Rather His Own Man by Geoffrey Robertson

Author:Geoffrey Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

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, and Jeremy Hutchinson and Michael Foot bonded with her immediately. Of my own generation, the late Bernard Simons, the wonderful solicitor who helped to found the first HIV/AIDS charity (the Terrence Higgins Trust) 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 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 was taken by Mark Stephens, the mercurial litigator who shared my sense of mischief (although never at his clients’ 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 at our first house in Islington for Tony and Cherie Blair for Labour’s new leader 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 whom I assumed was a hired waiter – I just did not recognise Tom Cruise.

I must confess to the occasional faux pas of this kind – after a 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?’

‘Yes. That’s because he is Julian Lennon.’

There was one occasion on which my mindset proved a 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 district, in which we would show off our Wildean witticisms. It was pretty much a second eleven 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.

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