Dinah Rose appears to have survived. In the rush of current affairs in the noisy internet age it seems hard to believe that it was only a couple of weeks or so ago that the position of this leading QC as President of Magdalen College Oxford appeared precarious. Rose has now appeared in a case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in defence of the Cayman government’s determination to persist in its prohibition of gay marriage. Rose is reported to have been supported by her College’s student representative body, and the Bar has closed ranks behind her, pointing to the ‘cab rank rule’ under which it is said that barristers have to take the cases that come before them as long as they are available, and there is no conflict of interest.

If it is indeed all over, it should not be. I have met Dinah Rose perhaps once or twice and corresponded with her from time to time. I have long been a fan (from afar) of her brilliant advocacy on behalf of her clients, a compelling articulacy that flows out of a fine intellect and is further buoyed by her fearlessness and (never to be underestimated at the Bar) her sheer resilience. But the problem with her taking this case has nothing to do with the Bar; whether or not it flouts or follows the supposed cab rank is neither here nor there. (And what meaning can that supposed rule have in any event when you can always set a fee to make yourself unavailable whenever offered work is unfancied?) No: the issue here is Dinah Rose’s presidency of her college.

I am an academic as well as a barrister so in a tiny way my position resembles that of Dinah Rose. I say ‘tiny’ because I am only a small cog in my university’s machine, teaching students, marking essays and all the rest of it. My main concern has been with making sure my appearances in court do not come at the expense of the time I can give to my day job. We had a head of department a few years ago who was also a barrister and who defended the government’s work in Iraq however nasty the other side claimed it to have been; certainly this made a few colleagues queasy. But neither he nor I were even close to Rose’s position in her College. She is its president, its public epitome. For good or ill, what she does, she does as president. No ‘Chinese wall’ can divide her up, marking this bit of her as the Magdalen bit and the rest of her as the feisty lawyer who will do what it takes to win for whoever is lucky enough to get her on their side. As the President of Magdalen, and particularly in light of the College’s explicit equality policy, she had a duty to the LGBTQ + students in her care and an obligation to provide a safe and secure environment for them.

The college commits to upholding the Equality Act and specifically mentions a commitment to eliminating discrimination and harassment on grounds, inter alia, of sexual orientation. This equality duty is surely incompatible with its President accepting a brief in a cause that can be widely seen (and not unreasonably seen) as homophobic. Assuming she is not doing the case for nothing (which strikes me as unlikely) Dinah Rose has been faced with a choice which she exercised in favour of accepting this, presumably lucrative, brief. As the executive committee of Oxford’s LGBTQ+ society put it: ‘The minute Dinah Rose accepted the position of President, the duties of her new role became pre-eminent.’ The Oxford African and Caribbean Society has issued a strongly worded critical statement, declaring with venomous clarity that ‘Dinah Rose cannot in good faith help to set back LGBT laws in a Caribbean island and simultaneously claim to support LGBTQ+ and BAME students in Magdalen.’

There is a wider question here, too, about the many barristers who have achieved headships of Oxford and Cambridge colleges – a recent trend which looks if anything to be gathering pace. I am not surprised by this: good lawyers are terrific chairs of meetings and the best of them personable too, no doubt as good with students as they are with clients and instructing solicitors. But these are real jobs, not pastimes for the ethical part of themselves.