One of Britain’s leading family lawyers, Maggie Rae, who has died suddenly aged 74, had a lifelong belief that it was imperative for everyone to receive fair treatment from the law, whatever their means or status. She won public attention for representing such stellar figures as Diana, Princess of Wales and the former wife of the Aga Khan, but regarded the dispossessed and the unfashionable as every bit as equal to the great and the good.
A member of the Communist party as a young woman, she joined the Labour party when living in Hackney, north London, with a fellow lawyer, Cherie Booth. The two became close friends – Rae made the bridesmaids’ dresses when her flatmate married Tony Blair – and their relationship would later be cemented by politics.
