Constance Briscoe went into the High Court libel action that could have wrecked her career fully expecting to lose, she says in an interview in today’s Times.

The judge, criminal barrister and author of the bestselling childhood memoir Ugly outlines her plan if the verdict had gone in favour of her mother, who claimed that the physical and mental abuse chronicled in the book was “a piece of fiction”.

She was going to resign from the Bar because it was “the only honourable thing to do”. Then she would garden at her home in France and write crime fiction.

Miss Briscoe, 51, was sure that she would lose because her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, 74, had persuaded several of her ten siblings to give evidence against her. Her own best witness, her sister Pauline, who had initially pledged to support her, disappeared. It was only four days before the trial, when social services released vital evidence showing official concern for how Ms Briscoe-Mitchell was raising some of her younger children, that Miss Briscoe first dared to imagine victory.

She burst into tears when the jury’s unanimous verdict in her favour was announced on Monday and celebrated with a steak in Covent Garden on Monday night (her first in years “but I felt quite bloody!”).

Her mother faces a legal bill of up to £500,000 with no insurance. Yesterday she said that she does not want to see her mother hounded from her home in southeast London but allowed to live in it until she dies, when the proceeds could pass to Hodder & Stoughton, her publisher.

Explore Law

• Columnists

• Law Panel

• Law Reports

• Student Law

Times Recommends

• The best legal yarns this Christmas
• Legal school 'earned £1m by exploiting bar course'
• Axe may fall on 5,000 more City lawyers