Some women still reckon the profession treats them pretty shoddily at times, but according to Cherie Booth QC, things used to be a heck of a lot worse.

Giving the Association of Women Solicitors’ Fiona Woolf lecture at the Law Society last week, Booth recalled that when she was called to the bar in 1976, only 10% of applicants were women.

Her pupil master was Derry Irvine – later, of course, to become lord chancellor in the Labour government. When she attended her first High Court case with Irvine, he apparently refused to let her come into the robing room because there was a ‘huge urinal’ in the middle. Were the male barristers in the habit of taking a communal leak while discussing their opening arguments?

On completing a pupilage, Booth noted that women pupils often missed out in favour of male rivals. Indeed in her case, the pupilage was awarded to fellow pupil, Anthony Blair.

Booth revealed that when she had a young family, she took very little maternity leave because she did not want to give anyone an excuse to say she was not up to the job. But, she now realised, that had simply been reinforcing the system, not smashing it. When she ‘unexpectedly’ had young Leo, she took more time off. As the Eurythmics also (almost) noted, Booth said that ‘behind every great woman, there’s a great woman’. In Booth’s case, she says she could not have succeeded without her cleaner.

No mention of Carole Caplin, curiously.