Girl, interrupted

by Marianne Macdonald (taken from ES Magazine [Evening Standard])

Two years ago Martha Lane Fox cashed in her Lastminute shares and took some well-earned time off. Then disaster struck in Morocco. Now recovering, her projects include a karaoke bar, a directorship of Channel 4, and most importantly to her, a charity educating girls in Africa. Marianne Macdonald salutes her spirit.
Martha Lane Fox is tanned. Her cheeks are flushed pink. Her hair is carefully curled, feminine, pinned to her head with a beige hairgrip. Her sheer white polka-dot ruffled blouse, accessorised with a waist-long chain of pearls, is worn over a pair of jeans. You hardly notice the two black sticks she uses to manoeuvre herself from the door to the meeting-room table at the Soho headquarters of Lucky Voice, her new karaoke venture, though the deep scar carving down her right arm keeps catching your eye as she lifts her thin hands to make a point.

In May it will be two years since the 33-year-old was hurled from her 4×4 on to a rock in the desert in Essaouira, Morocco. Her body was broken in 24 places – across her right arm, pelvis and right leg. She nearly died. A year ago she was still in hospital; today she has to have more than an hour of physio every morning. She is just getting used to being liberated from the bedroom of her Marble Arch flat – ‘Just being able to make my own choices and not having people decide what’s going to happen for the next week.’ For months she couldn’t life her arms or legs and had to ring a bell to get a sip of water.

No one missed the irony that her dreadful accident happened just as she walked free of Lastminute.com, the internet holiday- and flight-booking success story she slogged for through her twenties. The poster girl for the internet boom – she was on the front of every magazine and newspaper in the late Nineties – Martha began the company from a ‘broom cupboard on the Portobello Road’, with a management consultancy colleague, Brent Hoberman, in June 1998. It was an unusual move for someone with her background – her family is, according to reports, ‘educated, cultured and not interested in luxury’. In the past, she’s admitted to me that ‘my parents would have been more surprised is I said I wanted to be a banker than if I wanted to be a ballet dancer.’

She left Lastminute five years later in December 2003; cashed in £4.6 million of shares in March 2004 to go backpacking; lined up (if the press was to be believed) a fabulous new job as creative director at Selfridges; and that May, carefree and happy, drove to the beach without a seatbelt, to fly a kite with her new boyfriend, Chris Gorrell Barnes.

She thinks now she only survived thanks to her money. Hoberman and Lastminute’s then chairman, Allan Leighton, chartered a plane to fly her back to England – it had to keep at low altitude in case a dramatic change in the cabin pressure killed her. Metal clamps and pins were inserted into her right arm, legs and pelvis in more than 12 operations at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. Her mother Louisa, who runs lectures at the Royal Geographical Society in London, and her brother Henry took up residence at her bedside. ‘My mother was there every day for six months, just reiterating: “You can do this, you can do this,”’ Martha said last May.

‘Getting there, getting there. Brian slowly revving up!’ she exclaims determinedly now of her recovery. Her voice is much quieter than when I met her two years ago, and more headmisstressy, as she works to keep the interview under control. But curiously she is more beautiful, albeit with a couple of new lines around her mouth. The suffering she has gone through – she has talked about being ‘in hell’ and feeling like a ‘wounded and powerless animal’ – may have taken its toll on her confidence but it has somehow completed her appearance. When I comment on her flat pumps she remarks sadly that she can’t wear her beloved high heels any more. ‘I just have to keep going,’ she observes in a lower voice. ‘But I’m in a very different place to a year ago – I’m not in hospital anymore. So that’s all brilliant. But I don’t really want to talk about the accident. I’ve talked about it in the past and that’s closed now. I’m really keen to talk about positive issues.’

Not even what she’s learned from what she’s gone through? Her voice goes even quieter. ‘It’s a bit early to have those conversations, I think. And you can see where I am physically: there’s a lot of stuff to do, but it’s a lot better. And as far as taking things from the accident and the past two years, there’s too much that’s still whirring round in my head. In another year I’ll probably be able to answer that question. But right now I’m trying to focus on some things outside by body! I’m really keen to talk about other things, because that’s where my focus is beginning to go.

Her blue eyes are imploring. Please don’t, it hurts, they’re saying. ‘I guess the link for me,’ she goes on in a more definite voice, playing with her necklace, ‘is that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a near death experience and yet the resources that I banked up from my business and my contacts saved my life. They’ve allowed me to start focusing on Camfed, the Campaign for Female Education, and some of the other things in my career. It has highlighted the importance in my life of wanting to give something back a bit. And the charity, Camfed, is a very obvious place to focus my energies, because it’s doing something that might allow other girls to take control of their lives, and offer the resources to help them in their most desperate situations.’

She has come full circle, in a way, because Camfed – which fights poverty and AIDS by educating girls in Sub-Saharan Africa – was co-founded by Lucy Lake, who shared a house with her at Oxford. Martha read ancient and modern history at Magdalen and didn’t much enjoy it – she found Oxford stuffy and unchallenging after going to school at Westminster. (Her father, who was divorced from her mother in 1993, is an ancient history don at New College.) But she made several close friends there, and Lucy, who read human sciences at Wadham, was one of them.

