Read more: Farmers pushed to brink of suicide by Rachel Reeves’s tax raid
As a defence barrister, she was among the country’s high profile QCs. And in her defence of rural communities she has served for more than a quarter of a century as president of the Countryside Alliance.
Her family used to “swap pigs” with Labour legend and NHS pioneer Aneurin Bevan, but she laments the lack of understanding about the countryside among MPs today.
“Unfortunately,” she says, “at the moment we have quite a lot of politicians who think they know about the countryside because they have a weekend cottage they go to from time to time but [they] have absolutely no idea how their neighbours live.”
There are “very, very few people”, she says, “who have any direct contact with farming now”.
The consequences of the tax raid for Labour at the next election, she warns, threaten to be terrible.
“I have to say I think what they have done so far is to knock out the possibility of another term in office. It is not possible for a Labour Government to have an overall majority unless they have rural seats.”
And she is in no doubt who will reap the electoral benefits.
“I’m afraid what they have also done is to drive people to Reform,” she says.
Labour MPs in rural constituencies are “very” worried, she claims, and she now lives in hope of a u-turn.
Farming can be a “very lonely job” at the best of times, but she warns of a “profound depression” in the countryside with people suffering “sleepless nights” because of the Government’s policies.
Her love affair with farming began when her parents moved the family to “a very rural village in darkest Buckinghamshire where as well as Nye Bevan’s pigs they had “a house cow and some calves”.
A farmer let the local children clamber onto the tractor and help with his dairy cows and she was “mad to ride” ponies from the age of four.
“That started it,” she says. “I always wanted to farm.”
When her legal career took off she rented a cottage and kept “a lot of poultry”, and when her husband and her bought “somewhere with a little bit of land” she invested in a flock of sheep.
“I used to be lambing sheep during the night and then go off to the Old Bailey,” she says.
She worked alongside Sir John Mortimer of Rumpole of the Bailey fame and she looks back at this time as a “golden patch”.
“His speeches to the jury would have them holding their sides with laughter,” she remembers.
The pair often defended pornography cases. Sir John “hated” having to look at the films and books.
He would often dispatch the future baroness to examine the exhibits, saying: “You go and look at them because the jury will think if you’ve seen them they can’t be that bad.”
These were days when a female barrister was considered “unusual”.
“There were judges then who made no secret of the fact they didn’t think women should be at the bar at all,” she recalls. “But after a while they became some of my best friends.”
The attention was not unwelcome for someone at the start of her career.
“What was important was to be remembered,” she explains.
