister and was enduring a bad press, pretty much on the basis that he lacked the common touch. In the simplistic world of tabloid spin, this was easy to refute – by inviting him to dinner with Kylie Minogue. Their meeting became a subject for discussion in Parliament – even his enemies (or those with a sense of humour) celebrated his discovery of a lighter side. With Ed Miliband, we matched George and Amal Clooney, although sadly the stardust did not sprinkle. I have to say that George truly is one of the most decent, charming, intelligent and humble men I have ever met, and if the Democrats select him as their presidential candidate I shall give up the day job to work for him pro bono. Good guys do get corrupted by power (see Aung San Suu Kyi) but I do think that George could lead us to a better world – and, which may amount to the same thing, could beat Donald Trump. As for the latest Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, we have not offered a dinner party (he is verging on veganism) but have given him something infinitely more valuable – our daughter, who works for him.
Our dinners put together some interesting people from disparate worlds of law, theatre and politics – a nice night’s entertainment, as Dame Edna, who sometimes attended, would say. Only once was there a hidden agenda, the result of a friendly fight between Kathy and the actress Maureen Lipman in St John’s Wood High Street. Kathy had gone to buy a cake for our party that night and left her purse behind. She bumped into Maureen, one of the invited guests, who insisted on lending her £20, then refused to accept repayment. She was at the time playing Aunt Eller in the National Theatre’s production of Oklahoma!: the curtain went up as she churned butter and heard the strains of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’ from Curly, played by a then-unknown Australian named Hugh Jackman. They both attended a party at our place after the show, but still Maureen refused to accept repayment. There was a whispered conversation between Hugh and Kathy: the next night, by the butter churn, Curly was seen to place something in Aunt Eller’s hand: a £20 note.
* * *
Our son Julius was a beautiful baby – ‘Baby Jesus must have looked like that,’ exclaimed Jill Neville, I suppose accurately. He passed all his milestones with ease and at fifteen months had many words, until suddenly he shut down and lost them all. It was an anxious time – I could make him smile, at least, by singing Bob Dylan as badly as Bob Dylan – until after his third birthday, when he pointed at a shoe-rack in my old room in Longueville and said ‘shoe’. But he could not recapture that early quick spirit, and we went to doctors all over Britain and Australia for a diagnosis, eventually of Asperger’s, somewhere (no one is very sure) on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He was not an FLK (social worker jargon for ‘funny-looking kid’) and was loving to his parents and charming to our friends, but there was something unusual – a crossed wire in the brain. He could do amazing things – memorise Hamlet – but could not add up or read a book.
It’s hard on parents raising an autistic child – the divorce rate is extremely high. My only advice would be to have another as quickly as possible. Our daughter, Georgie, was born in the Lindo Wing two years later and delivered by no less than the royal gynaecologist (I will spare readers my wife’s jokes about where his hands had been). She was a great kid – I can remember her at about age three advancing on children twice her size and age who were picking on her brother, and beating them up. She had something of her mother’s jollity and her father’s love of history. By age fifteen she was brilliant and beautiful, but her political beliefs had not crystallised, so she went along with her mother’s tongue-in-chic arrangement to make her debut in Paris at le Bal (usually known as the Crillon Ball, after the hotel where it is held). This is a famous event, apparently, where the daughters of the crowned heads of Europe traditionally ‘come out’, although by 2009 the blue-blood test for aristocracy had changed. As well as Lady Kitty Spencer and the daughters of long-overthrown European royals, we had Hong Kong royalty (the daughter of a billionaire) and Hollywood royalty (the daughters of Forest Whitaker and Clint Eastwood). How did Georgie qualify as Australian royalty? Kathy claimed it was because of her own pure convict blood, dating back to the First Fleet, but maybe the organisers had been told of my relationship with the Kaiser. To dance with my daughter without trampling her, I needed a refresher course – the June Winter Academy days were long past. I booked some lessons at London’s Pineapple Studios, but my footwork had not improved. Georgie was stunning, in a dress made without charge by our friend Collette Dinnigan, and money was raised for charity. I took Georgie outside the Hotel Crillon to show her the place where the aristocrats had been guillotined, and did notice the glint that came into her eyes.