‘Lucy’s a very understated and impressive young lady – typically, she’s gone about doing something very incredible very quietly, while I’ve made a lot of noise,’ says Martha. ‘I respect her a lot for the good she’s done and the relentless focus Camfed has kept on this issue. As I’m sure you’ve read, the biggest single factor in the fight against poverty and AIDS – I don’t want to start sounding like Bono at this point! – is educating women up to the age of 16. This is the single biggest driving factor because it empowers the women. It not only teaches them about birth control but gives them confidence.’

I ask how she and Lucy met and Martha laughs, trying to remember. ‘The morphine has addled my brain quite badly! I had a very good friend at Wadham and I think she must have introduced us. We lived in a house near the railway station with some very nasty neighbours who tried to barricade us in the house with their bicycles.’ Her voice rises. ‘Extraordinary – they complained we went up and down the stairs too noisily! And then I left and started on the heady path to Lastminute.com.’

‘And Lucy met Ann Cotton, who was starting Camfed, in the kitchen of her house in Cambridge. And just very quietly they started building this organisation. And one of the things that always struck me about it is that it required very little resource here in England and enormous amounts of resource in Africa, and I think that’s one of the reasons it’s been so successful, even in the face of terrible oppression, in Zimbabwe in particular.’

A strange expression crosses her face. ‘And I’m in a slights dip in what I’m doing and not working flat out as I used to’ – she raises her eyebrows – ‘so if in some very small way I can help that’s great. And if there’s one thing an ES reader can do, it’s to give £72 to educate a girl over her whole lifetime. That’s probably as much as they’ll spend going out this weekend after reading the magazine. And I do the same, lots of people do the same, it’s not a cuss!

‘But the amounts of money are so tiny, especially for us living in London. I’ve just read a story of a lovely girl called Abigail. Her parents died, she went to live with her grandmother, and she would definitely have been married off and gone to work on a farm if Camfed hadn’t sponsored her through primary and secondary school. Now she’s got a degree and can look after her grandmother, rather than the other way around. Her whole life and horizons have been changed. The impact is so immediate, and the amount of money is so relatively small.’

Camfed is one of several projects Martha works on two or three days a week in this phase of her recovery. ‘Lastminute.com was sold last summer,’ she says when I ask her what else she’s doing, ‘so I see Brent and I talk to him a lot, but there’s no board of that company for me any more. I’m still very busy doing physio and getting my body shipshape. And I’m focusing on Camfed and Reprieve, another charity I work as a trustee of, which fights for human rights concerning the death penalty around the world.’

She has also joined the board of Channel 4. ‘I’m helping them with my experience of technology and new platforms and new media in particular, and the challenged they face in the multi-channel and multi-platform world, so that’s exciting. And finally there’s Lucky Voice, which is great.’ She is the major shareholder in this new venture, an upmarket karaoke bar on Poland Street, Soho, where you can book a private room and order cocktails and food by pressing a button. This, she says, is the main place where she goes out.

But the Selfridges job went to Alannah Weston, daughter of the owner Galen Weston. ‘There was,’ she agrees briskly, when I say there was a lot of talk about it. ‘But it was all speculation.’ I can’t tell if she’s upset that it fell through because of her accident or if it really never existed. ‘But there’s definitely energy and ambition inside me to want to do something. I don’t know if that would be a commercial role or something else, and I don’t know when I’ll be in a physical position to be able to do it, but there’s life in the old dog yet! So I have to see where I’m at and what’s happening when I’m through the next phase.’

And who approached her, I suggest. Her voice goes little. ‘And who might want me!’ she agrees. She smiles bravely. ‘But there’s lots of…I still feel I’m at the beginning of my life, not the middle or the end yet! I think sometimes people think, “Wow, you’ve had this big success and that’s it.” Well, I don’t feel like that. I’d really like to try to use the things I’ve been lucky enough to learn from Lastminute.’

In her time there Martha was responsible for the hiring and firing (in which her toughness contradicted her soft, faun-like exterior) and traveled almost non-stop. ‘Airport terminals could have been my specialist subject!’ she remarks. ‘Now I wouldn’t be so good. I’m moving slowly on two sticks! But I’d love to go to Africa. There’s still lots of the world to explore.’

Perhaps with Gorrell Barnes, an advertising executive who runs an agency that specialises in marketing through mobile phones. They had been together six weeks when she had her accident. He stood by her and they are still very much together. They’re not engaged? She shakes her head. ‘That’s one think I absolutely won’t talk about!’

She is certainly a catch. She made £13.5 million from the sale of Lastminute. ‘I feel very lucky, is the best way to describe it,’ she says. ‘Obviously I hope to use some of it to do some good things. Lucky! I say the word again, lucky: I do feel very lucky in lots of ways.’

Some people might feel angry or bitter, I remark. ‘No,’ she replies definitely. ‘I don’t feel angry or bitter. I feel frustrated sometimes! But I don’t feel angry.’ Not that she had to go through such suffering? She gives the first genuine laugh of the interview. ‘I’ve had huge ups and then huge downs. Maybe that’s the way it goes!’

We get up to go and she reaches for her walking sticks, but they skitter to the floor like Pick-Up Sticks. ‘Oh!’ she exclaims with frustration. ‘They should make them like wibble sticks, so they stay upright all the time!’ I help pick them up and she gets to her feet. ‘You go ahead,’ she says. She follows me more slowly, a large amethyst and diamond ring flashing on her right hand, an emerald and diamond on the index finger of the other.