By Sheila Mckenzie-
A family barrister has been cleared by the Bar Standards Board over tweets she sent about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s new baby.
Joanna Toch was widely criticized and briefly suspended from the Family Law Cafe, the company she founded in 2017, following tweets about the name of the Sussexes’ second child, Lilibet Diana, last June.
It followed a comment from former Daily Telegraph columnist, Julie Burchill, that the name was a ‘missed opportunity’, adding: ‘They could have called it Georgina Floydina!’ Toch, in an apparent reference to the Duchess of Sussex’s mother Doria Ragland, replied: ‘No Doria? Don’t black names matter?’
After Burchill replied that she was ‘hoping for Doria Oprah’, Toch also responded: ‘Doprah?’ Her rhetorical question was interpreted to mean that the Duke and Duchess Of Sussex could have chosen a name closer to Oprah, in other words Oprah Winfrey, who had interviewed the Duke and Duchess Of SussexToch, who was called to the bar in 1988, deleted the tweets shortly after they were published, apologized, and shut down her Twitter account.
The Family Law Cafe said the comments were ‘offensive [and] unacceptable’ and briefly suspended Toch, who returned to work the following month. Toch’s comments were further criticized by the Family Law Bar Association, which said it had referred the tweets to the BSB and the Bar Council.
The BSB received dozens of complaints about the two tweets, which the regulator’s decision-making panel said some people found offensive though it added that this alone was not a basis for finding a breach of the BSB handbook.
The panel concluded that the posts did not diminish public confidence in the profession or undermine Toch’s integrity or independence and dismissed the complaints against her.
Toch said in a statement: ‘My tweets were misinterpreted, perhaps deliberately by some, and I was publicly vilified with threats made about me and my family. The furore was whipped up by those who should have known better in my view.’
She added: ‘I am now going to get on with representing people who need to have their voices properly heard and make family law representation accessible to as many people as I can.’