Shabana Mahmood flanked by Baroness Carr and Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls
A Lady Chief Justice swore in a female Lord Chancellor for the first time in English legal history yesterday.
Shabana Mahmood was also the first Lord Chancellor to swear their oath on the Qur’an and Baroness Carr, the Lady Chief Justice, said “both of these firsts highlight how your office, our constitution in microcosm, continues to evolve and reflect the society which it serves”.
She is not the first female Lord Chancellor – Liz Truss held the post for 11 months from July 2016 – but she is the first female lawyer.
Ms Mahmood recorded another first in being the first Lord Chancellor to have been an employed barrister – after undertaking her pupillage at 12 King’s Bench Walk, she went on to specialise in professional indemnity law as an employed barrister with the law firm Berrymans Lace Mawer, which is now part of Clyde & Co.
Baroness Carr said: “Experience of the independent and employed bar – and of the solicitors’ branch of the profession – will no doubt inform your understanding of the challenges faced by all those who seek justice as well as those who strive to secure its delivery.”
She noted too that, when studying law at Oxford University, Ms Mahmood was awarded the prize for best performance in the lawyer’s ethics finals examinations.
In her address, Ms Mahmood said she believed she was the first in another way – “the first Brummie” to hold the post.
She declared: “I will be a champion for the rule of law and our judiciary, inside cabinet and in our government, at home and abroad. I will say ‘no’ when ‘no’ is warranted, even if at times I frustrate my ministerial colleagues in doing so. After all, that frustration is not a failure of our system but an essential feature of it.”
She stressed the need to speed up the courts so that “justice is done in a timely way”, to continue the court modernisation programme and to ensure that legal aid “is fit for the needs of the modern world”.
“I don’t pretend that any of these have easy answers nor that everything will be solved quickly but I can say that I will fight for our justice system and I intend to be in that fight for the long haul.”
Richard Hermer KC and Sarah Sackman were also sworn in as the Attorney General and Solicitor General respectively.
Mr Hermer, who has been elevated to the House of Lords to take on the role, was most recently chair of the Matrix Chambers’ management committee, effectively the head of chambers. He was appointed a deputy High Court judge in 2019.
He has had a broad domestic and international law practice, acting against the state in many forms, but Baroness Carr highlighted his work last year leading the settlement negotiations for 900 victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster, “a process that led not only to the settlement of their compensation claims but also the establishment of a restorative justice fund and, earlier this year, a restorative Testimony Week”.
Ms Sackman has been given a ministerial post immediately upon election. She has since 2021 practised from Matrix too – “Quite possibly the first time that both law officers have hailed from the same chambers,” said Baroness Carr – where she focused on public, planning, local government, election and environmental law.
She will almost certainly be appointed a KC too, as has happened in the past with other non-silks to become law officers, such as Jeremy Wright, Robert Buckland, Suella Braverman and Harriet Harman, who was the first solicitor to be Solicitor General.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed four junior ministers to the MoJ and, very unusually, not one has a legal background.
James Timpson, boss of the high street chain Timpsons, has been brought in, again via the House of Lords, as prison minister.
Heidi Alexander is the other minister of state and Alex Davies-Jones and Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede are the junior ministers. Their various briefs have not yet been announced.
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