Lady Scotland never came close to quitting over cleaner as she reveals veiled ambitions

Published on Saturday 5 December 2009 18:53

ATTORNEY General Baroness Scotland never considered resigning amid the row over her housekeeper, she says in an interview broadcast today.

Lady Scotland was fined 5,000 for failing to keep photocopies of documents she claims she was shown by Loloahi Tapui. The Tongan national was charged with fraud and immigration offences and will appear in court tomorrow.

In her first major broadcast interview since the affair came to light, Lady Scotland tells BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs she was "very, very sorry" for the distress she had caused to her family and accepted she had breached the rules.

But asked if she ever thought about "jacking it in" as political opponents called for her resignation, she says simply: "No."

Lady Scotland tells interviewer Kirsty Young: "It was a very difficult time and I clearly accepted that I should have taken a photocopy of the passport. I didn't. That was wrong. I was fined. I accepted it. The thing I was really worried about was the impact it had on my family.

"My family have been amazing and I am very grateful to them and I am very, very sorry that an oversight on my part, a genuine mistake, has caused them a great deal of distress.

"The law was targeted at employers and I have paid the penalty for that. If anything, it demonstrated that nobody at all is above the law."

Asked what lessons she had drawn from the events, she replies: "I learnt that I need to be an awful lot better at managing my administration."

In a wide-ranging interview, Lady Scotland recalls her childhood on the Caribbean island of Dominica and her experiences of racist bullying after her policeman father moved the family to the east London suburb of Walthamstow in the late 1950s.

She reveals that, before entering the law, she considered alternative careers as either a ballet dancer or a nun.

"From about 11 to 17 I loved dancing contemporary ballet," she says. And she was encouraged to believe she was good enough at dancing to make a career of it: "I certainly thought about it seriously."

However, she says her father – who was fiercely ambitious for his 12 children – and mother did not approve of her choice.

"My parents were very clear that each of their children had intellectual ability and dancing was transient and you would end your career by the time you were 28," she says.

It was meeting her lawyer husband Richard Mawhinney – with whom she now has two sons – that persuaded her not to take religious orders as a nun.

"I have always been a devout Christian and I did think about it very seriously indeed for a very long time," she says.