MY JERICHO
Helen Mountfield QC
Principal Mansfield College - From Jericho to Head of House
This meeting was held on November 20, 2019
It was back home for her. Helen Mountfield lived for a year in a student house at 35 Wellington Street in Jericho That was in 1988. “There were lots of pubs. When you are twenty you’re fearless, aren’t you?” she recalled at a My Jericho session.
Jericho was more mixed then and “very nice. Lucy’s was a factory.” Jericho has got more comfortably off.
Helen Mountfield was a student at Magdalen College. She knew students in her house who in the previous year who managed to go to the fair rent tribunal and get a reduction. So she did too.
Mountfield gained a first in History; she did not really enjoy the subject which she found formulaic. “You had to look in an incredibly empirical way and I was too lazy for that.”
She attended a comprehensive school in south-east London, also attended later by the murderers of Stephen Lawrence. She had mixed feelings about Oxford, but was busy with “drama, politics and anti-apartheid stuff.” She directed three or four stage plays including one involving Samuel West who went on to grace bigger stages..
Her path to the law was pure accident. “A friend’s dad was a lawyer.” It looked a good career so she took a law conversion course at City University to achieve it. She did not want to work at something she did not want to do.
From there she joined Cherie Blair’s chambers and became her pupil. The latter was very supportive of women at the Bar and was giving up her small trade union cases so Helen Mountfield took them on: “I took the crumbs from Cherie Blair’s table.”
Then she was directed into planning law. “It didn’t grab me.” She would not have been given the option due to the ‘cab rank' rule that barristers must take cases as they come up.
However, later she was able to get involved in the ‘People’s Challenge’ group led by the Gina Miller. Her case was parallel to Gina’s. The case was crowd-funded, using money to overturn Theresa May invoking Article 50 (leaving Europe) without consulting Parliament. They won in the Supreme Court. She has since interviewed Gina Miller at the Byline Journalism Festival.
Of fifty-five barristers in the case only three were women and she was the only one who spoke. Helen has contributed to the First Hundred Years project on women in the law
She became a Recorder and a Deputy High Court judge. But she had never addressed a jury until she spoke to one as a judge. “I’m not on home turf and the lawyers know I’m not.”
She also confessed there was one case she judged where she felt the jury had reached the wrong (guilty) decision. Helen did not go into details.
She’s married to Dr Damian Tambini, a political scientist at the London School of Economics who specialises in media policy. They have three young daughters and live in College.
As a reward for her achievements in the law, she has been made head of Mansfield College “a very progressive college with a high state school entry”. She followed the very high profile Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, a national treasure in Scotland and wider afield, who had raised the college profile to new heights leaving behind a new building and a Human Rights Institute..
Mansfield was started in the 1830s in Birmingham, before moving to Oxford a in the 1880s s a theological college. The first women were admitted in 1913, other subjects were taught from the 1950s. It became a full college of the University of Oxford in 1995.
There are 450 students “who are clever and bright and want to change the world”. She is “quite emotionally invested in them”. The college though lacks big endowments. “There are few hedge fund managers among the alumni – they are more likely to be retired vicars”.
Mountfield applied to be Principal having narrowly failed to become ‘head of house’ at another Oxford College. The reason to semi-retire from the law? Simply she he did not want the lonely life of a High Court judge. The corridors are empty. The other judges are “older and maler than me”.
After four terms in post, she loves being head of the college and has kept up the Kennedy tradition of having outside speakers for public lectures at 5.30 on Fridays. Check out the website for next term’s card. They are worth a visit.
As for the University itself “I’m still trying to work out how this byzantine place works.”
But “I definitely don’t want to be Vice-Chancellor!”
My Jericho offers a series of independent events organized by Jericho resident John Mair. Many are at at St Barnabas. Others are streamed on YouTube.
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