Who's the opposite of Bridget Jones? The fearless Karren Brady, says Carole Cadwalladr, as she asks Britain's best-known businesswoman about ambition, three-day maternity leave, and what Alan Sugar really thinks
I can't help thinking that I've arrived too late to interview Karren Brady. Not on the day – I've watched too many episodes of The Apprentice to court that sort of disapproval; I know that the merest hint of Brady's eyebrows inching north can indicate the start of an Arctic-style freeze-out – but the year. By my reckoning, I'm about two decades too late to get the really interesting stuff.
The problem is that Karren Brady is as smart and sensible in real life as she is on TV – very smart, very sensible – and as cool and collected – very, very cool and very, very collected – with a deep seam of common sense that seems to run through her like the Blackpool in a stick of Blackpool rock. It's no doubt why she's managed to achieve all that she has – at 42, she's one of Britain's most successful businesswomen, is happily married and has two children – but I do rather wish I'd had the chance to meet young, thrusting Karren. The feisty go-getter who wouldn't take no for an answer. The strict Catholic who when still a teenager working in telesales rang up David Sullivan, the publisher of the Sunday Sport, and tried to sell him ad space. And when he said no, went and turned up at his office in person.
Sullivan not only bought the ads, he offered her a job, and when later he bought Birmingham City Football Club on her recommendation, he made her managing director. She was 23. She turned up on her first match day in a powder-pink puffa jacket and when she met the squad, one of the players said: "I can see your tits in that top." To which, she replied: "Well, don't worry – when I sell you to Crewe, you won't be able to see them from there." She did sell him. As she did her now husband, then boyfriend, the Birmingham City FC player Paul Peschisolido. Twice.
Of this Karren Brady – the tough, ballsy (her term) wannabe – there's really no sign. And yet it's no wonder she's so at home on The Apprentice. She really was like one of those contestants, as cocksure and as pigheaded as the best of them. Sending you at 23 to run Birmingham, I say, that must have been like getting Stuart Baggs in to manage Vodafone.
"I know! Somebody asked me the other day if I could have done Junior Apprentice, and I said no. And I was talking to my chairman, David Sullivan, and he said: 'Don't kid yourself. You could have done it. You forget, I knew you when you were 19. You were that person.' I think you forget about the raw energy you have at that age. I really really wanted to be a success.
"I guess if someone said to me: 'There's a 23-year-old woman going to run Man U', I would say: 'Don't be so ridiculous!' Because it does on the face of it seem staggering. But I didn't think that at the time. Someone asked me the other day, for a questionnaire: What's your biggest fear? And you know what? I don't have one. I don't have any fears."
Which may well explain a lot. Or at least some part of what has enabled Karren Brady to succeed in a world where so few women have. She was the first female managing director of a British premier league club. The youngest-ever managing director of a PLC (when Birmingham City floated on the stockmarket for £25m, she was only 27). And is now the vice chairman of West Ham, where she has overseen the team's bid to takeover the Olympic stadium – their bid has just been endorsed by the government and the Mayor of London.
It's been a fraught process, but as she says, "I'm not sensitive at all. I don't take things to heart. And I'm not particularly emotional. I'm very rational. I tend to let my head rule my heart. I equally accept that not everyone likes you, not everyone thinks you're great. And I guess that comes from a security. I'm very comfortable in my own skin. I'm very happy with the work I do. I feel appreciated for the work I do. And I've had success. Those things give you an inner confidence that it's hard to knock. But equally, even when I was 23 and running Birmingham, I had skin as thick as a rhino."
Some neuroscientists would say you've a male brain, I say.
"What do you mean?"
Well, they say that people with autism have hyper-male brains – they're all rationality, no emotion – and that we're all on a spectrum. But it's only a theory, I say hurriedly, when I see her face. And it's in decided contrast to her appearance, which is all soft curls, heavy lashes and curve-enhancing dresses. While the young female Apprentices stride in wearing trouser suits, she's more likely to be in a cocktail dress. "You've got to remember that I'm so much older than them," she says. "I did shoulder pads in the 80s."
Have your looks been a positive or a negative, would you say? "Definitely a positive. I mean, I'd never say that I'm good looking – that sounds awful – but when I was in my 20s and 30s, I think I'd be the person you'd remember at a meeting."
Which is partly why I'm curious about her and Sullivan's relationship. Wikipedia describes him as a "British pornography entrepreneur", and he's been an enormous influence in her life. Meeting him was "a sort of fate", she says. She was, quite simply, his apprentice. And he relentlessly supported and promoted her, and she still works with him. Was there an element of? I try and phrase this delicately – he was a man, you were a young, attractive woman… And she cuts me off.
"Most of the people who run David's companies are women. He's always been surrounded by them. And he's very straight, if that makes sense. A lot of people I work closely with, whether that's Alan Sugar, Philip Green, David Gold, David Sullivan – they're all from a similar sort of mould. Very self-made, very direct, very independent of thought."
A bit like your dad, I say. "Yes. Probably."
Brady doesn't really want to go there, won't indulge me on the subject, but it's hard not to spot the link between her father, a printer and self-made businessman, and the father-like figures in her business life. She grew up in Edmonton, east London, and as she grew, so did his business, moving the family from a terraced house into a world of Rolls-Royces and holidays to Barbados. No, she wasn't a daddy's girl, she says. No, she had nothing to prove to him. No, she doesn't know where her drive to succeed came from. No, she's never tried to impress him.
