Superyachts, private jets and big parties — inside the world of billionaire Tina Green

Lady Green is often cast as the quiet wifey of a boisterous billionaire, probably because she is as reticent with the press as her husband is bullishly engaged. Those who know her, however, describe a tough, shrewd woman, who understands her husband and his business inside out.

Although it is often reported that Tina Green is from South Africa, she was born in England. Her father worked in the wine trade and the family travelled with his job to Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand. She has described herself as “something of a wild child and desperate to be older than I was”.

She met her first husband, Robert Palos, a South African who was 14 years her senior, in Hong Kong when she was 17. They travelled together to Japan and Australia before moving to South Africa, and were married when she was 18. “My God, if my youngest daughter, Chloe, did that, I’d have a heart attack,” she told The Sunday Times in 2014. “But I was a headstrong kid.”

The marriage lasted 20 years and they had two children, Stasha, an artist, and Brett, who is a property investor and on the board of Arcadia, tipped as a possible successor to Sir Philip.

Tina and Palos had a clothes shop in Johannesburg and then took the business to London. “Bobby was a wonderful man and everybody loved him, but he wasn’t driven in the same way I was,” she said. “I was pushing ahead with the business and needed him to help out when things were tough. Sadly, we grew apart.”

When she met Philip Green, the man she calls “the love of my life”, through mutual friends, she initially thought he was “dreadful”. She recalled in an interview: “I remember him asking who I was. I said I ran a boutique, Harabels. He said rather dismissively: ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ I thought: ‘What an arrogant man.’ ”

The next night they met at a party. She straightened his bow tie and “I just fell in love with him at that moment.” She moved into his London house with her children but he was reluctant to commit. She had to give him an ultimatum before he proposed, and they married in 1990 in the garden of their home.

She says that at the start of their marriage they weren’t rich. “He was a colourful character, but had zero money,” she recalled. “Just an ordinary person with a seriously strong work ethic. We are still ordinary people, but we’ve worked hard. We are what we are and I have nothing more to say, really.”

The Greens have two children, Chloe and Brandon. Chloe, 25, has designed her own shoe collections for Topshop, appeared in Made in Chelsea and perfected the “Instagram pout”. The other day she was pouting in Madrid with Cristiano Ronaldo. She has also been linked to the singer Marc Anthony and the footballer Jermain Defoe.

Brandon, 23, has joined the family business and is often to be found on one of the yachts or in one of those Tatler lists of most eligible billionaire offspring. He first attracted attention at his bar mitzvah, for which his parents flew 300 guests to the south of France and laid on entertainment that included a set by Beyoncé.

When the children were younger, Lady Green “loved being a home-maker looking after Philip and the children, and, to this day, I still love doing anything for him . . . cooking, putting away his clothes. Women are women and men are men. Does looking after your man take feminism back to the 1950s? Bulls***.”

A few years after their 1990 marriage Philip Green had heart scares and contemplated retiring from the retail business. In 1997 he was mugged by a man with a sword on the street near their home in St John’s Wood. Tina urged him to take some time off in 1998, but he returned to the fray and said later: “There would have been murder,” if he had found himself spending his life “walking along a beach holding hands”.

However, he decided to move his family abroad after the sword incident and denies that Lady Green is domiciled in Monaco for tax reasons. Her husband commutes back and forth on his private jet, staying in the Dorchester and working hard and playing with Kate Moss and his other celebrity friends. No doubt Lady Green chose Monaco over other locations for its fabulous cultural attractions.

She argued that when her children were growing up they had a more normal childhood in Monaco than in London because there was less attention. They worked in their father’s stores during the holidays. When they were younger she insisted: “The kids are not spoilt. Obviously they are very lucky, but they appreciate it.”

Lady Green once said: “Philip does nothing without consulting me,” and while the days of mapping things out on the kitchen table in north London may be long gone for the Greens, he is believed to consult her about key strategic decisions. Often that is how to spend it. They entertain on a lavish scale. For his 50th birthday they flew 200 people to Cyprus for a three-day bash.

“Why shouldn’t we have a wonderful party?” Lady Green said at the time. “Philip has earned it. I don’t understand the anger. I think, unfortunately, in this country there’s a lot of jealousy.”

She reportedly bought her husband a £7 million Gulfstream jet for one birthday, and a Monopoly set, reputedly with gold pieces and a £250,000 price tag, for another. There are his and hers Bentleys and, of course, most extravagantly, the yachts. In a world of haves, have yachts and have superyachts, there are also the Greens, who have two superyachts and are soon to take delivery of a third, a 90m floating tower of decks, pools, whirlpool baths, state rooms and staff quarters, called Lionheart, the biggest creation yet from the yard of the Italian luxury boatbuilder Benetti.

Summer isn’t summer in the Mediterranean without photographs of Green tanning his prosperous belly on the deck of one of his yachts with the likes of Simon Cowell, Kate Moss, Sylvester Stallone, Naomi Campbell and Kate Hudson.

Lady Green has her own career as a designer of yacht interiors, collaborating with the Italian designer Pietro Mingarelli. When she took Boat International magazine inside a Benetti superyacht for which she had conceived the lavish interior, she told the reporter: “I’m like a child. I just want to jump up and down.”

When she showed off some of her designer range of furniture to The Times a few years ago she explained how she worked. “I’m trained in . . . nothing. I didn’t even finish school. But to sell and design and to work and to graft and . . . I love that.”

Complimented once on her business instinct she replied: “Well, my husband did teach me. Am I a natural businesswoman? Yes, I think I am. I haven’t got a financial head, but I’ve got a creative head.”

She described her husband as “a financial wizard. He’s incredible. He’s got incredible perception — for people, for businesses. I can’t do what he does. I can’t do that. But I can do this,” gesturing at her collection. “And I can sell anything!”

When she gave the writer Polly Vernon her furniture sales pitch, Lady Green claimed: “You love it. If you were having an apartment, and you could afford it, you’d say, ‘I want this as my home.’ ” Vernon pointed out that she couldn’t afford it. “Yes. Well. That’s . . . it.”

Still, if you can’t afford her cabinets or a bar for your yacht, you can still pick up useful tips in her yachting-magazine columns. One key rule: “There is no excuse for omitting flowers from your life or your boat; it is not about money . . . it is about time and effort.”

There is uncertainty over Lady Green’s age (she doesn’t like to go into it in interviews), but she is about 65, and everyone agrees that she is glamorous in an expensive, ash-blonde, leather-trousers, diamonds-the-size-of-sugar-lumps sort of way.

“It’s been quite weird to watch Mum and Philip build up this business,” her daughter Stasha said. “And it’s been difficult at times too. When I read some of the things that have been written about Mum, it makes me so angry. I see these things and think: ‘That’s not the woman I know.’ Mum and Philip have built up their business from nothing.

“Most of the people who judge Mum don’t know her. She created her own success and built her own dreams. She’s a blonde hurricane, and I’m so lucky to have this tough independent little lady as my mum.”

So there are two hurricanes in the Green house(s). Lady Green was once asked about her husband’s famous temper. She defended him robustly, saying he can be “outspoken and he tells it like it is, and sometimes it’s been mistaken for arrogance, but most people respect and like him for that. He’s got a big, loud lion’s roar, but it’s over in three minutes. It’s gone.”

She may hope that the furore over the collapse of BHS will pass as swiftly.