Maybe I just don’t know enough about what chief executives of major FTSE 100 companies get up to, but I’m mildly gobsmacked to find half a dozen of them hanging out in Gateshead on a wet Wednesday in October. At a reception for local councillors, I stumble across the CEOs of Argos and E.ON deep in conversation and watch the CEO of Everything Everywhere, a Dutchman of athletic build enjoying a casual lunchtime sandwich with a member of north Tyneside council.
“I am impressed,” the latter tells me later, “with the seniority of the people here.” He’s not kidding. But then, another CEO, Dido Harding, of TalkTalk, explains it me. They’re here “because Martha told us to be”. It just about sums it up. We’re all here, the CEOs, the local councillors, the cream of the north-east’s business fraternity, dozens of community groups, a hundred or so volunteers, me, because Martha told us to be.
And while hundreds of people are milling around the Baltic Centre, it’s not hard to spot her, the newly ennobled 40-year-old Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, the youngest female member of the House of Lords. She is wearing a high-viz top in the same fluorescent yellow you might wear if you were, say, under contract with Serco to dig up the water mains (it’s what fashion-types, I believe, call “neon”) and is wielding a black silver-topped walking cane. The effect, it has to be said, is not very baronessy but then Martha Lane Fox (the hyphen is used only in conjunction with Baroness) is not very baronessy: she celebrated her nomination by wondering aloud on Twitter whether she’d get a free cocktails and a set of nipple tassels (the Soho Society obliged with the latter; I see them a couple of days later on display in her house).
Gateshead is a long way from Soho, but there’s no doubt she’s in her element, charging around meeting local community groups and digital “champions”, hustling the gaggle of CEOs from one event to the next – the high-viz top comes into its own here – stopping only to deliver rousing speeches about why it’s so important that the seven million people who currently aren’t online in Britain, get online. At the first event of the day, Eva Eiseschimmel, marketing director of Lloyds bank, introduces Lane Fox, with a resumé of her career, back to when she co-founded Lastminute.com. “And what you don’t yet know,” she tells the crowd, “is that she is also the most amazing person.” I’ve been shadowing Lane Fox for all of about half an hour at this point (“Thank you for making me seem like President Obama,” she says), but this has begun to dawn on me too.
Because back in 2009, David Cameron appointed Lane Fox as the government’s “Digital Inclusion Champion”, one of those made-up job titles that politicians like to grandly announce, give practically no budget to, then forget about.
Martha Lane Fox and David Cameron Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA Lane Fox, however, had other ideas. She produced a comprehensive report on the UK’s digital strategy, which she presented to cabinet, set up an organisation, Race Online 2012, with the goal of getting an extra two million people online during the Olympics year, and made a set of proposals that resulted in the creation of the government digital service, which Mike Bracken, its head, describes as a radical attempt to “create a digital centre at the heart of government, something that hasn’t been done before in a country like Britain”.
It’s been a triumphant success, streamlining hundreds of government websites into one easy-to-use customer interface, gov.uk, tackling massive, wasteful government IT contracts, and: “It simply wouldn’t have happened without Martha,” says Bracken. “The government digital service wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t be here. She’s insightful, as hard as nails, deeply charming and utterly irrepressible. She’s a force of nature who’s been unrelenting in supporting the digital agenda both inside and outside government. She’s a modern marvel.”
And when the money for Race Online ran out, Lane Fox carried on regardless, setting up her own organisation, Go On UK, to “make the UK the most digitally skilled nation in the world”.
It’s a tall order and the event in Gateshead gives a small insight into why. It’s easy to assume everyone is online these days and there are just a few resistant octogenarians doggedly holding out against the internet, but the latest research, by Ipsos Mori for the BBC, shows that as well as the seven million who have never been on the net, 11 million people in Britain don’t have basic online skills, of which what Lane Fox calls a “staggering” 18% are 15- to 24-year-olds. “It’s like literacy!” she says. “It’s basic literacy! And it’s something that we’ve absolutely got to crack as a country.”
But then, in another century, she could have been one of those doughty lady missionaries who set forth and single-handedly built the empire: “I sometimes feel like I’m some kind of Victorian lady who would have gone to do jolly good work in a prison and am some sort of caricature of myself.”
Because there’s an evangelising zeal that she brings to the task, a zeal that has got the CEOs up to Gateshead, that has brought them together with the Post Office and Big Lottery and the BBC, all on a tiny budget of £1m a year, and that, despite what she calls her “incredibly privileged upbringing” and her millions in the bank, gives her the gift of being able to talk to just about anyone.
