Bickerstaff: How One Barrister Lost the Room and Found His Voice

Roddy Bickerstaff KC does not so much enter a room as impose his will upon it. Senior counsel. Planning inquiry specialist. Immaculate haircut. Permanent expression of refined contempt.

He has been doing this for thirty years. He is very good at it. He has never once considered that the microphone might still be on.

When Roddy's running commentary on a live-streamed planning inquiry....the witnesses, the objectors, the Inspector, his own junior, and several things that cannot be repeated without context goes national on the BBC Red Button, the consequences arrive swiftly. A Bar Standards Board notice. A statement from the Law Society. His junior on the Six O'Clock News looking calm, dignified, and considerably more sympathetic than Roddy managed in three decades of practice.

What follows is a darkly comic account of a man whose professional armour turns out to be substantially thinner than his ego, and who discovers slowly, reluctantly, and with considerable embarrassment that the gap between being formidable and being right is wider than he assumed.

Bickerstaff is a planning inquiry novel for anyone who has ever sat opposite a barrister who treated the room as a personal stage. It is also, quietly, a story about what it costs to be that person — and what it takes to stop.

Includes a glossary of planning and legal terms for the uninitiated, the confused, and the person who just wants to know what a viability assessment actually is.