At the risk of conflating Oscar Wilde’s gag about the importance of taking appearances at face value with the Canadian sage Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink on instant decision-making, I contend that only a fool would not judge by first impressions. My dilemma, however, in applying this method to Karren Brady lies in choosing which first impression to take: the initial view provided by The Apprentice or my first personal encounter.
On The Apprentice, Brady – who thanks to David Cameron is these days Baroness Brady – is Lord Sugar’s dry-eyed sneak, raising a lethal eyebrow as his would-be business partners go out and lose him money. She is impatient of their bombast, impulsiveness, innumeracy and touchiness and in favour of very thick skins, having self-admittedly developed the hide of a rhinoceros by the time she was running Birmingham City Football Club, aged 23. So Karren Brady, first impression number one: terrifying.
When, however, she calls off our interview for a second time because her father is in hospital, she rings me early to apologise and work out a plan for meeting a few days later. My second first impression therefore is that Brady is someone with the grace to say sorry personally and the imagination to appreciate someone else’s professional obligations. More than that, the woman who notoriously went back to work three days after giving birth to her first child, 26 years later demonstrably puts her family first. She used to describe herself as a working mother; at the age of 53 and with Terry Brady in his mid-seventies, she is now, like so many women, a working daughter.
We duly meet three mornings on in a hotel thoughtfully near the station I use to get into London. One minute early, immaculate in a creamy white blouse and black trousers, she orders a glass of water. I won’t go into her father’s ailments, but he is safely at home and recovering, so the family will be together at Christmas: Terry, the millionaire printer turned property developer; Karren’s mother, Rita; and Karren’s husband, the Canadian former footballer Paul Peschisolido. Also at the table will be their two adult children, Sophia and Paolo, who live next door to each other. Brady speaks to both every day and sees them at least four times a week.
So how did they turn out so well, I ask, impressed. She ponders this. “I think,” she answers, “we always listened to our kids. We always taught them right from wrong. We gave them values. We taught them the importance of respect and kindness to one another, manners and that doing things you love is important.”
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As a mum, who would not hire her?
How else do we judge people, however? That would be by the company they keep, and here things are complicated. Her 2012 memoir, Strong Woman, contains warm praise for two former pornographers, one of them still her boss at West Ham United where she is CEO, the other a friend. She also gushes over a subsequently humiliated high street titan. No one has ever doubted Brady’s integrity, but I fear I shall have to ask her about David Sullivan, Richard Desmond and Sir Philip Green, my main question being, “Why, oh why, oh why?”
As far as viewers are concerned, for the next three months she will be in the company of Alan Sugar and the 18 candidates competing to win his £250,000 investment in their businesses. Every non-Covid year since 2009, Brady has spent five and a half weeks helping Sugar whittle – not to say grind – down such aspirants. By series end, she says, everyone is shattered. This year’s filming has been more exhausting than ever with several tasks set abroad.
Episode one sent the wannabes to Antigua on a two-night mission to sell and conduct tours. On the beaches, the boys were in their business suits and the girls in their high heels, having have gone straight from boardroom to airport. When, later, Brady and her time-and-motion partner, Claude Littner, said they would see them back in the boardroom “tomorrow”, they meant just that: after an overnight flight home.
The format obviously depends on the contenders’ idiotically high self-evaluations being radically priced downwards. Is there occasionally, though, someone Brady identifies as a younger her? I am thinking of last year’s winner, the Huddersfield baker Harpreet Kaur, who in Bradford in August opened her third cake shop.
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“I did like her a lot, but she’s her own person and it would be patronising, I think, to say that,” Brady replies. What about Kaur’s suggestion she’d be willing to lose her business partner, her sister, if it meant she could secure investment? “She and her sister work very well together. I think they’re a good partnership.”
It makes a change. This week’s opening episode had the women’s team shred itself with recriminations and pre-emptive arse-saving. Is it my imagination or in recent years have the teams become more dysfunctional?