“I want to tell you why I have boundless enthusiasm for the internet,” she says in her second speech of the day to a hot, packed room of volunteers. She has rested her stick to the side and walked to the microphone with difficulty, her hip stiff and unwieldy: “I have felt the effect of technology at a very personal level. For me it’s about being able to do my shopping. Making sure I have cat food delivered. And that on days when I feel I just can’t get out of bed, I can still send presents to my friends. The internet has been my fundamental tool.”
She said something similar in her earlier speech, yet it doesn’t come off pat and she looks visibly moved when Kim Gallagher, a “community learning champion”, speaks next, telling how she became a carer when her husband became disabled a decade ago: “My world became very, very small. I was very isolated until someone showed me basic computer skills and the world came to me. I could keep up with family, and I couldn’t go anywhere, but at least on Google Earth, I could travel the world. I was really suffering with depression, but it helped me see that I wasn’t alone. There’s a whole world out there.”
Spreading the digital inclusion message at Gateshead: corporate chief executives attended ‘because Martha told us to be here’. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer A couple of days later, I meet Lane Fox in her grand, multi-storied Georgian townhouse. It’s in an area of central London where normal folk just don’t live, the preserve of foreign embassies and Saudi princesses and round the corner from Tony Blair. It’s a long way from Gateshead. But here’s a fact about interviewing: most rich people don’t want you to see their house. They don’t want you trampling through their hallway, eyeing up their artwork and making sarky remarks about their bathrooms. Their PRs organise beige hotel rooms or anonymous cafes. It’s partly convenience that we’re meeting here: some days, she’s not really up to leaving her house. Though it’s more than that, I think: she has no pretence. What comes across, after even just a short time in her company, is that she has a profound belief in equality and social justice. And since this stems from her own sense of luck and privilege, she has nothing to hide. Nothing to be ashamed of, or to pretend about. She is – refreshingly, unusually – transparent.
Because this is the house that Lastminute.com built, the travel website that was the poster child of the first dotcom boom, floating at an inflated share price on a sea of media hysteria, then becoming a cautionary tale when boom turned to bust and the share price crashed shortly afterwards. With her co-founder, Brent Hoberman, she spent three years building it back up, before selling it on (netting herself £13m in the process) and it’s one of the few survivors of what now feels like the internet’s Jurassic era: before Google, before Amazon, before Facebook. And luck, she says was “everything”.
“Or at least luck and timing are everything. I was incredibly lucky to meet Brent, that was the first thing. And we were both incredibly lucky to hit the acceleration and excitement around the web, which I think we partly helped to fuel. We were unbelievably lucky that we got our share flotation away, honestly on the last day we could possibly have done it, just before the stock market collapsed, so therefore the company was flush with cash and could survive. So, you know, of course we worked freaking hard, but at the same time luck is a massive part of it. On top of which, I had this insanely privileged education, an unbelievably loving home life, you know, all these things. I didn’t have to overcome any of the stuff a huge number of people do.”
But then, for all the massive amounts of good luck Lane Fox has experienced in her life, she’s had massive amounts of bad luck as well. On the day we meet, she’s been awake since 4.30 am. She doesn’t much want to talk about it, but she was in pain: “And sometimes you wake up at 4.30 and just have to get up. There’s nothing else to do.” In 2004, just months after leaving Lastminute.com, she suffered a horrific car accident in Morocco. She wasn’t expected to survive, smashed her pelvis, broke 28 bones, had a stroke, spent over a year in hospital, and is still dealing with the ongoing health issues it’s caused.
From her Twitter feed, I can see she was in hospital just a couple of weeks ago (“an infection”). She’s had 28 operations in total; two this year. And when we talk about Gateshead, she brings up Kim Gallagher, a full-time carer who says finding the internet changed her life. “I do understand how constricting and claustrophobic you can feel. It is as if the world does open up through the screen.”
Do you feel your accident does enable you to connect with people in a way you might not have done before?
“I don’t know. I hope … I haven’t … I mean I hope I’ve never been a pompous person. I like talking to people, so I don’t feel like I’m swooping in from my ridiculous house in Montagu Square who somehow, because I’ve got a stick, means I can talk to somebody who comes from a completely different background. I mean, it must have given me an extra layer of something, but it’s quite hard to analyse what that is in yourself.”
Do you think about it though?
