The Londoner: Cherie Blair defied sexist Bar advice

Cherie Blair was advised against pursuing her legal career by Lord Denning, the late “people’s judge”, because of her sex, she has revealed.

In a video interview posted by Legal Cheek and recorded for the First 100 Years Project, which marks the first centenary of women in the law, the prominent QC and wife of former PM Tony recalls being called to the Bar in 1976.

“I remember I was invited to make a speech and sit with the benchers,” she says, “and Lord Denning being there and saying to me, ‘Well, you know really the Bar really isn’t the place for women’ — so it wasn’t exactly the most encouraging way to start.”

Denning, who died in 1999, was known for his controversial comments: he called homosexuality a “cult” and stated that black people should not sit on juries.

The profession’s innate misogyny went beyond him, though: on the same day, Blair made her “first little act of rebellion”.

When it came to filling in the details on the Bar certificate, she told officials: “I don’t want to put my father’s name and occupation on the certificate,” referring to actor Anthony Booth, best known for his role as Mike Rawlins in the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part.

“He left my mother when I was eight and hasn’t been involved in my upbringing. This is my mother’s achievement,” Blair explained, only to be told: “No one’s ever wanted to put their mother’s name on the certificate before.”

“I insisted,” she remembers. “And indeed, they put it on.”

Years later, when she was pregnant for the first time and “the only woman in chambers”, she describes being “so determined to prove to those men in chambers that I was going to come back. I came back very quickly”.

“The only previous time they had a woman in chambers, as soon as she had babies, she left,” she recalls.

Overdressed Left

James Schneider, Momentum co-founder and adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, almost missed watching the vote last night because he didn’t have a jacket — a requirement of sitting in the Commons press gallery. A source was particularly tickled to watch Seumas Milne — Corbyn’s executive director of strategy and communications — try to convince the doorkeeper that Schneider’s long overcoat was, in fact, an Edwardian-style jacket. Luckily, Schneider made it through in the end, to join Philip May, Sally Bercow, Corbyn’s son Seb and Sadiq Khan in the press gallery to watch the dramatic proceedings.

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Samuel L Jackson’s first role was as the Sugar Plum Fairy, aged three. “When the show is over, and people come up to you and they pinch you on the cheek [and say] ‘You were so cute’, you always remember that,” he tells Jonathan Ross’s podcast. “It’s like, OK, this is good.”

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James Middleton, brother of the Duchess of Cambridge, has a surprising new admirer. The businessman has recently unlocked his Instagram account, thus revealing to the world pictures of himself sunbathing and enjoying country walks with his dogs. January Jones, the glamorous star of Mad Men, is flustered. “WTF?” she asks. “Where’s he been hiding?”

All a bit Green

The distractions of Brexit may have got in the way of former First Secretary of State Damian Green paying his TV licence fee. Yesterday he warned his constituents in Ashford about a “scam TV licence demand” he had “received at home in Charing”. He posted a photograph of the letter in question online. The correspondence, however, looks legitimate: the font, web address and even the name of the TV Licensing employee who sent it are all consistent with the real thing. As PhD student Michael Docherty points out, it seems that Green is “telling his constituents that a genuine payment demand is a hoax”. You might want to look into it, Damian.

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Former Bond Pierce Brosnan was relaxing in a lounge at Geneva airport yesterday when who should walk in but fellow Hollywood stars Amanda Seyfried and Hugh Jackman? Seyfried is the link between the pair: she starred with Brosnan in Mamma Mia! and with Jackman in Les Misérables. Don’t ask her which leading man has the better singing voice...

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Stonehenge comes to Aldwych’s Store X

The art world descended on Wiltshire B4 Christ last night, a new collaborative project from Jeremy Deller, David Sims and London fashion label, Aries. Debuting at The Store X in Aldwych, the immersive exhibition is shot at some of Britain’s key neolithic sites including Stonehenge and Avebury. Guests included former enfant terrible Jake Chapman and his wife, nutritionist Rosemary Ferguson. Model Edie Campbell, complete with bleached blonde eyebrows, also turned out in support.

Deller hit the headlines recently with his new anti-Brexit T-shirts emblazoned “F*** Brexit”. The artist, who confessed recently to singeing a Hockney in his first job as a gallery technician, claimed that: “Humour is important in these conversations… [Vote] Leave at least used imagery; they were cleverer with words and images, more viral.”

Over in Piccadilly, Evening Standard food writer Clodagh McKenna launched her new cookbook, Clodagh’s Suppers, at Hatchards bookshop, with chef Thomasina Miers among the guests.

SW1A

Priti Patel MP has a flexible memory. Lambasting the corporal punishment sentence handed out by a Singaporean court to former British schoolboy Ye Ming Yuen, as “reprehensible” and “like something from the Dark Ages”, she perhaps forgets she once claimed on Question Time that “capital punishment would act as a deterrent”. She has since rowed back her support for the death sentence.

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Another thing died in the Commons last night alongside Theresa May’s Brexit deal: the convention of no photography in the chamber. Multiple MPs flooded social media with selfies as they trooped through the voting lobbies. Welcome to the 21st century.

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Last night also proved too much for some. By 9pm Labour’s leader in the House of Lords, Angela Smith, had posted a photo of a bottle of 46 per cent gin. It was completely empty.

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