“It’s interesting because before, when it was a job [with Sugar] on offer, you got a certain type of character that thrived. Now that it’s to set up your own business, you get much more entrepreneurial types, and many entrepreneurial types never really work with other people.”
Solo entrepreneurship was not Brady’s route into a lifestyle that, according to her book, encompasses a “lovely home in the West Midlands, a Bentley, a flat in Knightsbridge” and first-class flights. After leaving school she worked first at Saatchi & Saatchi and then at LBC selling ads. It was there she persuaded David Sullivan to advertise his Daily and Sunday Sport newspapers on the station. She was 19 but so impressive that he hired her. Four years later, he had her running Birmingham City. She knew little of football but recognised an underexploited brand when she saw one. By the time she left, the club had its own credit cards, mobile phones and a funeral service.
Sullivan is the majority stakeholder in West Ham United. He is an economics graduate and a philanthropist. Back in the pre-digital days, however, he owned market-leading adult magazines and 150 sex shops. Brady had nothing to do with those but was involved in the Sunday Sport, famous for its front-page headlines about Second World War bombers found on the far side of the moon, a “sex dwarf” eaten by otters and (my favourite) the Man from Atlantis being arrested in a pub brawl. It was nevertheless also famous for its off-the-scale nipple count. In her book (which is otherwise commonsensical and probably inspiring, especially to young women), Brady simply says that “under David’s shrewd and inspirational guidance” they built “a fun company into a £50 million empire”.
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“Well, David,” she says when I ask the case for his defence, “is a serial entrepreneur who set up businesses, is hugely generous to charities and does incredible work in his local community, whether that’s through West Ham or his own personal charities. He is a real go-getter, runs some incredible businesses, has done some incredible things. I mean, in his early days, before I worked for him, he had a series of adult magazines. I don’t think there’s anything overly… You can look at that through one lens or you can look at it more broadly and see he has very diverse interests.”
But when she first worked with him, as a young woman, through which lens did she view his pornography?
“It didn’t touch me, I don’t think. When you’re young, you’re just interested in getting on and getting a job and working hard and you tend to be less reflective. Nowadays people are much more reflective on organisations and cultures and all of those things, which is great.”
Companies actually acknowledge their social responsibilities?
“But I think at the time it didn’t even occur to me.”
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So to her second hero: Richard Desmond, “a friend” as she calls him in her book. The founder of the publishing group Northern & Shell, he is the former owner of the Daily Express and Channel 5. He made his early fortune, however, from Asian Babes, Barely Legal and Television X, which broadcast the Bafta award-winning series Superdick and Shagnasty and Muttley (upon checking, I discover they are not Bafta-winning). In 2020, the housing secretary at the time, Robert Jenrick, approved Desmond ’s luxury housing development in the Isle of Dogs against advice and Desmond made a donation to the Conservatives shortly afterwards. Jenrick later accepted that his go-ahead had been unlawful and the Conservative Party apologised for allowing Desmond to sit next to him at a fundraising dinner.
● Boris Johnson promised gambling review after a party with lottery boss Richard Desmond
Yet in Strong Woman, Brady writes of Desmond that “to be able to encourage excellence and integrity is a rare talent”. He is, she says worryingly, “a character similar to me”.
“Oh, we’re not going to go through all the people? This is the last one.”
Well, no. I can ask what I want.
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“Well, I don’t have to answer.”
That’s true. Does she not want to say anything about Richard Desmond?
“Well, Richard Desmond is another great entrepreneur who has done good things but I don’t know him intimately. I’ve never worked with him.”
I have known people who did, I say, and both left because the language he used to his employees was appalling.
“Well, let’s put it kindly, he’s quite fruity.”
She’s no swearer, I check, wondering what on earth they really have in common.
“I’m sure I do, but not deliberately.”
