The militant campaign group Fathers 4 Justice once created a poster that featured Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. “If BSE- infected meat is bad for kids”, it read, “why is this mad cow in charge of family courts?” It wasn’t the smartest move — insulting not only one of the country’s most respected judges but a trailblazer who was the first woman to break into England’s judicial elite. Unsurprisingly, it backfired. Dame Elizabeth, with trademark aplomb, said: “I cannot meet Fathers 4 Justice because they are not being sensible, and as long as they throw condoms with purple powder and send a double-decker bus with a loudspeaker outside my private house in the West Country there is no point.”
Not that she was ever a stranger to controversy. Dame Elizabeth presided over the Cleveland child abuse inquiry, spending weeks hearing harrowing details about the dilating anal sphincter. She was responsible for granting life-long anonymity to the killers of the child James Bulger, blocked a mother’s attempt to have her 29-year-old mentally disabled daughter sterilised and defended adoption by homosexuals.
Now she is stepping out of retirement to put herself in the lion’s den again: she will preside over the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, which is scheduled for next year, replacing the royal coroner Michael Burgess, who took himself off the case in July.
Elizabeth Havers was born into an illustrious legal dynasty in 1933 and is known to her family as Betty. Her father, Sir Cecil Havers, was the High Court judge who passed the death sentence on Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Her older brother Michael — father of the actor Nigel Havers and Philip Havers, QC — was Attorney-General under Margaret Thatcher and, briefly, Lord Chancellor. She admits that she made use of family contacts to go straight to the Bar at the age of 21, without attending university. From there she went for a minor judicial post as a divorce registrar, and was soon promoted to be a judge in the family division of the High Court. This was the first time anyone had become a High Court judge straight from being a registrar.
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When she made it to the Court of Appeal ten years ago she prompted the installation of the first women’s toilet especially for her. A mother of three, she also set up and ran the first nursery for toddlers in the basement of the Inner Temple, which all her children attended. Jilly Cooper, a neighbour, once likened her to a “sturdy Welsh cob: could keep going over rough territory for a long time”. When the Princess’s inquest begins, such qualities will prove useful.