Some moaning at the Bar

This is a sad little story of the author’s annus horribilis as a pupil barrister in the late Nineties. Today the Bar bends ever deeper before the winds of modernisation — an all-graduate profession which subordinates even the best and brightest to the continuing rigours of further training and examination, piling acronym upon acronym — for those without a law degree the CPE (Common Professional Education) and for those with any degree the BVC (Bar Vocational Course). But the apprentice year as a tutee of a junior barrister remains in the new millennium the Bar’s mummified memorial to its mediaeval origins.

Harry Mount assures his readership that, while his gruesome chambers’ characters are ‘composite characters and essentially the author’s own inventions’ (but isn’t there a difference between putting together and making up?) ‘everything that takes place is based on real incidents’ (but how broad is the basis?). It is as well that he does so since otherwise he would risk a suspension of belief. The sconcing in Hall for some venial breach of some antique rule of etiquette has, as defence counsel conventionally say, ‘the ring of truth’ (although at College gaudies it is nowadays only the pensioners whose eyes still mist over as they reminisce about this means of fixing some unfortunate with the bill for the port). Barristers are still not supposed to shake hands with each other, although I had always understood the reason to be that they are assumed, in a small profession, to be familiars, not that, as Mr Mount suggests, they would otherwise be thought by clients to be conspiring with each other.

But did the author’s own pupilmaster really never say more than five words to him a day — ‘Morning’ (sometimes), ‘Lunch’ (always), ‘I’m off home’ (ditto)? Could the Beadle in Temple Hall actually have refused to allow him to escape to the loo before coffee was served? Was his fellow pupil seriously pressed into service as a sunshade for a computer screen?

The dust jacket carries an endorsement from John Mortimer, but even in Rumpole’s Equity Court chambers the culture here described would seem archaic.