‘For me, the wig was the key’: how I defied family expectations to become a criminal barrister | Law

Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned in my life – certainly of those that apply to being a parent – is the need to give free rein to a child’s ambitions. My son has just turned six and, as with most kids, what he wants to be when he grows up changes with the wind: marine biologist; palaeontologist; treasure hunter; film director. The list goes on.

My reaction to his ambition just isn’t the one my parents would have had. Their response would have been typical for their time, reminiscent of the old Eddie Izzard routine: ‘“I wanna be a taxidermist.” “You’re British, boy, think smaller…”’

But that wasn’t mine. Instead, I found my reaction to be: “Well, we do know a film director. Maybe we could speak to him.”

I was not unlike my son in terms of all the things I wanted to be. There was the astronaut, the archeologist, the journalist (because if it was good enough for Clark Kent). But then passionately from the age of 14, I wanted to be a criminal lawyer. Or, more particularly, a criminal barrister: for me, the wig was the key.

But I didn’t come from a world where these kinds of careers were even considered. My family were builders and tarmacers and roofers. That’s what we all did. We went to school until we were allowed to leave, then we went to work on the building site. That was what was expected – that was where I was going. Certainly not to the Old Bailey. At least not via the front door.

My life was set out and it was the same path that almost everyone before me had taken. Because that was just the way it was. At least until the day I first stepped foot in a crown court.

I was 14 when I visited Aylesbury crown court – the age when most of us undertake our first school-arranged work experience. But that’s not why I was there.

Along with my parents, I was supporting my eldest brother. Five years older than me, he was facing trial before a jury and a crown court judge, accused of the robbery of a jewellery store. A trial that was due to start that day. It was a serious charge and, if convicted, it would come with a serious sentence.

My brother had been getting himself into trouble for several years by this time –run almost always for crimes and behaviour to which he admitted. Things he had actually done. And I’m sure he won’t mind me telling you that this Aylesbury case was his not last run-in with the law. Now over 50, he has more than a decade of good behaviour behind him, but for a long time he was a frequent “customer” of the court system and an irregular “tenant” of the prisons that support it.

But this trial was different. On this occasion we knew my brother was innocent. By that I don’t just mean “not guilty”. I mean he didn’t do it. He had been – to use a term I had picked up from the TV shows of the 80s that I was probably too young to watch – “fitted up”.

The details of the case don’t really matter this far down the road. Everyone involved in the trial is long-retired and, to be honest, 32 years later, I am probably misremembering some of it. But what I can never forget is the effect that trial – what there was of it – had on me. Because what I didn’t know when I left the house that morning was how it would change my life for ever.

I had always been a different type of boy to my older brothers. We had been raised the same way – initially on a fairly tough west London council estate, where fighting back was the first thing you had to learn – and I had always been very capable when it came to all the physical things that came with that.

But at the same time I tended to live in my own head too much. It had set me apart from not just my brothers but also from my many cousins. And yet still the expectation on me was the same as it was on all of them. I would leave school once I was allowed to do so and learn the trade. That was the plan. It was a plan that ended in Aylesbury crown court. Looking back, I can’t pinpoint when it happened. It might have been the moment I walked inside. I didn’t know it then, but I was stepping into one of the few traditional court buildings left. Big, dark, sweeping staircases. Wood-panelled lobby areas with ancient courtrooms and an elevated seat against the back wall from which the judge could dispense his justice, unchanged since the days of George Jeffreys, also known as “the hanging judge”.

(Of course, Jeffreys never sat in Aylesbury crown court, which was built in 1740, 50 years after his death. But come on, I was 14.)

My memory now tells me that I was smitten at that moment. That I felt as if I were somehow living a piece of history. And yet I doubt that was what made me think, “This is the life I want”. That came once the action started.

I did not exchange even two words with my brother’s barrister that day, or on the two days that followed. I just saw him from afar. A man in the strange clothing who seemed to command a level of respect from my parents usually reserved for… well, for no one, really. I had never seen it before. My mother even seemed a little in awe of him. Fifteen minutes into the hearing, I saw why.

I am now more than 20 years into my career, specialising in criminal defence and particularly in allegations of the most serious and organised crime. I can’t count how many jury trials I have defended in that time and now I can see that my brother’s barrister had a lot of material to work with. That’s not to take anything away from him; you won’t find a barrister who hasn’t had great ammunition and seen it come to nothing. He did an amazing job. But I can now see how he did that job.

Back then, all I knew was that this man was taking on police officer after police officer in the witness box – police officers I knew, remember, these were our local coppers and they were not the best of them – and he was taking them apart. They had told lie after lie and my brother’s barrister was exposing them all, collapsing the house of cards that had resulted in the trial ever starting. It was like nothing I had ever seen, not even on TV. And it made up my mind on the very first morning. He was what I wanted to be.

There are so many stories I could tell about the three days I was in that courtroom. How he proved that no stolen items were found at my parents’ home, despite four police officers having claimed it. How he demonstrated the coercion that had been used on my brother to elicit a false confession.

Suffice it to say, my brother was acquitted. The judge found there was no case to answer after the lead officer in the case called in sick on what should have been his second day of evidence, having been exposed in cross-examination the afternoon before. The jury were directed to find him not guilty. Trial over, everyone got on with their lives.

Everyone but me. Because from that day there was only one life I wanted. And I am incredibly lucky, over three decades later, to say that it’s the life I’m living.

It wasn’t a simple ride from there, not by any means. For the first few years I didn’t even mention it to anyone other than my mum, who – taking the then understandable view that “barristers don’t come from where we’re from” – had said to me: “That’s wonderful, but don’t tell anyone because they’ll laugh at you.” I may as well have told her I’d decided to be the pope.

Even when I’d made it through university, through bar school and was applying for pupillage (the apprentice stage of our training), I still had that old council-estate paranoia that made me forego applying to the top barristers’ chambers and try for the ones I’d never heard of.

A decision which backfired in the best possible way when I applied to 2 Bedford Row, not realising that they were quite literally the top set in the country, but had recently changed their name to match a change of address. They took me on both as a pupil and later as a full member of chambers, and I spent my formative 12 years as a barrister working with the best in the business.

If only there was enough room for all these stories. Or maybe it’s better there isn’t, as so many of them are either unbelievable or downright unprintable. But all of them, good and bad, are a part of a career that has been – and continues to be – everything I could ask for. A career – a life – which goes back to that first day in Aylesbury crown court.

The Shadow Network by Tony Wyatt (pen name of Tony Kent) is published by Elliott & Thompson, buy it from guardianbookshop.com for £8.99