Lane Fox's new venture

13 April 2012

NE year after the accident that nearly killed her, entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox tells journalist Simon Brooke that she's back on fight form with a new business.

MARTHA Lane Fox's Mayfair flat is huge, modern and elegantly understated, but piles of books and unopened post betray the fact that she hasn't spent much time here recently; she still has to return to hospital quite regularly for further operations.

Considering she very nearly died when she was flung out of a Jeep in Morocco last May, and was only released from hospital in December after six months, she looks remarkably well.

The only clues to her injuries - she now has so much metal in her that she will need a letter from her doctor to explain to airport security staff why she is setting off alarms - is one arm which lies motionless on her lap while she speaks, and the walking sticks leaning against her chair.

Although she doesn't rise to meet me, her handshake is firm and her voice soft but confident. It is clear that, despite the walking sticks, the pain that still endures and the scarring on her arms and legs, Martha Lane Fox is back, on fighting form - and keen to talk about her new passion: karaoke.

Bizarre though it might seem, the Oxford-educated internet entrepreneur whose own brother dubbed her 'Fast Lane Fox' is now developing a chain of upmarket karaoke clubs called Lucky Voice, the first of which opened in London's Poland Street last Tuesday - the day before she finally sold lastminute.com, netting what is reported to be about £13m.

We meet the day after the opening and just hours after the shareholders' meeting that approved the sale. I ask what kind of response she received from shareholders, given that it was her first public appearance since the accident. 'Very pleasant, everyone was very nice,' she says modestly.

She had met her business partner in Lucky Voice, former advertising executive Jonny Shaw, on a group holiday in Ibiza two years before the accident. They had spent six hours a day singing in Tokyo to research the market. But while she was in hospital after the accident she found she could no longer bear to listen to music.

'Music is so emotive for me - it just upset me too much,' she says. 'Even now I find it quite hard sometimes because I associate it with happy times. In hospital I thought I'd never see good times again, or be able to go dancing.'

Does she feel like her old self now? 'I'm able to use email again,' laughs the former workaholic. 'But I'm not sure if that's a blessing or not.'

The most celebrated face of the dotcom boom, famous for bringing us lastminute.com with business partner Brent Hoberman, she stepped down from the board last year to relax, travel and do some of the things she hadn't been able to during the manic 18-hour days, seven days a week spent nursing her internet baby.

On Sunday, 2 May 2004, with £5m in her bank account and a few million more to look forward to, a new boyfriend, mobile phone entrepreneur Chris Gorell Barnes, by her side and the world at her feet, Martha Lane Fox was in Morocco enjoying one of the short breaks she had made her money promoting. She and Chris had enjoyed a lazy lunch at a café near the town of Essaouira and were now driving through the desert to a beach.

With them was a friend, Duncan Flower, who had been working on the set of the movie Kingdom of Heaven.

'It had been raining on and off,' Lane Fox remembers. At about 3.30pm Flower was forced to turn the steering wheel abruptly - quite why has never been established - and the Jeep skidded out of control.

The two men suffered only minor injuries but their fellow passenger, probably because she wasn't wearing a seat belt, wasn't so lucky. 'I flew out of the car, across the desert, and landed on a rock,' she says.

The impact shattered her right arm and leg and smashed her pelvis in six places. What was less obvious but more serious, as she lay unconscious, was that she was suffering massive internal bleeding, and fragments of bone from her crushed limbs were beginning to circulate through her blood stream. 'The risk was that one would reach my brain,' she explains.

Duncan Flower's movie contacts helped transport her to hospital in Essaouira, then to a better equipped hospital in the Moroccan capital, Rabat.

Here she was stabilised, but it was her friends and colleagues at lastminute.com, Brent Hoberman and newly appointed chairman Allan Leighton, whose initiative saved her life when they chartered a special plane to take her to the trauma unit at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

SEARCH: 'Martha Lane Fox'

'I have some recollection of the hospital in Essaouira,' she says. 'But I don't really remember anything until I came round in intensive care. I was scared because I was on a ventilator and couldn't speak. The first person I saw was my mother. I remember trying to ask her immediately, 'Is Dad cross with me?' 'Of course not,' she said.'

Lane Fox continues, 'You can't move, so, very quickly, you go into protection mode. As time wore on I realised this wasn't going to be over in six weeks or even six months, that it was going to be years, and that became more frightening.'

Doctors began the painstaking work of clamping her shattered limbs together with metal supports. 'I'm like a small titanium factory,' she smiles. 'My arm is metal, my leg is metal and so is my pelvis, pretty much.' There were more operations to graft skin on to her right leg, which is still extensively scarred.

Does she mind people seeing her legs and arms? 'I'm used to the scars now,' she says quietly. Wearing swimming costumes again will take some getting used to. 'One day, when I'm walking down an Australian beach, I'll get my leg out and people will think I'm a surfer dude,' she jokes.

{2}

In July, she was transferred to the Wellington Hospital in St John's Wood where the recovery - and the operations - continued. But even at this stage progress was slow. During one operation her lungs filled with blood, and later her leg became infected and she was forced to undergo further operations to prevent the bone disintegrating.

'At first you just go from hour to hour, getting through the pain,' she says. 'Then, when I moved into rehab in September, I behaved like the true public school girl I am and became furiously goal-orientated. I had lists of things to achieve each week. Sitting up, for instance. That took seven months.' Was she ever depressed?

'I've been so lucky, I've had the most incredible reminder of what a wonderful family I have and a network of 10 to 20 friends who have been to see me every single week for 13 months; without them I don't think I would have had the will to get through it,' she says.

'I finally got out in December but I had to go back for two more operations this year, so I've really only been out of hospital for three months,' she says. Now, back home, although the live-in nurse is gone, Martha still relies on two assistants for her business and personal needs. She can walk unaided apart from the sticks.

She has a physiotherapy session every day, which includes regular visits to the pool. 'It's splashing more than swimming,' she smiles, adding: 'I did break 28 bones. I've always hated sport - but I had started running just months before the accident. The surgeon told me that's one thing I'll probably never be able to do again. I said, 'Can I have that in writing, please?' '

Other than this, she should, with time, be almost back to normal. Asked whether the accident has changed her outlook on life, she answers with typical vehemence: 'No, absolutely not. It's just made me more determined to enjoy life and make a difference with things like my charity work.' (She supports Reprieve, which campaigns for people on death row, and Camfed, which helps young girls in Africa.)

Now 32 ('I keep thinking I'm 31 because I've lost a year of my life'), she is still with Chris Gorell Barnes, who came to see her almost every day in hospital. 'He was one of the people who convinced me that I could get through it,' she says. 'We made lots of plans together and that inspired me to a huge extent.'

Marriage was not one of them, though. 'I don't want to get married,' she says firmly. 'My parents have both been married several times and I'm not religious - children are much more important to me.' She is hoping that she will still be able to have them.

'That was the biggest shift when I was in hospital. When I had the crash all my friends were young, free and single, and when I came out they were all living together and having babies.'

But even during her treatment and recovery, she says she was desperate to get back to work, looking at new projects and proposals. 'One guy contacted me and said 'Bowls! It could be as big as Formula One. It just needs someone to head it up.' Well, it won't be me.'

Lucky Voice Private Karaoke, 52 Poland Street, London W1; 020 7439 3660, www.luckyvoice.co.uk

MORE ABOUT

Business Partnership