In the respectful stillness of court, Fiona Shackleton, representing former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney in his divorce in 2008, was waiting for the judge to make an order. Then something started to feel wrong.
“I was just writing, and then suddenly I thought, ‘My god, I feel I’ve had an accident.’ I couldn’t work out what was happening.” And then she did: “The entire carafe of water was being slowly poured over my head.” Heather Mills, McCartney’s soon-to-be-former wife, had made literal the cold soak of her unsatisfactory outcome.
Shackleton tried to process the water trickling down her neck. It was contempt of court to assault an officer of the court, so she could have reported Mills to the judge, but deemed that ridiculous. The judge’s clerk came out with a towel — “about the most unsavoury piece of towelling I’ve ever seen. God knows how many bottoms it had wiped” — and said: “His lordship says he hopes this helps.”
The picture of Shackleton outside the court shortly afterwards was worth a thousand settlements: her blond hair wet and swept back, her face still gleaming — but with a smile. The “Steel Magnolia”, her nickname, would not be shaken.
This is not where Shackleton thought she would end up — never mind the soaking, she did not see court or family law in her future. “I wanted to be a cook,” she says in a meeting room at her firm Payne Hicks Beach in the thick of autumn, as a storm pounds the pretty garden square outside. “I wanted to please people, I wanted to make nice food and I wanted to have much less responsibility than I’ve ended up having.”
