4 Thursday May 26 2022 | the timestimes2
What Amal
wants to change
about the world
for her daughter
The top lawyer also known as Mrs Clooney tells
Helen Rumbelow why she and activist Tanzila Khan
got Prince Charles to shine a spotlight on periods
the heir to the throne championing
in public (although in private
conversations with Camilla we know
he has form).
And now the circus has come to
a suite at Claridge’s hotel, where
Clooney and Khan are being fussed
over by a couple of dozen public
relations executives, social media
video producers and make-up artists.
The sheer number of bodies has
overheated the room to sweltering by
the time I sit opposite their sofa, with
a few of the team sitting on chairs
behind my back, making notes.
Clooney is the opposite of the diva
this set-up would suggest — she
winks a little at the strangeness of it,
apologises for the cold tea and plies
patisseries from her table. There is not
a crumb on her white dress. Her voice,
and I know this is specific, is similar to
that of the British-American actress
Jemima Kirke: warm, wry,
accompanied by an arching of the
eyebrow. If she has a tic, it is adjusting
the weight of her long hair, her
lifelong trademark and the only hint
that she was destined for a future less
conventional than her peers at the Bar.
It gives her a look something between
Angelina Jolie and Amy Winehouse:
Clooney reaches the near impossible
Hollywood standards of beauty, but
her head — and serious intellect —
seem to overbalance her
incorporeal body.
During our conversation
Clooney is determined to
showcase Khan, 31, an
impressive trainee lawyer
from Lahore, but I also want
to hear from Clooney. So
begins my hopeless attempt
to battle the deft negotiator
who knows how she wants
this meeting to turn out.
Clooney chose Khan for
the award for reasons that
may also reflect on Clooney’s
own life. “I could sense the
grit and I loved that she’s
not waiting for other people
to fix global issues. If the
government’s not going to
change policy when it
comes to gender then she’ll...
take one issue that she can
fix, and try and fix that in
t h e m e a n t i m e .”
Khan, by turns, who raised moneyfor charity in her teens by writing
novels, is meeting her hero from way
back: Mrs Clooney, not Mr. “Oh my
goodness, Amal, she has been part of
our lives even before she became
Mrs Clooney. A lot of girls in Pakistan
knew about her origins in Lebanon
and the work that she was doing.”
The media, said Khan, likes to
stereotype women from Islamic
countries as “weak, victimised”.
Clooney, by contrast, “just brushes
off stigma at the door. That’s how I
want to be.” It has been said of
Clooney that she is the intersection of
a Venn diagram of what people want
from a feminist superhero — from
legal scholars to fashion bloggers to
Muslim teenagers. While it seems
extraordinary that the girl from
Buckinghamshire grew up to marry
George Clooney, it seems fair that
her husband is a little awestruck by
her. He took the daring strategy,
after they met through a mutual
acquaintance at his lake house in Italy,
to court her by adopting the persona
of his cocker spaniel Einstein, who was
in need of legal rescue.The couple spent lockdown at their
home in Sonning, Berkshire, 20 miles
from where she grew up, with no
childcare for twins Ella and Alexander
for a year. Meanwhile, Clooney’s legal
demands did not stop, and her
magnum opus, The Right to a Fair
Trial in International Law, was about
to go to press. This is a gold-standard
textbook that she co-wrote with
Philippa Webb, her fellow legal
academic (Clooney teaches at
Columbia Law School) in round-the-
clock writing sessions at their pool
house. This pool house doubles as a
party room and contains a photo
booth that, as Clooney told Vogue,
produces some less-clothed late-night
shots of “just, like, George in a hat”.
Clooney used the pool house to
produce a 1,000-page, closely
researched and argued, possibly
life-saving book.
Unlike Michelle Obama or Hillary
Clinton, two high-profile lawyers who
arrived at fame via their husbands,
Clooney has ramped up her legal
career after marriage, while her
husband may have taken the strain.T
o meet Amal Clooney
at work is to meet one
half of her, the Amal
before the Clooney
happened. She wants
to talk about women’s
rights, and she is
authoritative and
disturbing in what she says: her fears
for a United States regressing on
abortion rights, the war crimes
inflicted on Ukrainian women by
Russian soldiers, forced marriage and,
well, the list is long.
But would Prince Charles have
invited her when she was Amal
Alamuddin to give her name to his
new award, the Prince’s Trust
International Amal Clooney Women’s
Empowerment award, which is the
reason I am here? The Alamuddin
who is a British-Lebanese human
rights lawyer, who worked her way
up from grammar school to the
University of Oxford to working at the
highest level in New York, London, at
the Hague and for the world’s most
deserving causes but who was by the
age of 35, as she said once in a speech,
“quite resigned to the idea that I was
going to be a spinster”? In an ideal
world you would hope so, but it isn’t
an ideal world.
Talk of her other half — George
Clooney, one of Hollywood’s most
famous actors, her husband
now aged 61 to her 44 years
and father to their nearly-
five-year-old boy-and-girl
twins — is taboo. Her
husband is also, of course,
the reason she has a
platform to benefit the
work of subjugated women.
I enjoyed the fact that
Clooney chose as her first
award recipient a female
activist and entrepreneur
called Tanzila Khan,
who founded a kind of
Deliveroo service for
period products in
Pakistan. “Step aside,
Amazon,” Clooney jokes
to me, “hers arrive in 20
minutes.” This meant
Prince Charles, 73, stood
on stage with Khan and
Clooney at the televised
event in celebration of pads and
tampons, something I hadn’t seenI loved that
she’s not
waiting
for other
people to
fix global
issues
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camp in GreeceClooney, Prince Charles
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