Meeting Mary Portas, a retail revolutionary

Photograph by Neale Haynes. Mary wears neon T-shirt, £80, trousers, £120, and pendant, £45, Mary Portas at House of Fraser (020 7003 4000). Rarely ring, £240, at swarovski.com. In trolley, from left: Tonda clutch, £285, Diane von Furstenberg (020 7499 088

Annabel Rivkin

10 April 2012

'I'm bossy,' says Mary Portas. 'I can't make out I'm Mother Teresa. But you have to be bossy to get things done.' Being bossy is her business. She has bossed everyone from shopkeepers to retail giants and, when it comes to reinvigorating the British high street, was recently invited by David Cameron to have a go at bossing the government, in the form of the Portas Review. I'm sure that at Yellowdoor, the communications agency (her clients include Clarks, Comptoir des Cotonniers, Westfield and Louis Vuitton) she founded in 1997, she bosses till she's blue in the face, because she's a doer who expects those around her to be doers, too. Slackers get short shrift.

Easy to clash with a bossy boots. We circle each other sharkily for a minute or two, talking about her huge Swarovski rings and her thing for travelling everywhere by Virgin motorbike. It is true that she is brisk until she becomes heartfelt; while she is probably not for all markets, hers is a bossiness without malice and, counterintuitively, without excessive control. She'd rather believe in people and hand things over, but those people will have been thoroughly briefed in terms of what is expected of them. She is a natural leader, is Mary, with accents of the warrior queen. I find myself enthralled.

These days she is very famous: a window-dresser turned creative director turned entrepreneur turned journalist turned television presenter turned designer turned philanthropist turned government advisor turned underwear manufacturer - more of which later. And she hasn't meandered from one profession to the next. She has steadily added strings to a bow that must be groaning under the weight of so many vocations.

At 51, she is far more attractive than she appears on screen. 'I think I must look like a harridan on television,' she says and, indeed, the camera swells her features and portrays her as a bit tough and faintly lantern-jawed. Actually she has perfect skin, fine eyes, a natural elegance and that luminously glossy Mary Quant cap of orange hair. It would be marvellously convenient to write her off as a bit butch, because she is in a same-sex civil partnership with Grazia's fashion editor at large Melanie Rickey (they got hitched in May 2010 in edgy Antonio Berardi frocks), who is younger and even more willowy, and there you have a lovely ready-to-wear cliché.

But Mary, although imposing, possesses an undeniable delicacy. She could be brittle and bitter. Everyone would understand because, as a teenager, she had some nasty shocks. She was brought up in Watford as Mary Newton (Portas is her married name), the fourth of five children in a working-class Irish family. Her father was a sales manager for the tea company Brooke Bond and her mother had her hands full feeding, dressing, loving and taming her offspring. 'My mother was extraordinarily practical and strong,' says Mary. 'She was a fiery, feisty redhead and she was the centre of our world. Though we were very much working-class, she was obsessed with books and poetry and she played the violin. I remember her sitting on the landing at night and reading to us with all the doors open because she didn't have time to go round all the kids' bedrooms. I couldn't have asked for better.'

When Mary was 16 her mother contracted meningitis and was dead within two weeks. Her father didn't cope well. Unable to process his grief, he effectively signed out of the family and, with the older siblings away at university or working, Mary was left to care for her 14-year-old brother Lawrence. Within a year their father had remarried and moved out. 'I remember thinking that I wanted him to be happy because he was so lost,' she says, 'and being glad that I had got rid of that stress. It sounds ridiculous but he was so morose. Lawrence and I became a unit. It's only now, when I look at my daughter of 16, that I think, "How could you ever have done that? How could you ever have left your children in a state of grief?" '

A year later her father died, leaving everything to her stepmother, who promptly sold the house, rendering them genuinely destitute: no money, no parents, no security bar the kindness of family friends. 'Auntie Sadie and Uncle Don put up Lawrence and Auntie Sheila and Uncle Harry put up me,' she says. But this meant that she and Lawrence were separated and Mary cries at the memory. 'Oh, I don't know why I still get so emotional about it,' she chides herself, 'but it was scary. I had no roots. I have wiped a lot of that time from my memory.'

