‘Well, it’s a big surprise, and quite an embarrassment that I am such a Venus flytrap,’ Lady Hale replies when I ask her how she feels about her iconic status. She denies that she is ‘better than chocolate cake’ (as the children who met her described her in LAG’s book Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court) but she quite likes Lord Reed’s description, at her valedictory, of her as a fine example of ‘swashbuckling womanhood’. ‘I thought that was great,’ she tells me.

We are speaking on Zoom as Lady Hale is in Richmond for the summer. I took the opportunity to ask her for an interview when we met at the opening of Lady Hale Gate in July. I would normally buy her a drink but, as that isn’t possible, I ask her what she is drinking. She tells me she is on her first Nespresso, as she had got up late for the first time in ages and had to slightly rush. When she says she didn’t think I’d mind, being as I am an old friend, it makes my heart skip, just as it did when her name appeared in the waiting room on my Zoom screen.

At the Doughty Street International Women’s Day Conference in 2019, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC said: ‘The route that women have to take to success is often not up the carpeted staircase but out of the window and up the drainpipe.’ I ask Lady Hale if that’s how she got to be President of the Supreme Court – by going up the drainpipe. ‘Yes, well, definitely,’ she replies. ‘The carpeted route would’ve been the commercial and property law route.’ And although she enjoys commercial law, she tells me that she has worked with the opportunities that she has been given: ‘I didn’t set out to specialise in either family or welfare law, but it is what happened.’

It was while she was teaching at the University of Manchester that she was invited to sit on the Mental Health Review Tribunal (MHRT) as a judge. Lady Hale had been asked to teach mental health law to social workers but there was no textbook. So she wrote one. The Mental Health Law handbook was my bible as I started out as a baby solicitor representing patients in MHRTs. It was many years later that I realised the author, Brenda Hoggett, was also Lady Hale. I couldn’t find my copy when she opened the Law Centre’s new office in 2018, so she said she would send me one of hers. I remind her that she still owes me a copy, which makes her laugh. A copy of the first edition of the book did end up in the hands of the presiding judge of the MHRT, though, and that is how Lady Hale started her journey up the drainpipe.

It’s lovely to hear that Lady Hale’s vision of what the law, justice and fairness are all about probably goes back to her early days of working with LAG in the 1970s. I also love that the writing of the handbook was an influential part of her journey. She explains that she would travel down from Manchester to London and teach for LAG, mainly on family law and injunctions. The Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976 had expanded protection remedies for women, which up until then wasn’t an area that had really been taken seriously. I ask her what that felt like. ‘It was quite an exciting time,’ she tells me. ‘Practitioners were developing remedies; they were persuading judges that they could protect the right for women to stay in the family home.’

It was while she was at Manchester that Lady Hale met her ‘frog prince’, Julian Farrand. He arrived as a young professor at Manchester University in 1968 when Lady Hale was a lecturer. She tells me that it wasn’t apparent then that he would be her frog prince and assures me that, at the time, ‘nothing happened between us AT all!’ I laugh at the idea I may have stumbled on an exclusive.

Sixteen years later, they were both appointed to the Law Commission at the same time, ‘much to our surprise’. She thinks it was probably quite irritating to the other commissioner colleagues because, ‘although not romantically involved, we were good friends’. She tells me they tended to think alike about things and spent a lot of time together. So they became known as the ‘Manchester Mafia’ or the ‘Piccadilly Line’. When I tell her I think it’s a lovely story, she replies: ‘I thought you would like it. That’s why I told it to you.’

As Lady Hale speaks of her career, you can tell she has always been a natural performer; from the early days of singing and dancing at Cambridge, to front and centre as both advocate and judge in the courtroom and the lecture hall. But I hadn’t known about her acting at the yearly Gray’s Inn Miscellany until now. When she tells me that she played Yoda, never having watched Star Wars (her daughter sent her YouTube clips), it makes me laugh. Later, when I tell my son, Harry (who loves Star Wars), he replies: ‘Feisty one, she is.’ Which makes me laugh again.

I ask Lady Hale what she felt were key priorities for LAG as we move into our 50th year. We had just discussed the McDonald case, the ballerina who was refused night-time care.2R (McDonald) v Kensington and Chelsea RLBC [2011] UKSC 33. Lady Hale had given the only dissenting judgment, which she tells me had ‘outraged’ her colleagues. She hadn’t meant to upset them, but she thinks she touched a raw nerve by pointing out the logic of their argument – that nappies would do – could also be applied to daytime care. This made them uncomfortable, she says. ‘It was later pointed out to me by another senior woman judge that there may have been a gender dimension to the decision: “Well, men can always pee in a bottle,” she said.’

Diversity is important. Lady Hale and I agree on that. We also agree that social care is one of the most serious welfare problems facing the population, along with the changes made to the welfare system that have resulted in increased child poverty. ‘Between social care for elderly and disabled people and the problem of child poverty, I am not quite sure which I would give priority to, I think they are both equally important,’ she says.

Lady Hale’s memoir, Spider Woman, will come out in October, published by The Bodley Head. I ask her if she can reveal anything in advance of publication. She tells me that quite a lot of what we have talked about crops up in the book. She suggests that if most people have read her interviews, they probably won’t need to read the book. But I think they will. She tells me it’s about her life, the law and the legal profession – all interwoven with the most fascinating cases she has been involved with throughout her career.

I ask her what she would say to the young Brenda starting out. She seeks clarity on the question - whether I mean her personally or all Brendas. I give her the choice. She replies: ‘Well, what I tend to say, which is equally applicable to me when I was starting out in Cambridge, and to young people starting out today, is – enjoy! Because, if you enjoy, you will work hard. And if you work hard, you will be the best you can be at what you are doing. And if you can be the best you can be at what you are doing, this is likely to bring the next things to do. And seize the next thing and enjoy …’

And I have really enjoyed my morning with Lady Hale. It felt like I was having coffee with an old friend, chatting about life and the law, although she was sitting in her book-lined study, in Richmond, 250 miles away. Lady Hale has a lovely sense of fun. I feel lucky to have had this time with her and to have known her for so long. The depth of her influence on the law, and society more generally, is quite phenomenal.