I watched with fascination thereafter my daughter’s ideological progress. Later, at school, under the influence of an inspiring politics teacher, she began to reckon that all should have access to the opportunities provided to her. At London University she achieved first-class honours in English and History and looked back on le Bal with irritation as an arcane survival of an elitist marriage market. She followed in my footsteps to the extent of being elected as a student president at SOAS,38 although there were differences: she campaigned for justice for the cleaning staff, who did not cross our minds at the SRC in the Vietnam-dominated ’60s. After a stint with Amnesty, she now works to bring about political change as an official in the Labour Party. This excites the Daily Mail, which got hold of pictures of her at le Bal, and when she was selected as a Labour candidate for a local council it could not wait to publish them (four times in four weeks!), falsely reporting that the dress cost £6,000 and implying that Labour’s war on privilege cannot be waged other than by the underprivileged. At least this petty political propaganda serves to show off the talent of Collette.
When they were younger, we kept the children in touch with their grandparents and their increasing number of cousins through regular visits to Sydney, at Easter if possible and for a month over Christmas. Every Boxing Day we took a large room at a beachside restaurant, where Jules would make a speech toasting his grandfather (whose birthday it was) for his efforts in combating old age (one feature of autism is unremitting truth-telling). The gathering of Clan Robertson came together in all shapes, sizes and races. My international businessman brother Graeme’s first marriage was to an Indonesian, his second to a Chinese woman. One of his daughters is an accountant married to a Mauritian businessman. My other brother, Tim, by now a Senior Counsel, has a daughter, Venetia, who took the Sydney University medal (in Theology) and then a PhD – she is a world expert on religious cults. It was a reunion that continued for forty years, and helped to make up for the loss of family time we have endured for the sake of our international aspirations. How could we go back to the London winter was the annual and aching question.
Schooling Jules proceeded, with difficulty, although it was heartening to sit in meetings in his state school with five or six different experts concentrated on his problems. This was the mark of a caring state. In time, however, he had to go to special schools – well, he was special – and then we heard from Tina Brown of a college in Cape Cod which could help those with his challenges. He attended for two years, and I crossed the pond to be with him every month or so, but it could not conquer the devastating loneliness of a boy craving friends his own age yet too wracked with anxiety ever to cultivate them. Those with experience of the condition will know the problems – as an acquaintance said to me when I mentioned that our son was autistic, ‘I thought you and Kathy had the most marvellous life, from reading about you in the social pages. Now I realise the heartache…’ Precisely.
I taught Jules tennis, which he loved and excelled at, to such an extent that I took him to be coached at the Bollettieri tennis ranch in Sarasota, Florida, where the CIA once had me sleeping with Pee-Wee Herman. Jules was given to writing pages of what we thought were random numbers, but when they were fed through a computer it was discovered they were the exact scores of every quarter, semi and final played at Wimbledon since the war. Our son is a genius receptor of useless knowledge, although it does startle the famous tennis players we meet when he reels off the score in matches they had long forgotten. I was quartered, for those Sarasota weeks, in the crummy hotel attached to the tennis ranch, reading my papers from the UN court in Sierra Leone, where I was a judge – a dismal business until Jules called with the message ‘Sharapova on court’, which brought me running, a relief from war crimes.
Jules also has an obsession with movies – he would amaze our actor friends by recalling their lines (including voiceovers) as a party trick. He wanted to be an actor – who doesn’t? – but we doubted that he could put the artistic into autistic. He did an acting course, which he enjoyed, and then won a scholarship to an intensive course for differently abled actors. The catch was that it started in the first week of January, so he had to forgo his time on the beach with his family. So did I – the lot fell to me to take him back to England after Christmas. In the middle of Sydney Airport he decided to run away, and I had to sprint to catch him. I thought my life had reached its nadir: here I was, at age sixty-eight, chasing my 24-year-old autistic boy.