OK, I say, this is last name I’m going to bring up: Sir Philip Green. Again in her book (the gift that keeps on giving) she praises the discredited former chairman of the Arcadia Group, which went into administration in 2020. A few years before, in 2016, he had to be shamed into making good the BHS pension scheme after the failing department stores collapsed following his offloading them for just £1 (by which time his family had earned £586 million from them). In July 2017, Green appointed Brady chairman of Taveta Investments, Arcadia’s owner. Only in February 2019, having resisted stepping down, did she finally resign amid accusations that Green had sexually harassed and racially abused his staff.
In Strong Woman she called him not just “the most dynamic, most energetic, the most relentless businessperson I have ever come across” but also “a good friend to people”.
Would BHS pensioners, I ask, consider him a good friend?
“No, I don’t think they would, although, to be fair to him, he did pay over the amount of money that the pensioners required. So I don’t think they would consider him a good friend at the outset but maybe towards the end, having paid many hundreds of millions of pounds into the pension scheme, I think they probably would consider that he ultimately did the right thing. But that whole period was a disaster from start to finish.”
Was she disappointed in him?
“Yes, I was. I was disappointed. He ultimately ended up paying for the scheme and he could have done that about a year beforehand and saved the anxiety that people had through that period.”
Integrity is important to her. “Very.” So to be in that position must have been hard. “Very. But, to be fair, I was never on the board of BHS.” She chaired Arcadia’s holding company. “Yes. That was way after BHS. So BHS was not under my remit. I had no control or say or knowledge or anything. I wasn’t involved in that at all.”
But she did resign.
“I did resign from the holding company, yes.”
Does she still speak to Green?
“Occasionally, yes.”
Actually, I am going to ask her about another male role model. He is Ted Lasso, the US football coach played by Jason Sudeikis in the eponymous Apple TV+ sitcom. Lasso manages a fictional British football team, which is run by a woman, a little (but probably not very) like the way Brady runs West Ham. Brady does watch Ted Lasso and, indeed, the show has been filming at West Ham for its next season.
“I think it’s a lovely, heartwarming show about how you can be perceived as, you know, too nice. There is that saying, isn’t there, that nice guys don’t win, but he does win and I think people like that.”
That’s interesting. Nobody would call David Sullivan, Richard Desmond or Philip Green nice. Would being nice work in real business life?
“I genuinely think one of the most important things you need in business is the art of kindness. People want to work for an organisation they respect,” she says.
What kind of boss is she then? Nice or tough? “Well, you’d have to ask the people who work for me…” What does she intend to be? “I would say I respect everybody. I’m very fair. I’d definitely say that people enjoy working with me. People have been working for me for a very long time. I’m candid. I think people are not afraid to be candid and speak honestly to me.”
A Ted Lasso plot actually prompts my next question. In it, a player refuses to wear a sponsor’s shirt because the company is polluting his native Nigeria. His CEO supports him at a cost to the club’s finances. At West Ham, however, one of Brady’s major sponsors is Betway. So, my question to her is about integrity: does she have qualms about taking money from an online betting company?
“Well, it’s under constant review, I would say that. Look, some people are affected by gambling quite badly but lots of people gamble and have no after-effects at all. I think we have to take a view on where that’s going. So I would say it’s under constant review.”
In 2020, Betway was fined £11.6 million (a record at the time) for not checking on how its heavy betters were funding themselves.
“Lots of gambling companies get fines and that’s right: if you breach the rules you should be fined and they’ve accepted all their fines, as far as I’m aware from the conversations I’ve had with them. They are responsible in the relationship they have with us and the things they do and don’t do. I can’t lie, they’ve been a very good partner. But that doesn’t mean to say that everything goes on for ever.”
In Strong Woman she writes of “integrity” seven times. She uses the word “independence” four times as often. “I think going to boarding school very young – I was 13 – teaches you independence. The one ambition I wanted for myself was independence. You know, when you go to boarding school you get up when you’re told, you go to bed when you’re told, you eat what you’re told, you wear what you’re told, you spend your whole life doing what you’re told. By the end I’d had enough.”
