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.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is the lawyer Dame Aelish Angelini, the first woman to become

both Scotland Solicitor General and Lord Advocate, she's currently Principal of St. Hughes College, Oxford. It's a long way from govern, where her father heaved bags of coal round the streets and there wasn't always money for the meter. She was the youngest of four and

by her own admission being Gabby was the only way she got heard. It's an early skill that

seems to have served her pretty well. In the legal establishment she's gained a reputation

as a gutsy modernizer, unafraid to challenge the system. Among her innovations,

a pioneering support scheme for vulnerable victims and establishing the National Crime Sex Unit

for Scotland, the first of its kind in Europe. Her predisposition to seeing things from

the victim's point of view might have something to do with her own experience. In 1984

she was badly injured in a real disaster that killed 13 others, including the two men sitting

opposite her. She says advocacy is a great life skill. If you go to your

bank manager asking for an overdraft or if you barter at a market, you're

employing advocacy skills. It's all about empathy and charisma.

You once said that you think that part of your success has been done to the fact that you were never afraid to ask the stupid question, the obvious question.

Being able to ask the obvious question, the obvious question, what seems like the stupid question

though, that takes actually quite a lot of confidence, inner confidence.

Possibly are also naivety and stupidity, which I had an abundance in the early years, but I think we call it in Scotland, the daft lassie question or laddie question, is something which I always encourage, never be inhibited from asking the question just because you think that you somehow

humiliate yourself that very often it's the one that everyone is struggling with and ultimately it became very useful in the context of

cross-examination and advocacy later on in life.

How interesting.

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