I am glad I caught him, because later in the year, a tiny miracle happened. It was hell getting him through the course, but eventually he passed and was invited to an audition for a role in Holby City – the BBC’s weekly hour-long medical drama with a viewing audience of around four million. He got the part of a character named Jason, and he thrived as the first autistic actor cast to play a character with autism. Soon people would stop him in the street and ask him for selfies and autographs. I almost cried with joy the first day I went with him to Elstree Studios, seeing how transformed he was: playing his character, he was happy at last – genuinely happy. I was happy too – and proud. Once, you had to use an actor as good as Dustin Hoffman to play the Rain Man – now, an autistic actor will play the part authentically if they ever make Rain Man II. Jules wants eventually to play Hamlet, who is obviously autistic (all that anxious equivocation, paternal obsession and misreading of social situations), and we are planning the movie – Hugh Jackman has been cast as Claudius, Jemma Redgrave (his co-star on Holby) as Gertrude, and Stephen Fry has volunteered to be the First Gravedigger (‘Alas, poor Yorick!’). We are still looking for an Ophelia (so is Jules). I, of course, shall be the ghost.
For the past two decades, our family inhabited a home in Swiss Cottage, a half-mile north of St John’s Wood (where it would be worth twice as much) and a half-mile south of Hampstead (where its price would triple). It’s a quiet, middle-class suburb, full of psychiatrists and mistresses of faded rock stars, with some high-rise council housing – a genial place, which did not vote for Brexit. Not far away there was Hampstead Heath to walk on and Regent’s Park to row boats and smell the profuse roses. Nearby is Lord’s Cricket Ground, where the Ashes are displayed in an eggcup, although I prefer to watch my cricket from a couch in front of a television screen with beer in hand (the last time I was invited to a box at Lord’s, I had Jeffrey Archer with his bad breath on one side and Cardinal George Pell with his bad conscience – he was meant to be at the Australian Royal Commission answering allegations that he had abused children – on the other). Just down the street and round the corner are the Abbey Road studios, with a traffic jam of tourists photographing each other on the crossing where the Fab Four once posed for the eponymous album. Over in Richmond, my old friend Gael Boglione is chatelaine of London’s historic Petersham House, and lures us to lunches at its restaurant (made famous by Skye Gyngell) and to postprandial walks along the riverbank that leads to Runnymede.
What do I miss about Australia? Well, swimming for a start – there are plenty of pools at gyms in London, full of what Kathy describes as ‘chlorinated phlegm’, but oh, for the beach at Balmoral or the swim to the shark nets at Nielsen Park to watch the waves sparkle in the wake of the ferries to Manly. Although the Swiss Cottage house had a garden that came alive with colour in spring, and urban foxes that devoured the squirrels, who give a blood-curdling death yelp in the middle of the night, how I miss the wildflowers in my parents’ garden in Sydney and the flash on the veranda of colourful parrots in the evening, and the tinkling of the masts on the bay.
My mother always said that I was not cut out for marriage. In Los Angeles once, a celebrated soothsayer inspected my palms and other visible parts of my body and declared with certitude that in a previous life I had been a monk. This kind of rang true. But mischief-making with someone you love is a good way of spending most of your allotted span. Kathy has occasionally tried the Christina Stead lament (leaving home and hearth for a man, etc.) but in truth she has not left the Australian persona which she inhabits and in which she writes, and I deserve some sort of award (although Sir Humphrey would veto it) for unleashing her on Britain to add to the gaiety of the nation. Gossip columns have found it funny to juxtapose her comments on men and sex with the fact that she is married to a ‘serious-minded QC’. The joke wears thin. Kathy became a noted writer. She created in Girl’s Night Out the perfect revenge on the two-timing male – prawns left in the curtain rails by his departing lover – which soon became an urban legend. In quick succession, her chicklit classics, Foetal Attraction, Mad Cows and How to Kill Your Husband and Other Handy Household Hints, were all listed in the top ten of the bestseller charts. Some film rights were sold to Hollywood and we waited anxiously for the cameras to start rolling, but they never did – except in the case of Mad Cows, which was sold to a UK company and made into a movie, in which I played a scene with Anna Friel on a bus. I am listed in the credits as ‘Man on the Clapham omnibus’ (lawyers will get the joke). It is occasionally entered in competitions for the worst movie ever made. Sometimes, it wins.
