Labour’s former Attorney General tells Peter Stanford why she wants to lead the ­Commonwealth When Patricia Scotland was rushed into hospital with terrible gall stone pain, the doctors reassured her it would only require a simple, routine operation. “I tried to tell them,” recalls the former Attorney General, “that I was the exception to every medical rule, someone who ruins every survival statistic, but they just thought I was bonkers.”And so, on that day in April 2013, Baroness Scotland, the youngest woman – and the first black woman – ever to be appointed a QC and currently front-runner in the race to become the next Commonwealth Secretary-General, did what she has done throughout her stellar career in the law and politics. She put herself