Baroness Heather Hallett: The former judge leading the Covid public inquiry

Something must have gone wrong with the appointment of Baroness (Heather) Hallett as chair of the public inquiry into the official response to Covid-19. She is the sort of independent-minded type who’s liable to cause trouble for the government, and this is one government that really doesn’t need any more trouble.

It is not, historically, how things are supposed to work when British governments subject themselves to judicial scrutiny. When, for example, the government of Tony Blair was obliged to launch an investigation into the Iraq war, they chose Lord Hutton for the job, a slightly unusual choice for the post. He was from Northern Ireland, and was suggested by Peter Mandelson, one of nature’s problem-solvers, who knew him from his time as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Hutton was an honourable man, a fine judge and with impeccable credentials. He was never going to be soothing. But Mandelson knew, or thought, that Hutton was on the more conventional, “establishment” end of the spectrum of outlook. Just as bricklayers or university dons come in all flavours of temperament and opinion, so too do lawyers. They are human.

Much the same might be said for other judges and quasi-judges appointed to other big inquiries that have since become, well, a bit tarnished. Lord Franks, for instance, who looked benignly on the origins of the 1982 Falklands conflict, simply got it wrong. Lord Denning’s dismissal of the appeal against the conviction of the Birmingham Six in 1981 also springs to mind. History is littered with such examples of failure.

Which is why Hallett’s appointment was odd. She has been given “full powers, including the power to compel the production of documents and to summon witnesses to give evidence on oath. This week she exercised those powers, ordering Downing Street to hand over unredacted messages between Johnson and ministers over the decision to impose lockdown, after the Cabinet Office refused to provide WhatsApp exchanges, claiming much of the requested material was “unambiguously irrelevant”.

Put bluntly, she is not “one of us” in the Johnsonian sense, which is to say that she seems set to put the law and the feelings of the bereaved families and recovering victims first. She’s not likely, let’s say, to have ever said or thought “let the bodies pile high” rather than impose lockdown, as the prime minister is alleged to have. If one was to guess, you’d imagine she is what is disparagingly called a member of the “liberal elite”. Having risen so high in such a chauvinistic world as the law profession has traditionally been, she is an avowed feminist. Partisan critics – and they will emerge if they sense she is hostile to the Tory government – will turn all of this against her and attempt to discredit her efforts. She must be aware that elements of the press are perfectly happy to deride judges as “enemies of the people”. Some difficult days may lie ahead for the Baroness.

Hallett was chosen partly because of her experience in steering high-profile and sensitive investigations. She was widely praised for her empathy during the 7/7 inquiry, for example, which contributed to her being handed a peerage from Theresa May in 2019. The bombings of 2005 claimed the lives of 52 people, and Hallett saw her first task as getting to know the families and survivors, as people, speaking to as many as she could. She explained later that she saw there was a danger they “obviously thought I was some establishment figure who’d do an establishment cover-up. Well they obviously didn’t know me… I could see how it might be swept along by possibly systemic failures and that sort of thing, but without remembering there were 52 individuals, 52 families and sets of friends who’d lost loved ones.” As a result her work was praised in the press as “a model of what an inquest can achieve, a kind of national catharsis”.

Her career at the criminal bar meant that she had had plenty of experience of all manner of people and the most painful and emotive of cases, such as child abuse. “It was very tough, as a mother of two young children, cross-examining other young children about their allegations of sexual abuse against their parents,” Hallett said in one interview.

"I was challenged many times by friends about my willingness to defend someone they believed should be locked up and the key thrown away. I tried to explain that the cab rank rule means a barrister has no choice. They present the case. They do not decide it. It is for the court to decide on guilt or innocence and sentence.”

When the time came for someone to take on the case of Dawn Sturgess, who died in the novichok attack in Salisbury it was Hallett who was an obvious choice to assess allegations of Russian state interference. However, given her new role over the Covid-19 inquiry, a new chair for the Sturgess inquiry may be needed.

Hallett says her motto is “give me a puzzle and I want to solve it”, and she does tend to. She attributes her success above all to her parents. Her father was a highly successful police officer in the Hampshire force, having spent his wartime service flying agents behind enemy lines. He ended up as an assistant chief constable – and Hallett's early interest in the law was stimulated by Dad’s library of books on crime and punishment, factual and fictional. She admires still his devotion to duty and to principle. She tells the story of how, back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the done thing for an ambitious copper to join the Freemasons, but Hugh Hallett thought this the wrong thing to do, and this was frowned upon by his superiors. Even then, Hugh was so good at the job that he found himself being promoted every year or two, which had the drawback of the family having to move home and school frequently.

Both parents encouraged Hallett to believe that she could do anything a man could. Her mother, a secretary, refused to teach young Heather to touch-type, lest it left her marooned in the ruling pool one day.

So Hallett’s background is not posh or establishment, even though she obviously moves in such circles now. Born in Eastleigh in 1949, Heather Carol Hallett was one of that generation of children who could take full advantage of a full, free education from a state grammar school, though in her case quite a few of them because of her father moving from division to division.

She found the experience of trying to make whole sets of new friends all the time difficult – “it wasn’t very nice to be honest” – as well as disrupting the usual smooth run through the curriculums. The teachers at her last school found her ambition to go to Oxford incomprehensible, and refused to give her the customary extra tuition. She was on her own, but she made it to St Hugh’s College anyhow. She chose the college because of her father’s name, and Oxford because she thought it sounded glamorous.

She studied law, and made it her career, and her achievements speak for themselves: allied to the bar at 23, a QC at 40, one of the youngest, and a High Court judge at 50. Apart from high-profile work on 7/7 and child abuse cases she was also tasked with reviewing the unusual grant of “letters of assurance” to terrorism suspects – so-called “on the runs” as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland (lawful but defective in operation). Hallett was only the fifth woman to become an appeal judge. She was turned down for one appointment because, she was told, she was bound to leave and have babies. She was also sexually propositioned by more senior men, including one judge who, in a break in a trial she was acting in, invited her to his room and volunteered to father a child with her. One can only guess how she must have felt with such obscene harassment.

Now, at 73, it is she who is in charge, so to speak, and her home life could hardly be more settled. She met her husband at Oxford when they sat next to each other in a law lecture and, with one break, they’ve been together and married ever since. She and Nigel Wilkinson QC live in southwest London, and have two grown-up sons and four grandchildren.

Hallett likes Status Quo (the rock band rather than the national state of affairs), and Genesis, a taste in music she picked up from her late elder brother. Her idea of an ideal night in is for them to be curled up on the sofa together watching Strictly Come Dancing or maybe an episode of Endeavour, and enjoying a nice glass of white burgundy. Hallett appears to have a great gift for judging an optimal work-life balance. As she begins to relive the whole grim Covid saga on behalf of the nation, she’ll need that.

A version of this article was first published in December 2021