* * *
As for my first love, it was always a joy to open the front door of our little house in Longueville after the taxi ride from the airport to kiss my mother’s greying head. When I appear on radio programmes on which you choose music that means something to you, I begin with the judge’s song from Trial by Jury, end with Isolde’s ecstatic lament at the end of Tristan und Isolde, and include somewhere Verdi’s ‘Dio, che nell’alma infondere’ from Don Carlo, a duet between two doomed young men determined to fight for human rights against the Inquisition. And I always dedicate the Judy Collins version of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘In My Life’ to my mother. She would sit every morning in a shaft of sunlight in the lounge, reading every word of the Sydney Morning Herald, cutting out for me the mentions of my old friends and chuckling over my detractors. She had no liking for what she called ‘the limelight’ and would never appear on television programmes – not even on Who Do You Think You Are?, which was about her ancestors. Only once did she allow me to mention her in print, and that was because the proceeds from the book went to the Blind Society. It was called Mum’s the Word and contained recollections by what it termed ‘celebrated Australians’ – Alan Jones, Hazel Hawke, Rolf Harris and other names of 1988.39 Here is what I wrote then, and I did not alter a word when I read it at her funeral almost thirty years later:
My first serious thoughts about Mum came when I had to list her occupation on a school form. ‘Put down “Domestic Duties”,’ she said. I had a first, childish twinge of male guilt: is that how society really regards mothers? In those days, of course, it was.
I can’t help drawing inspiration from my mother, because I experienced at first-hand her humble strength and unfussy decency. She never preaches – just teaches by quiet example – how happiness comes from giving to others, how to obtain pleasure from doing inconvenient duties, how to accept good fortune with humility, and bad luck with the determination to fight another day. She has no time for riches or vanity nor what she dismissively terms ‘the limelight’. But although she’s self-effacing and sometimes in fragile health, whenever I’m with her I feel as secure as a cub protected by its lioness. And when I hear that haunting song ‘In My Life’ (‘There is no one compares with you…’) it always seems to sum up my feelings about her exactly.
Of course, mums can’t be held responsible for their children. Even Hitler had a mother, who doubtless encouraged little Adolf in his ambitions. Mine always says she just wants me to be happy – but whenever I am asked to do something which I feel to be morally right, although difficult publicly or damaging for my career, it’s my mother’s principles which give me the strength to do it. If I were a guest on my own Hypotheticals, and were asked where I drew the ethical line, I would have to admit that I could never do anything of which my mother would disapprove.
Notes
34 Geoffrey Robertson, Reluctant Judas: Life and Death of the Special Branch Informer Kenneth Lennon (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1976).
35 Earl Pratt and Ivan Morgan v Attorney General of Jamaica (1994) 2 AC 1.
36 Geoffrey Robertson, Mullahs Without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons (London: Biteback Publishing, 2012); ‘The Massacre of Prisoners in Iran’ (Boroumand Foundation, 2010).
37 Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals, ‘All in the Family’ (ABC TV, 5 February 1989).
38 SOAS is the School of Oriental and African Studies, a part of the University of London. I am now one of its trustees.
39 Maria Stenmark, Mum’s the Word (New South Wales: North Rocks Press, 1986).