From combat to comfort zone

Helena Kennedy at her north London home

It says a lot about Helena Kennedy that she untidies the sitting room sofa cushions, taking them out of the regimented lines in which they have been placed. It’s a comforting gesture. Her house could easily be grand and it is certainly spacious and beautiful, but precious – never. The pots of paint on the hall floor are by Dulux, and working papers are piled at the edge of the stairs. This is a family home, and a place where people think.

No doubt RD Laing would be intrigued. The late psychiatrist was the previous owner of the north London house, built as a rectory in 1856, and Kennedy has lived here for 25 years with her husband Iain Hutchison, the renowned facial surgeon, and their three children, now in their twenties. She got on with Laing, she says, “although we were told that he used to go to the back of the garden and howl”. There is now a set of goalposts near Laing’s howling position, and the hub of the house is not the elegant pale yellow room with white sofas where we talk, but the open-plan basement kitchen reached by a metal spiral staircase. Here a big table faces the garden and there are squashy sofas for watching TV. Upstairs there are five bedrooms, some of them still full of her children’s clutter, Kennedy says with more pleasure than dismay. There are some strong colours in this house – a ground floor room is dark green – but the feeling is of light.

The metal spiral staircase leading to the basement kitchen, the hub of the house

As a QC and one of Britain’s most distinguished lawyers, Kennedy is well known as a champion of underdogs and a fearless advocate of human rights and civil liberties. She chairs Justice, the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists, and has just become principal of Oxford’s Mansfield College; in the past she has led the British Council and the Human Genetics Commission. Most people would call her a “good egg”, with the possible exception of the former left-wing friends she has upset in the House of Lords where, as the Labour peer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, she often makes a rebellious stand against her party. She is 61 and a doer rather than a theorist, but what distinguishes her from many high-achieving women is that however much she takes on – and from the outside the volume looks endless – she remains rooted in her family. This stems from her upbringing in a council tenement in Glasgow, where her printer father and housewife mother were Catholics and socialists, she explains.

“When I think how my mother raised four children in a tiny space – she was a big part of the community and the kitchen was where everything was done, where I did my homework. It gives you an incredible capacity for concentration because I did it in the midst of a crowd. This is an active house too, a lot of folk here always, cousins, the kids’ friends, and there’s lots of talk about politics and what’s happening culturally. I love that.”

Her husband is working at the table downstairs. “Iain is the child of a refugee mother who was a doctor and fled from Vienna in 1938. His father and mother separated when he was a baby and for him having a family was a revelation. So I’ve been supported by a man who has an independent life and who had a professional mother and isn’t threatened by a wife like me, but he’s also somebody who loves being in a family. I’m really blessed by that.”

The wall opposite us is dominated by an oil painting of a woman breast-feeding. Kennedy and Hutchison are not great acquisitors, she says, but they have celebrated key moments by buying contemporary art, including this powerfully serene work by the American Daniel Ludwig.

Teddy bear with the logo of the Saving Faces charity founded by Kennedy’s husband, facial surgeon Iain Hutchison

“Iain bought me this painting when I was 40. I’d had the babies but I felt nostalgic about that being over. A family life is about learning to carve out time for them, making Sundays precious, eating together, and we still go on family holidays. There will be times when you worry that you’re getting it wrong but a lot of it is about being expressive.”

She talks quickly and energetically, her sentences weighted with the control and nuance of a barrister, yet shot through with emotion.

“People say I’m part of the establishment but it’s not strictly true in that I’m a dissenter. I like to tell life as it is, as I see it. It’s not always made me popular [in the House of Lords] but it would be treacherous for me to vote for things that I don’t agree with. During the Blair years I could never have lived with myself if I hadn’t spoken out about things that I thought were profoundly damaging to our constitution and to our liberties. I belong on the left; I can’t pretend to be neutral.”

Most of the friendships damaged by her stand have mended, she says. She has just written to Philip Gould, the former New Labour spin doctor, who is seriously ill. “There are some that will not be healed. I can never feel as warm towards Tony Blair over the business of the Iraq war because of his resistance to any self-examination about it.”

“I felt that one of the follies of New Labour was to be seduced by the money men, by the masters of the universe. That preoccupation distracts you from the real stuff of being in politics to change people’s lives. It’s not my way. Iain is a National Health [Service] surgeon and all my practice is legal aid. We’re very comfortably off but I’m not interested in being rich. There are lots of things that ground me: my clients, spending time with battered women, taking the bus.”

“I came to the law as an outsider when there were hardly any women. The law is still overpopulated by the middle classes. My mother put the washing on an old pram and went to the public wash-house. This is why education and opening opportunities to people from backgrounds like mine is important to me. Mansfield College appeals to me because of its tradition of widening the gates to a diverse body of students. Whether it’s the law or Oxbridge, all these parts of the firmament have to be much more inclusive. I want my voice to be in there.”

This Monday, as president of Women of the Year, Kennedy will enjoy its lunch to honour women who have made a difference, whether in public life or as a postmistress who looks after elderly customers. “We have to keep saying how much our society depends on acts of kindness,” she says.

It’s an apt response from someone who balances her combative instincts with great warmth, and who is never frightened of being empathetic.

“Professional distance is just a cover for not connecting properly to your clients, and it was used by doctors and lawyers for a long time,” she says. “I don’t spill my guts on the floor but to be effective you have to understand what makes your client tick. You have to get under their skin.”

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FAVOURITE THINGS

“Choosing these is really easy because I’m wearing them. When Iain and I got married he made my wedding ring. To specialise in oral and maxillofacial surgery, he had to qualify both as a doctor and a dentist. When he was young and learning dentistry you had to learn what the technicians did, so he went to one of the technicians with wax and made this ring and then gave the technician the gold and got him to make it real. It’s very irregular, two strands of gold intertwined. I love that.

“Then there are my bracelets. Each of my closest girlfriends has bought me a silver bracelet. There are eight of them – two of the girlfriends are dead now – and one of the bracelets has a broken latch at the moment. I wear them all the time – in the shower, in the bath, swimming. They’re about friendship. The truth is that none of us ever enjoys success without incredible love and support. I get it from my family, my sisters, the kids, and I have wonderful women friends.”

www.mansfield.ox.ac.uk

www.womenoftheyear.co.uk