Although as a teenager she was good at sport. "I played for the county." But when her father pointed out there was no money in hockey, she gave it up. Isn't that a bit sad, I say.
"No. Why?" Well, lots of people do lots of different things for the love of it, I say. She shrugs. "Maybe they do. But that's not the way I thought when I was 17."
She doesn't really think she has consciously taken after her father any more than she has her mother, a glamorous, stay-at-home housewife of Italian extraction. But then she has perhaps always striven to be both. To be the successful businesswoman and the old-fashioned mother. She's always saying she wishes she'd had more than three days off after she had her first baby "but 15 years ago phrases like 'work-life balance' simply didn't exist". And even today her business brings her to London three nights a week, while her family is back home in the Midlands. "I still haven't worked it out," she says. "After all this time." What she has seemed to work out is how to encourage and empower women in business. When she left Birmingham City, 75% of her senior management team were women. "And it happened that I brought three people with me to West Ham, and it just so happened that they were all women."
She believes women interview women differently. "We see different things. I don't see someone who I think: 'Ooh, they might need days off because of their family.' I just see that talent of the person and whether that person would fit in."
Sir Alan, I point out, hasn't exactly been the most progressive in that regard. He's stated that he thinks maternity leave has gone too far, that employers should be able to ask about women's plans for children in interviews.
"Everyone is entitled to their opinion," she says. "Alan is honest about what he believes. I have a great relationship with him and I have never seen him be anything other than incredibly respectful towards women."
What's impressive about her is that she's quietly just gone ahead and promoted women, but she also believes in bigger changes. That the government should make childcare tax deductible, that public companies which don't have women on their boards should have to state why on their annual reports, and that there's an obligation on women like her to pave the way for younger women coming in. She's a judge on the newly launched Ambition AXA Awards, a scholarship scheme for 11- to 18-year-olds which funds high achievers in the fields of enterprise, science, community, sport and the arts, and literally says things like: "We need to make things better for our daughters, and our daughters' daughters, so that any stigma, or glass ceiling, simply shouldn't exist in 10 years' time."
Really? I didn't think anybody actually believed that was possible in the next 50 years, let alone the next 10. But then Karren Brady has hurdled so many obstacles, treated them as if they simply didn't exist, and is such a true believer in the concept of progress that maybe if we were all a little bit more like her, it actually would.
"Life is a series of problems, and how quickly and easily you overcome them generally means how happy you are. So I also have a unique ability, that is in my personality, that I can close a door and never look back."
Blimey, I can't help myself saying. How do you do that?
"A woman came running up to me on Saturday and said: 'My daughter has a brain aneurysm.' And I said: 'I'm sorry to hear that.' And then I realised she was asking my advice. [Brady was successfully treated for a cerebral aneurysm in 2006.] Because I'd honestly forgotten I'd had it. I dealt with it and moved forward, and I think sometimes if you spend your whole life questioning and analysing and driving yourself mad, you can't get on to the next thing. And I just don't have time. I'm always on to the next thing."
There's no doubt about it, there is a bit of a Superwoman aspect to Karren Brady. She's like the anti-Bridget Jones. She knows no weakness, experiences no doubts. Have you never had any sort of dark night of the soul?
"Maybe when I was ill. But only for a moment or two."
The more amazing thing is that she does it so affably. She's tough in her business decisions, but she's never been a shouter, says she hates bullying, never disagrees with any of my questions, and it's only later when I listen to the tape that I realise that half the time this is because she doesn't answer them, and the rest of the time, she says: "Yes, that's right…", only to then dismiss my argument entirely.
It's only towards the end of the interview that I realise there may be a flip side. I'm asking her about the Big Society, about whether well-off individuals such as herself will step in to fund public services. Is that really going to happen?
"Well, you wouldn't think so if you'd seen the march on Saturday. It's hard to work out what this country stands for any more. Complete anarchy on the streets. How are people allowed to go into London and just set fire to things?"
But that was just a tiny minority. Most people were there because they care for their local services.
"But say the shopkeepers came out and punched people on the nose. You'd have real anarchy."
It's interesting that she's brought this up, and I say so, because she's on the board of Arcadia, Sir Philip Green's company, and it was toward Topshop, and Green's unpaid tax bill, that a lot of the anger was directed.
"It's really not for me to speak on Philip's behalf. But he employs 45,000 people in the UK; they all pay tax. He pays corporation tax. They make a huge contribution."
But there's this specific issue of the £1.2bn which went offshore to Monaco. "Which is exactly the same as any foreign-owned company which pays its dividend outside the UK."
But does that make it right?
It's at this moment that the PR steps in. Karren has to go. Right now. And I switch off the tape recorder and we both gloss over our little spat and retreat to small talk, but when we get outside it's raining and she offers me a lift to the tube and we talk some more. "You will be sensitive about the Philip Green thing, won't you?" she asks. "It's really not my business. I'm a non-executive director."
What exactly does a non-executive director do, I ask, and she reels off a long list that includes things like "strategy" and "branding" and "core values" and looking out for "decisions that are bad for the business". Not paying your tax, and having protestors smash in your windows, feels to me like it would come under all these headings, so I'm leaving the question in. And actually I quite enjoyed finally seeing a bit of the Karren Brady steel I've read so much about. The married Catholic mother-of-two who chose a porn baron to be her mentor. One of Britain's most successful businesswomen, with, if you scratch hard enough, just the tiniest hint of the Stuart Baggs about her, too.
For more information about the biennial Ambition AXA Awards scheme, visit ambitionaxaawards.com
