The dining hall in Inner Temple – one of London’s four Inns of Court – has oak panelling and high ceilings. The walls are covered in plodding portraits of judges and hundreds of crests, each belonging to the annually elected treasurer of any given year (I detect some fake heraldry). This hand-me-down vanity must remind the barristers who come here for lunch of their days at Merton and Eton. I am surrounded by men in suits, women with their mandated cardigans and probity, and an ambient yearning for steamed pudding. It could be 1975.
A friendly server carves some roast pork and hands me a plate. “I don’t bite!” he reassures me, accurately diagnosing an acute case of social anxiety not experienced since I was last in a school canteen (aged 17, maybe?). He gestures limply to some potatoes and kale under a heat lamp. Further to my right is sponge and custard. A spherical man, who presumably earned at least £1m in fees last year, helps himself. Yum, just like matron used to make it!
There is something strange about the apex predators of the legal class being possessed with the souls of schoolchildren: handed their dinner by kindly grown-ups before they sit down together on long pre-laid dining tables. Some of these people end up in Downing Street, or married to Tony Blair. Jonathan Sumption, our last public intellectual, was once the head of Brick Court Chambers. Even those who rarely cross the threshold of Inner Temple into the real world wield power and marshal wealth in nation-defining ways – it was barristers that litigated the fine details of Brexit, remember. These are serious jobs and serious decisions, for junior prefects at least.
“It’s curry Thursday!” I overhear an adult – or perhaps three children in a trench coat – exclaim. And so, contained within their outré tastes, perfect manners, patrician drawls and Tudor piles in the countryside, I cannot help but detect a state of arrested development. The commercial barrister’s brain says, “that’s actually a de jure/de facto distinction”, while his heart says, “I have double French tomorrow.”
But back to lunch: the roast pork is fine, and the potatoes – remarkably unscathed by the Toby Carvery heat lamp – were as good as those I ate in the beloved Soho restaurant, Andrew Edmunds, the previous Sunday. This is a rung above gloopy school-dinner slop, or congealing shepherd’s pie artfully sploshed on to a plate by a horse. In fact, we really should commend barristers on knowing the importance of a good repast. In this they demarcate themselves from fellow show-offs and canteen-goers: parliamentarians. The creaking and ancient lords down in the Houses of Parliament share the same instinct to be coddled and mothered by their workplace – to have a nice lady in a hairnet hand them fish and chips on a Friday – but without any of the attendant standards.
And so, here I am eating my greens in Inner Temple, on a geographic and spiritual vacation from reality. I am metres away from Fleet Street. But it is peaceful and clean, and there are no Superdrugs or Holland & Barretts disrupting the view. It is technically a place of work, but with its quads and Georgian-ish buildings and chandeliered dining rooms, it is drawn more from the imagination of Evelyn Waugh than the HR department at Deloitte.
But it is not just a warm bath for Old Harrovians. It’s aspic for a political moment long lost to us. The legal profession was meant to have changed: Keir Starmer (son of a toolmaker, etc) is now the most famous barrister in the country; Jolyon Maugham, before he beat a fox to death, represented the new lefty-activist class; more than 100 members of the barrister-lobby in 2023 unionised against prosecuting climate protesters, and aren’t they supposed to be using the ECHR to crush right-wing Britain?
The paradigmatic Tory in a gown and wig was supposed to have been replaced by a young woman with an X account and spare keffiyeh. I don’t detect much of that energy in the canteen – these people eat like the most right-wing people in Britain. Bathed in custard, longing for Mummy.
[See also: The rise and rise of Zohran Mamdani]
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This article appears in the 17 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Can Zohran Mamdani save the left?
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