Five publishers bid for the anonymous blogger’s first-ever title
The Secret Barrister, a junior criminal barrister whose fly-on-the-wall accounts of law, crime and justice were read by half a million people last year, is to publish a book, The Law and How It’s Broken in 2018.
The book, to which Pan MacMillan secured the rights beating four other publishers in an auction, is the latest installment in Secret Barrister’s rapid success story; the blog only went live a few years ago. SB joined Twitter in 2015 and now has 31,000 followers.
Going mainstream, the unidentified blogging barrister featured in the Huffington Post earlier this year with a damning indictment of Iain Duncan Smith’s clanger when he criticised the Supreme Court for being “self-appointed” and telling parliament “how to run its business.”
The book, the blogger says, is intended for a general audience to get across the importance of the criminal justice system and why it matters that the system works properly. Continuing, the barrister told Legal Cheek:
I wanted to write a book to show the public what really goes on behind the courtroom door. By writing about these problems from an insider’s perspective, I hope to demonstrate to a non-legal audience why criminal justice is so important, and to illustrate what happens when we allow those in charge to chip away at our most basic freedoms. Anyone can be a victim of crime, and anyone can be wrongly accused of a crime. And you will want the system to work properly if that person is you.
The blogger has, so far, held onto anonymity. Could a book deal change that? The Secret Footballer, the anonymous Premier league football player and columnist, has managed to keep his identity under wraps even with four books under his belt; so it is possible to be successful and a secret.
There is one thing which the Secret Barrister makes no secret about, however, and that is their strong views. In an interview with Counsel magazine last year, SB said:
It is public miseducation and apathy that has permitted recent governments to wantonly vandalise the justice system to such devastating effect.
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