She once fought off a street gang in Delhi. She has travelled the Silk Road in the footsteps of Marco Polo. She has made it big in a man’s world, earns £1m a year and is tipped to be the boss of Marks & Spencer when its current chief leaves. But when Laura Wade-Gery, the head of “multichannel retail” at M&S, hit the headlines last week, it wasn’t because of her business nous or her brain. She was on the front pages because she’s 50 and she’s having a baby.
Most people tell their friends and their boss when the time comes to take a few months off. Wade-Gery’s four-month maternity leave, which will start next week, was announced on the stock exchange. Its financial rules dictate that investors must be told if senior directors are taking more than three weeks off. The statement was put out and all hell — or at least all of what used to be called Fleet Street — broke loose. You could hardly open a newspaper without seeing Wade-Gery’s square glasses, neat haircut and slightly stern face. In the photographs she is usually looking bemused. Why on earth, she seems to be thinking, all the fuss?
The fuss, of course, was because 50 is unusually old to become a first-time mother and because it offered an excellent opportunity for female columnists to lecture the nation about the best time to procreate. The journalist and broadcaster Bidisha, writing in The Guardian, thought this was a triumph for women. Wade-Gery, she said, is “inspirational” because she is “acting outside the prescribed template” and “dealing with motherhood just as she’s governing her career”.
The Daily Mail’s Jan Moir did not exactly agree. Who, she wondered, would “care for the child” when Wade-Gery returned to her “demanding, high-flying job”? It was, she said, “selfish” to start caring for “a brand new life when you are in the autumn of your own”. And Katie Hopkins. Oh dear. The thought of Wade-Gery having a baby, said Hopkins, who now has her own television chat show, made her feel “grossed out”. But then it isn’t at all clear what doesn’t.
Actually, the M&S statement had talked about “welcoming a child” into the family. Shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting at Wembley, northwest London, last month said Wade-Gery looked exactly as she always does: well coiffed, elegant and — the main point — slim. It seems possible that the finger-wagging about medical risks to late mothers and their offspring has been entirely misplaced. But whether the child is born to her, is adopted or arrives via a surrogate, one thing seems to be clear: Wade-Gery has balls.
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“I could never decide,” said William Dalrymple in his book In Xanadu, “whether she reminded me more of Boadicea or Joyce Grenfell.” He first met Wade-Gery at a dinner party when they were both 19. She was an ice-hockey blue reading history at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a budding travel writer who wanted to go on the Silk Road. She offered to trek some of the way with him.
The daughter of Sir Robert Wade-Gery, a diplomat who was then high commissioner to India, she had been travelling since she was a baby and had lived in Vietnam, Moscow, Delhi and Spain. She made the redoubtable traveller and writer Freya Stark “look like a dilettante”, Dalrymple said. She was “formidable”, “frighteningly intelligent” and “physically tough”.
His description of their journey in his book is charming and funny. It is also clearly a little bit camped up. Dalrymple portrays himself as the hapless Briton muddling through and Wade-Gery as the intrepid adventurer armed with a “Schedule” (note the capital letter) filled with “impossible deadlines”. Together they teach Turkish men to dance the gay gordons, talk about Chaucer with Syrian anti-semites and fend off meetings with Hezbollah.
Wade-Gery, Dalrymple tells us, once beat off a whole street gang in Delhi “single-handed” and left one of them “permanently incapacitated”.
It is, then, no great surprise to hear how she responded to the news that the flight home was full. She “assaulted the unfortunate airline official”, he said, “threatening him with a diplomatic incident and telling him to pull his socks up”. Dalrymple doesn’t need to tell us that she got on that flight.
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You wouldn’t necessarily have guessed that a woman who did this kind of thing when she was a student would end up trying to flog control tights and Per Una frocks. But this is what she has done. At Cheltenham Ladies’ College, according to a former classmate, she was “highly determined, serious and focused”. These words are also the type of thing that Wade-Gery says about herself. In a computer quiz when she took over as chief executive of Tesco’s online business in 2004 she described herself as “happy, focused and resourceful”. She is so focused, she said, that her husband says she “can’t cook and talk at the same time”. No wonder when she decided to go into business she made it very clear indeed that she was aiming for the top.
Wade-Gery worked at Gemini Consulting and Kleinwort Benson before joining Tesco in 1997. She was at the supermarket chain for 14 years in roles ranging from “targeted marketing director” to “group strategy director” and later chief executive of Tesco Direct and Tesco.com. It was while in this role that she was poached by Marc Bolland, then the new chief executive of M&S, and offered a “golden hello” of £4m. On the day she was appointed, the share price rose 13%.
The coverage of her imminent motherhood has tended to present Wade-Gery as an unassailable force in the world of retail, gliding coolly towards the top job. Her colleagues Helen Weir, M&S’s chief finance officer, and Steve Rowe, the head of general merchandise, who have also been named as possible successors to Bolland, might have a thing or two to say about that.
What also appears to have been skated over is the fact that her relaunch of the M&S website was hardly an unmitigated success. The company spent £150m revamping the site but customers struggled to register and online sales for last year were down 2%. They were up 38.7% in the first 13 weeks of this financial year, but Boadicea this ain’t.
“She cocked up the website,” said one retail industry insider last week, “and was still promoted to the head of retail stores after that. The gossip is that Marc Bolland was quite keen to get her and wrote into her contract that she would get that job and he didn’t put any performance conditions in it, so he had to give it to her.”
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While other industry insiders have rushed to gush about Wade-Gery’s indomitable spirit and charm, this source was more cautious. “She’s a funny one,” he said. “She’s not a particularly charming character. She’s very ambitious, but she’s quite a divisive figure internally.” She is, he added, “a cold fish”.
If Wade-Gery is a cold fish, this certainly hasn’t always been evident from her reading. After days spent arguing with Afghans, according to Dalrymple, she liked nothing more than to curl up with a nice Mills & Boon. She was, he wrote, “nourished on a literary diet of Prince of Darkness, The Rose of Biarritz, Silent Stranger and His Name was Passion”. He added: “Clearly, beneath the ferocious, ice-hockey-stick-wielding exterior, there lay deeper currents”.
Wade-Gery has given few interviews, so any “deeper currents” that lie beneath that cool exterior are rarely on public display. She is on the board of trustees of the Royal Opera House and you don’t get to do that if you’re not a pretty big fan of the trembling climax. And she seems to have found the love that those novel romances would suggest she sought.
After a five-year marriage in the 1990s to John Wardlaw Hanbury-Tenison, an Old Etonian banker, she has been wed for 10 years to a business consultant and Suffolk farmer, Simon Roberts. He was a partner at PwC for 30 years and is now chairman of two charitable trusts. He breeds Red Poll cattle, Suffolk sheep and Large Black pigs.
At weekends at the family farm Wade-Gery, who also skis and runs marathons, is often to be seen knee-deep in mud. Roberts, by the way, is 67. Nobody seems to have made much fuss about that.
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Parenthood at any age is an adventure; this will be one hell of an challenge. But it’s pretty clear that Wade-Gery is good at such things.
“I can’t say that it has been easy,” she said, talking about her life in a rare interview in May. “But I think most of the stuff in life that is easy is not worth doing.”