She found distraction and a sense of surrogate family in local amateur dramatic groups, but any chance of going to RADA was snuffed out along with her father's life. So she joined Bosch, working in telesales for car parts. 'It was hideous but I was in survival mode,' she says. 'Then one day I noticed the graphic design department and it was a bit like being in the desert and spotting a puddle.' She went to do a foundation course at Watford School of Art ('They didn't like me - they said I had no future - and I didn't like them') but part of the course was work experience in a department store. Mary was placed at Harvey Nichols: 'And I saw all the queens doing the windows and I was back in theatreland. It was installation, it was campy, it was art.'

This was 1979 and, much like today, times were hard and jobs were scarce. Mary wanted a place on the Harrods training scheme, but by the time she came to apply, the store had closed its books. 'At college, the head of department would lock her office and go out for lunch. I knew where she kept the key and every day I'd unlock her office and ring this personnel guy at Harrods.' Eventually the poor man admitted defeat and Mary got a place on the training scheme, moved into a flat in Notting Hill (then a gritty neighbourhood) and 'suddenly my world opened up; I was where I was meant to be'.

Her luck had changed and, talent and determination aside, Mary seems to have lived a life of 'right place, right time' ever since. Malcolm McLaren rapped on the Harrods window she was dressing and asked her to do the windows at his World's End boutique, so she freelanced up and down the King's Road until she spotted an ad for the display manager position at Topshop. Five years and all the marketing for 400 stores later, she was poached by Harvey Nichols.

It was around this time, on a night out with an old school friend at a wine bar in Pinner, that she first met Graham, a chemical engineer, now her ex-husband and the father of her children Mylo, 18, and Verity, 16. 'He walked in and was the most beautiful-looking man I had ever seen - and still is to this day,' she says. 'He was wearing a white T-shirt with a packet of cigarettes tucked into the sleeve. How cool is that?' The couple were married for 13 years and were amicably separated when Mary met Melanie at a Royal College of Art dinner in 2003.

The Portas-Rickey partnership was never a secret but they do not encourage the easy pigeon-holing of their union as a 'lesbian power couple'. They live in Maida Vale and entertain a lot, using mostly Bill Grainger and Ottolenghi recipes. They drink good red wine, garden and share wardrobes; they go nuts over Christmas and generally don't make a fuss of the fact that they are both women. But make no mistake, this is love. 'Melanie wakes up each day and the world is a beautiful place,' says Mary. 'I can be so much in my head, but you know when you see a kid and their face is full of joy and wonder? That's her. She gives complete love to the world and it is the most refreshing, beautiful thing.'

Mary is a sentimental woman, perhaps made more so by the unhappiness of her early family life. She was in danger of becoming too wedded to tradition and perfection. 'It was my divorce that freed me,' she says. 'And I fell in love with a woman and I had to think about what I was prioritising. I thought that for once I was going to make sure that I was totally and utterly happy and therefore I was going to make it work. And I don't want to sound smug but it is bloody brilliant. I know we've got it right and I know that my children are wonderfully interesting and interested because of it.'

Verity has been a bit nervy because of her exams and Mary pulls out her phone, plonks some spectacles on the end of her nose and reads out a text from her daughter: ' "Mummy, you always tell me not to be scared and not to be worried and fearing all the time. Well, I flicked open the book of Rumi [a 13th-century Muslim poet] yesterday and it went straight to the bit that says, 'Do not tighten your throat with fear, take sips of breath day and night before death shuts your mouth.' And it's true, I shouldn't waste my time on worry." She's going to be fine,' says her mother. 'I didn't learn that lesson until I was 40.'