After Poles Convent in Hertfordshire she went to an all-boys school, Aldenham in Elstree, which took a handful of girls into its sixth form. I assume the boys all fell in love with her, but she swears if they did, she never noticed. Thinking about it, however, she thinks her sudden immersion into testosterone may be when her carapace formed. “You find yourself in a very male-dominated environment. You learn ways to stand up for yourself and not be too bothered about what people say.”
Self-reliance became central. She wanted children but intended to have them on her own. Peschisolido, a player at Birmingham City when she was its managing director (it would have been a scandal only had either been married, she maintains), was no part of her business plan. So why did she marry him?
“I fell in love,” she says.
I ask what he does now that his playing and management careers seem over. She says he commentates and works at a homeless charity. Running it? “No, as a volunteer,” she replies. “He’s a very nice person, a very kind person, a very respectable person. He has no ego. We have our separate lives in terms of business interests and they don’t cross over, which gives us other things to talk about. And our children are the most important things in our lives.”
She admits to just one reservation. He was not as supportive as he might have been when she nearly died. It was February 2006. An MRI scan following an allergic reaction (to what she still does not know) revealed a potentially fatal brain aneurysm. After surgery, she came round and entered the 24-hour period in which its success or failure would be determined. Her husband was dozing on a chair in intensive care and to her displeasure leapt at her insincere suggestion that he sleep in her vacated hospital room. If she gets ill again, she won’t tell a soul.
“I just dealt with it very logically. I had five steps. One was finding out what I had and accepting I had it. Two was choosing what to do about it. Three was having it done. Four was recovering from the operation. And five was getting on with my life, closing the door on it and moving forward.”
Her left-brained approach to life (and brain surgery) impresses me, but I do wonder whether greater attention to the other hemisphere, the one that deals with intuition and nonverbal clues, might have helped her to see in Sullivan, Desmond and Green the character flaws obvious to others. I remind her of her column in The Sun this summer where she declared, “Liz Truss has my vote.” The rest of us could tell we were looking at a robot building up to a major malfunction.
“I think she thought she’d be better than she was. I think Liz’s problem was that she had some good ideas but executed them all at once and didn’t understand their impact. I think she thought they’d be so well received, she wanted to keep them a secret.”
She reminded me of those overconfident Apprentice contestants with radical business plans who are then astonished to be fired.
“I mean, what a terrible way to end a political career! I’ve met her a few times. I did a podcast with her. She’s great. She’s run some great organisations, done some great things, has a great business background… I thought she would do much better than she did.”
In the same column, Brady wrote that a woman was needed to sweep away the macho culture of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street. I sometimes wonder what she thinks of my sex. Boys, she writes, “are like dogs – they need lots of exercise, lots of food and lots of pats on the head”. She doesn’t surely think men and women’s brains are different? “No, she says. “I think women’s brains are much better.”
I am glad to say she calls herself a feminist, although she denied it a dozen years ago in an interview, saying the term was “scary for people”. “Feminism is about one thing and that’s equality,” she says now.
I say that nine years ago I interviewed a finalist on that year’s Apprentice who happily admitted to both “fake boobs” and “hating” feminists. That year, this entrepreneur had her own glamour calendar. It has all calmed down now, I say, but some of the women contestants used to dress insanely for a business show.
“I don’t care what they wear,” Brady rejoins. “I think one of the beauties of being a woman in this age is you can wear what you like. You’re entitled to and you should feel no shame and you should never be shamed about how you dress, what you look like or what you eat. The pressures on women are immense, from how you present yourself with what you wear, to how you do your hair. Everything is critiqued. So I have no worries about that.”
It is a tremendous speech, delivered calmly and without animus, and it even ends with a joke about her admiration for the high heels on The Apprentice: “I wear trainers all the time.” She is right and I stand corrected: only a fool would judge people by their appearance. That said, I stick by the hunch I formed during our initial phone call: Baroness Brady is very good news. Her weird menagerie of mentors could learn plenty from her.
The Apprentice continues on BBC1 on Thursday at 9pm
Shoot credits
Styling Prue White. Hair Sarrah Hamid. Make-up Mikey Philips
