Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is Baroness Scotland. As Attorney General, she's the government's

chief law officer expected to dispense top-notch legal advice whilst also sitting in on cabinet meetings.

Even before she entered Parliament, she had enjoyed a stratospherically successful legal career.

She took silk at the age of 35, becoming the most youthful

QC since William Pitt the younger. But law has never been her only love. She was

first drawn towards a career in ballet, then for many years believed her vocation lay in becoming a nun.

In the end, however, she settled on a husband and a life in the law.

Of her success, she says, In my my family it was just bog standard. I was

brought up to believe that everyone is the arbiter of their own fortune. If you said

to my father no one else is doing it he'd say good you can be first.

Yet it seemed Patricia Scotland as if this truly glittering career may reach an abrupt end just a couple of months ago.

It was September when we found out through the newspapers

that you had been employing a housekeeper who has subsequently been charged with working in the UK

illegally. You were fined 5,000 pounds.

For your political opponents it was a complete gift this situation,

something of an own goal for you.

I think 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.

For legal reasons, we can't discuss that. I was fined, I accepted it.

...