Mary's Harvey Nichols years were when she separated herself from the crowd. 'Brian Sewell wrote in the Evening Standard that there was better art in the windows of Harvey Nicks than there was in the Whitechapel Gallery,' she says. She was recruiting (Boris's Routemaster superdesigner Thomas Heatherwick for one) from the Royal College of Art and concentrating on creating a spectacle and then placing the product within that spectacle, rather than the other way round. Her most famous coup was to offer Jennifer Saunders run of the store in exchange for name checks in the as-yet-unknown tele-vision series Absolutely Fabulous. A perfect brand marriage. 'I know what the next big thing is,' says Mary. 'I just know it.' In 1997, finding herself on the board and rather bored, she resigned from Harvey Nichols to set up Yellowdoor.

Then came her shopping column in the Saturday Telegraph magazine; her television series Mary Queen of Shops, in which she attempted to awaken beleaguered retail businesses; Mary's Living & Giving charity shops, which have raised several million pounds for Save the Children (arise Dame Mary, I can see it now) and, with fitting guidance from Antonio Berardi - 'what a good and charming man' - and considerable input from Melanie, she has launched a fashion range with House of Fraser.

After being approached by Steve Hilton - 'he is such a wonderful character' - and commissioned by Cameron, she put together the Portas Review, an independent report into the future of the British high street, which includes recommendations for a National Market Day, rate concessions for small businesses, reasonable parking restrictions, imaginative use of empty premises to help small businesses and young designers, as well as the creation of a 'town team, so instead of it being the landlord dealing with Starbucks and no one else in the town having a say even though they live there, you get residents to have a vote and we become co-creators instead of passive consumers. What we've had is the bullying tactics of big retailers saying, "I'm giving what the shopper wants." No, you've taken away the choice and we go to you because there is nothing else. It would be naive to think we could go back to butcher, baker and candlestick maker, but there is room for both,' she says.

Together with the Local Government Minister Grant Shapps, she has launched her Portas Pilots initiative, whereby towns are being encouraged to present their blueprints for the future of their high streets in the hope of winning £85,000 (there is £1 million in the pot) to put towards these plans. Many of the retail giants are singularly unamused: Simon Wolfson of Next called some of her recommendations 'insane', and Theo Paphitis, owner of Ryman and a small-screen Dragon, labelled her a 'window-dresser who has never run a shop'.

Her latest concern is to reignite British clothing manufacturing, through knickers and telly. Mary's Bottom Line shows her travelling to Middleton, a once-thriving, now deeply depressed Manchester orbital town, to reopen a lingerie factory and make pants using the local unemployed youth as machinists. Kinky Knickers (made from once internationally sought-after, now almost extinct Nottingham lace) are pure British, from material to labour to marketing. No sweat shops, no imports. The theory is that as prices rise in the Far East, so they rise in Britain's low-price fashion superstores, creating a window in which she believes the British clothing trade could flourish.

I like her pants. In fact, I am wearing her pants, in unexpectedly comfy bright pink and orange lace, but they also come in more staid colours. They are a tenner - dearer than Primark, cheaper than Elle - boxed in retro cardboard printed with tongue-in-cheek double entendres as well as uplifting 'Buy British' messages. They are stocked at Liberty, with Selfridges, Asos and House of Fraser next in line. She assures me that every penny of profit will be ploughed back into the business. 'People say, "Oh why are celebrities doing this stuff?" Because no one else is, matey. No one,' she says. 'So if I can give someone a job because of my contacts then I will bloody well do that: I am no saint, but it is the most wonderful thing to be able to do.'

Mary recently received a letter from the headmaster at her alma mater, a convent in Rickmansworth, where the teachers refused to allow her to be head girl despite a landslide victory in the polls. She was too mouthy, too risky. He wrote to admit that he had felt, even at the time, that he had backed the wrong
horse. 'Isn't that lovely?' she says. 'I wrote back and said, "But we did all right in the end, didn't we, sir?" ' ES

Meeting Mary Portas, a retail revolutionary

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