“Yes I do, but I think it’s really tough and I don’t want to bang on about the accident but it’s a daily battle so I find it hard to pull out the strands of what’s good and what’s bad because it feels like I’m dealing with it all the time.”
It’s entirely understandable that she doesn’t want the accident to define her, but she can’t do the full-time kind of hands-on job she might otherwise have done. She has the sort of portfolio career which she says she thought she might have had “aged 60”; she’s on the board of Marks & Spencer, is a patron of Reprieve, the anti-death penalty charity, and co-founded the chain of karaoke bars, Lucky Voice.
But the corporate world’s loss is everybody else’s gain because she has thrown her energies into the “deep and troubling inequality in this country which doesn’t show any signs of going away”.
The launch of Go On UK Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer She believes – and it’s hard to see how she could be wrong – that technological inequality exacerbates social, educational and financial inequalities. And it’s only going to get worse. Not being online, or not knowing what to do online, makes life more difficult, more expensive. But the people who are not online are the most vulnerable, or excluded, or isolated around. The Gateshead initiative is a throw-everything-at-it attempt by Go On UK, part of a national programme they have so far rolled out in Liverpool and which improved the numbers of people getting online there by 55%.
She’s not exactly sure where her passion for social causes comes from. Her father is the classicist academic Robin Lane Fox and she went to Westminster school, the expensive London academic hothouse, then Oxford, where she read ancient and modern history. As a teenager, though, she tells me she wanted to be a prison governor.
A prison governor?
“I read a lot of William Godwin when I was about 16, 17, and was quite influenced by the things he wrote; that people are a blank canvas and all that stuff. And I think I watched something random on TV about a young offenders’ institution that was just so hideous. And I started writing to people in prison and one of the guys I wrote to killed himself and that was a very big experience for a 17-year-old.
“And I remember going to his funeral in north London somewhere. He was clearly very mentally disturbed and should have been in hospital. I was obviously outside looking in, but it just goes back to these 100,000 people in prison in this country costing us so much money and destroying lives.”
Prison reform is about as unfashionable and unpopular a cause there is. Which would just appear to be grist to Lane Fox’s mill. She’s supported Reprieve for years as well as a children’s legal support charity, Just for Kids Law, and her own grant-making trust, Antigone.
“I just think that everybody who has been lucky has a responsibility to try to improve other people’s luck. I really feel that very deeply.” But then, as Eiseschimmel tells me: “I’ve only met Martha three or four times but she’s this unique combination of understanding business and not-for-profit and she always has such a different take on things. I think she’s just one of life’s amazing people.”
Eiseschimmel is a hard-headed, successful businesswoman – a banker, no less – who has succeeded in the corporate world, yet talking about Lane Fox she almost comes across as a fan.
But then, I discover she is not alone. Harding of TalkTalk, another non-fluffy executive, is almost as gushing: “She’s incredibly humble and down-to-earth and she’s doing this because she passionately believes in it. But she’s also very calm and analytical as well. Which is quite a rare combination. She’s very clever at making the business case for doing the right thing.”
From what I can see, Lane Fox is the master of doing the right thing. I’d read that she “loves” paying tax. “Yes, of course I do,” she says. “It’s part of the thing that makes me very proud at making money.”
Baroness Martha Lane Fox at the launch of Go On UK in the North East. Sage Centre, Gateshead. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer She’s a member of the 30 Percent Club that aims to get more women on boards (her board at Go On UK is exemplary in this regard) and tries to support women in business and technology (she combines both interests by being chairman of Makie Lab, Silicon Roundabout’s It-Girl Alice Taylor’s 3-D printing business).And when asked what her advice would be to young entrepreneurs, she says: “Total love and devotion to your friends and family.”
I don’t think it’s the answer Alan Sugar would give, I say.
“No, but to me it’s the most important thing. You shouldn’t have to lose your humanity just because you work in the commercial world.”
I find it a bit excruciating looking back at the press coverage of Lane Fox from the Lastminute.com era. It’s so sexist, so patronising. She was conflated with her 1990s counterpart, Bridget Jones, and depicted as the air-headed singleton of the internet. A “webutante”. An e-babe. The “face” of Lastminute.com (as opposed to its “brains” – Brent Hoberman) who loved all things pink and glittery. And really, really wanted a boyfriend.
Hopefully we’ve all grown up a bit since then. And if anybody can get the seven million online, I think it really might be Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho. Go on UK. Go on Martha.
