On its release in 2005, My Brief Career, an exposé of the world of trainee lawyers by journalist Harry Mount, was noted as possessing “all the horror of a Dickensian tragedy and all the charm of Bridget Jones’s Diaries”.
Mount’s thoughts on the profession he abandoned were relived last week in an article he wrote in The Spectator, but received a notably less favourable review.
“I just wonder how long Harry Mount has been waiting to put his boot into the Bar,” former MP and criminal lawyer Jerry Hayes wrote on the magazine’s blog. “Having a first from Oxford, membership of the Bullingdon Club and then getting a pupillage in top-class chambers, it must have been devastating to his well-nurtured ego to have been turned down for a tenancy.”
Was Mount bruised, the Londoner asked. “I don’t know why Jerry Hayes takes against me going to Oxford,” he said. “I don’t take against him going to the Chelmer Institute of Higher Education.”
