Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Director of Liberty and barrister, civil liberties campaigner best known for defeating the government's 42-day detention bill for terror suspects.
On the island
Eight records
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be FreeFavourite
It's not representative, it is the th the song. And this is the song that my husband and I sang to our little boy when he was a baby.
I've picked this song because it reminds me of being at the L S C and going to Berlin the New Year's Eve before the wall came down. And because it's called Heroes, and there have been so many heroes in my life.
Von fremden Ländern und Menschen
This piece of music, beautiful piece of music, has probably haunted me for over twenty five years. Since I heard it in a film called Sophie's Choice...
I turned up for the first time at Grand Central Station with my Sony Walkman... and turned on Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue as I looked up at those skyscrapers for the first time.
Well this is really for my extraordinary colleagues at Liberty... and the chorus reminds me that you don't have to be cynical, you don't have to assume that public opinion can only be followed and never be persuaded or led.
Their music is contemporary and it's passionate and it's angry in a really positive way, but it also for me conjures up so many of the sounds and rhythms of my youth.
This is the song that we had at our wedding as our first song, and this is a lovely sentimental piece of synthesizer music from Cindy Lauper.
Leipzig Radio Chorus, Dresden State Orchestra & Peter Schreier
I think I may feel a little melancholy on my desert island. I think I'll need a bit of solace and I get that from this piece of music. It's complicated, like me, like all of us. It's melancholy, it's heroic, it's tragic.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:17Do you remember what you were doing on that actual day of nine-eleven?
I certainly do. As you said, it was my second day at Liberty... I had lunch with a new colleague, and when I returned, we saw the pictures appearing on people's computer screens and on the television. And it was, of course, completely horrific. I don't think I quite knew at the time, but I was also pregnant. And in the weeks and months that followed, I thought, you've just left the home office. Is this the time to be leaving all your chums in the Home Office who are trying to keep people safe? And is this the time to be bringing a new life into the world?
Presenter asks
2:44Did [the birth of your child] also add to the mix of motivation [for your work]?
It's very hard to separate these things. Becoming a parent had a profound effect on me... I don't think I would ever have been crazy enough to apply to be Director of Liberty if I wasn't drunk on being a mother and thinking, well, that's the most amazing thing I've ever done. Surely I can do anything now. But I think the other profound change was my attitude to human rights. They weren't just legal concepts or philosophical concepts anymore. It felt like I had a huge investment in the future, a personal, emotional investment. But hopefully also I understood more what it is to be afraid, what it is to really worry about whether your family are going to be blown up on the underground and or whether your child is safe.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Harper Lee
I will take To Kill a Mockingbird because it's been such an inspiration for my life and it'll make me smile.
The luxury
A private screening room with any movies I like
I don't suppose you're going to let me have my own little screening room so I can watch any movie that I like, are you? Yes. That's incredibly kind.
What are your earliest memories of growing up?
My earliest memories are of my parents' house full of food and full of guests and full of laughter and sometimes argument, sometimes heated debate. It was a very open house. They had friends who had come to London from all over the world and who they'd made friends with during their bed sit period.
Presenter asks
14:34As a student [at the LSE] studying law, were you into student politics?
So I was not into student politics at all... It was partly that there were all these mostly chaps actually, but all these guys who you could just tell wanted to go and run a small country and this was just a kind of nursery slate for them. There was also I can remember it was the first Iraq war and I remember people passing lots of resolutions about that, which was fair enough, but no one was doing anything about disabled access on campus. And I thought, hang on a minute, there's a mismatch between the grand ambition and what you might be doing, which is actually delivering something closer to home.
Presenter asks
23:43Do you worry about your own safety?
No, I don't worry about my what you mean whether I'm on on somebody's hit list? No... You do get a little a little nasty mail. Most of it. Nothing much to worry about, occasionally something to worry about, and you know. and then you do something about it. But I will say this when you're stopped in the street by people, they always have something kind and nice to say. But I have had more kindness and solidarity than I've ever had of the bad stuff.
“You've got to understand that no criminal justice system in the world will ever be absolutely perfect. And you have to imagine that you are the one person in a million and you've been convicted, no one believes you, even your family don't really believe you anymore, and you are walking to the electric chair or to the gallows, and how does that feel? And that is my earliest profound political memory.”
“I thought that we had been sounding like a bunch of lawyers, which is fine for the courtroom, but it was really important to get our values out into the newsroom and the classroom and the parliament chamber.”
“If I didn't do this job I'd be sitting in the pub complaining about Belmarsh and Guantanamo and Forty Two Days and all the rest of it, with a drink in my hand, you know. I get to do it with a microphone in my hand, and yes, sometimes that feels like a burden, but mostly it's just a an enormous privilege.”