ACROSS the country you could hear a collective pin drop as Lady Brenda Hale, President of the Supreme Court, delivered the judgment. “The Court is bound to conclude, therefore,” she read smoothly, “that the decision to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament was unlawful”.

She worked through the unanimous decision of 11 of the UK’s most senior judges – the result of a judicial review prompted by SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC and businesswoman Gina Miller – with efficiency and style.

And why would it not be carried out with such aplomb? Here was a woman with some five decades of experience and a first-class law degree from Cambridge behind her. A legal trailblazer, she is one of only three female Supreme Court justices and the first woman to be its president. In 1984, she became the first woman to be appointed to the Law Commission. Her role both in legislative landmarks such as the Children Act 1989 and in reforms of the legal system itself has been critical.

So, with such an embarrassment of riches to choose from, to which of these glittering attributes did the Daily Mail’s headline writer reach later that day? But of course – ex-barmaid.

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To be more specific: “Ex-barmaid with a spider brooch who spun legal web that snared PM,” the paper’s piece on Lady Hale was titled. Maybe it was an attempt at a witty pun. Get it? She worked behind the bar, and ended up being called to it?

This is the paper that brought us that “Who won legs-it” front page in 2017, gleefully diminishing high-profile political talks between the First Minister of Scotland and the then-prime minister Theresa May to a beauty pageant. It’s fair to say it’s got form.

But the Lady Hale joke fell flat. Most saw the promotion of an interesting detail into a defining feature of her career for what it was – an attempt to reduce one of the sharpest legal minds in the country to a sort-of twisted My Fair Lady tale with extra helpings of misogyny.

Who would have believed that a working-class girl from Yorkshire could make it into the ultimate London old boys’ club, was the eyebrow-raised subtext.

The tale of Eliza Doolittle – the flower girl who becomes the aforementioned Fair Lady – is based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, this sculptor found real women beneath him and fell in love instead with his own creation. Of course, she ended up becoming real as well as ideal, according to the myth, and wham, bam, he had himself a happy ending.

The story of the man-made woman is one that has run and run in various guises, from Adam and Eve to Cinderella, Pretty Woman and beyond.

Bat away any humour intended by the barmaid headline and this framing of Lady Hale casts her too in ivory. It tells the tale of a woman who came from nowhere and was moulded for greatness by the UK’s male-dominated establishment, rather than one who devoted her considerable energy, intelligence and determination to break into a profession overrun by the most privileged.

And it’s not just the misogyny that rankled. It was also the sneery attitude to minimum wage work that the vast majority of the population will have done – for the most part out of necessity – at some point in our lives. In the UK, more than one in five (22%) of those older than 18 were earning less than the Living Wage of £8.75 per hour in 2017 – in Scotland it was 18%. Of those, two thirds were working in the “accommodation and food” sectors, and were more likely to be women.

In this number are many who work low-paid jobs for decades, struggling to keep body and soul together. There are also those who will move on to better-paid and higher-status roles.

On social media, before you could say “custom-made £10 T-shirts complete with spider broach graphic have already sold out”, women were claiming back the term barmaid. Doctors, academics, microbiologists and other leading lawyers celebrated their former barmaid status with pride.

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Those still pulling pints could argue there were some rose-tinted glasses being polished here. There is still much to do in terms of securing better employment rights for those working in the bar trade. Campaigners, such as those from Better Than Zero, are calling for an end to the zero-hours contracts and unfair pay that are rife in the industry.

Working predominantly, but not only, with young people struggling to make ends meet, they point to links between precarious work and the widespread sexual harassment many bar workers report.

They point also to the vulnerable positions they are regularly put in, counting takings or locking-up alone, late at night. It’s telling that a campaign which calls for staff taxis to be implemented as standard for those working until the wee small hours is still necessary.

It’s a job where sexism is rife and double standards can be traced back in time. While the term “barmaid physics” suggests you haven’t fully understood scientific theory until you’ve explained it to the daft woman paid to serve you drinks, the stereotype of the capable, discreet barman is something far more desirable.

He’s a man of the people who knows the score. It’s an image Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been all too keen to utilise. Media photocalls where they pose while pouring pints play a part in fraudulent campaigns to impersonate those outwith the elite establishment.

It’s a deception that matters because it works. According to data from the Resolution Foundation, in 1974, just over half of ABs voted Conservative, along with 26% of C2s and 22% of DEs. By the 2017 election the class dynamics of voting for a right-wing party had dramatically shifted. In spite of austerity cuts and welfare reforms that have contributed to a dramatic rise in inequality, 40% of C2s and 41% of DEs voted for the Tories across the UK.

What’s more, Branko Milanovic, the Serbian-American economist best known for his work on income distribution, argues that analysis of global data shows that the greater the inequality in a society, the further away from democracy it moves.

Suggestions that the former Eton schoolboy Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – whose father was a politician, author and former World Bank and European Commission employee, and whose mother is an Oxford-educated artist – is anti-establishment are clearly absurd. He is unlikely to have ever relied on bar work as Lady Hale did.

Yet as someone who did bar jobs right through both under and post graduate degrees, I’d suggest he’s all the poorer for it. I may have spilled pints over some punters and sometimes used the wrong drink promo codes and forgot to set the burglar alarm, but through bar work I honed some serious skills.

For a start, there was the multi-tasking know-how needed for pouring two pints balanced on upturned glasses while reaching across to the optics for the gin.

Deadline pressures? A breeze when you’ve dealt with an average five-deep-at-the-bar Saturday night and the keg needs changed. Assertiveness training? Try diplomatically throwing out the drunk who just pinched your bum (again).

In a world where it is still men who for the most part prop themselves by the bar for the evening on their own, being a barmaid can also mean eves-dropping on a traditionally male domain. It offers a fast-tracked education in dealing with entitlement, in sifting the lonely from the deluded and the downright dangerous.

There are occasions when it depends on an ability to be calm even when a storm of alarming behaviour erupts around you, to be the rational one in the room when everyone else has drunk their logic into oblivion.

I am sure, in that aspect especially, it will have served Lady Hale well. But let’s call time on the misogyny. The story is not that she once poured pints, but that she is now making history.