|
I like her. Whilst from an opposite side of the political fence from me, do have to admire her drive. Glad she is batting for us too.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/07/karren-brady-interview-no-desire-to-become-an-mp
Karren Brady is telling a room full of Year 10 students that they need to think about how they’re going to make a living, and the kids are flocking. They form an orderly scrum, lobbing in business ideas, going into full Apprentice mode on her.
One girl shows her a book she’s written about gangs, and when Brady pulls a wallet from her handbag and fishes out a fiver, her friends can’t believe it. “I’m buzzing,” says Kapinga, 14, on Brady’s sheer presence in her school. “It’s crazy, Miss.” Another pitches a soccer camp idea and Brady asks if he’s thought about insurance. There’s always something. Come up with a plan, she says seriously, work out your costs.
“I think young people respond much better to openness and frankness and practical stuff than speeches,” she says later, once she’s disentangled herself from the last teen entrepreneur. We’re sitting in an office in St Mark’s Academy in Mitcham, south London, where Brady has come to offer tips on how to write a good CV (“you shouldn’t put socialising first”) and getting work experience. She’s an ambassador for Barclays’ LifeSkills programme, which works with schools, employers and young people, fixing them up with work placements and running advice sessions like this one. She’s good at it, discussing the finer points of how you list your exam results (start with the best and work down). She listens, encourages, surprises the kids with anecdotes: her first job was in a salon, sweeping up hair. Brady doesn’t mention that by the end of her first day she’d reorganised the hairdressers’ rota, changed the opening hours and reworked the pricing.
At the age of 19, working for Saatchi & Saatchi, she walked into Sport newspapers publisher David Sullivan’s office to sell him some radio ad space. Soon he was spending more than £2m a year and she was earning more commission than all the sales staff put together. Four years later, aged 23, she convinced Sullivan to buy Birmingham City Football Club and let her run it.
At her first press conference, a reporter asked for her vital statistics: no one took the appointment very seriously, at first. Today, as well as despairing at idiocy on The Apprentice, she still works for Sullivan as the vice-chair of West Ham. A recent article described her as his “enforcer” (“doesn’t bother me,” she says, “you have to have a very thick skin to run a business”). If that wasn’t enough, she’s also closely involved with various high-profile companies – on the board of Philip Green’s Taveta Investments and a management consultant to Simon Cowell’s Syco. And now she’s got a new title: Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge, sworn in to the House of Lords as a Tory peer last November. So is it a nice finishing touch or the beginning of a new chapter – Karren Brady, political powerhouse?
You can see footage of her taking her seat in the Lords on YouTube: Brady walks in – big hair, stylish even in the quasi-Santa-suit – past a row of hairless old men. “I think it’s a bit like any industry that has never marketed itself to women,” she says of politics. “A bit like football.” The Lords, compared to the league, is a beacon of diversity. But the numbers aren’t great: only 20% of the Conservative party’s peers are women (compared to 32% of Lib Dems and 31% of Labour). “In my experience,” says Brady, “not all women want to run the world. Not all women want to run a big banking conglomerate. Not all women want to be prime minister. What a lot of women want is a good career that respects them … and high-quality, affordable childcare. And if they find that balance, then they’re happy.”
Brady is the first to concede that it can be hard to strike that balance. After her first child – Sophia, now 18 – she went back to work after three days to fire a manager; it’s one of those stories that has become surgically attached to her reputation (Sullivan once described her as “a sacker”). In truth, she regrets going back to work so soon. It was exhausting: long days, sleepless nights, meetings endured – as she recalled in her memoir Strong Woman – as breast milk leaked through her jacket. The balance was always going to tip one way: “When I sold my first business I stayed at home for three months,” she says now. “I found it hugely hard work … I think looking after a family is one of the most selfless things you can do, but it wasn’t for me full-time.”
For the Tories, of course, she’s a gift. Successful business leader, television personality, woman. So why does she like them? “I do believe you need to live in a country that’s full of aspiration. That if you want to do well, you can do well. That you can get things like start-up loans, you can get equal pay. Our country has been built on a culture of the desire to own your own home. If you’ve worked hard to own your own home, it’s your home. I believe that hardworking people should retain as much of the money as they can in terms of the taxes that they pay. But I think everybody should pay their taxes. I’m a Conservative supporter and have been all my working life, because I do believe in the principles of family, fairness, home ownership, looking after those that can’t look after themselves and aspiration.”
Brady often talks like this: chunky paragraphs that feel honed, polished with the odd slightly meaningless motto (“If you’ve worked hard to own your own home, it’s your home”). When I ask if she has any concerns about how coalition economic policy has affected the most vulnerable, the negative impact of dramatic cuts, she ices over a little. “I don’t see any evidence of that at all … If you think how we’ve come through the recession by creating two million jobs, apprenticeship schemes … I think that’s a pretty remarkable achievement in the last four years. I completely accept there’s still a long way to go. But I think it should always pay to work more than it should pay to be a burden on society.”
So what about zero-hours contracts, which might helpfully knock you out of the unemployment statistics, but don’t necessarily give you enough work to make a living? “I’ve got a few friends who are working zero-hours contracts and would hate to change. They want to be flexible, they want to stay at home, they want to work the hours they want to work. There are some people that actually really like zero-hours contracts.”
Fine, but others – often women – are tied into them exclusively and aren’t able to earn enough to support their family. “I think in life you can concentrate on the lowest common denominator or actually you can concentrate on the highest common denominator. If you look at the people who are doing really well, it doesn’t paint the right picture; if you look at the people who are on the worst kind of zero-hours contracts, it doesn’t paint the right picture. It’s something in between.” But isn’t that what politics is for – to look at the people at the bottom and want to change their prospects? “What I’m saying is that if you take a snapshot – zero-hours contracts – it doesn’t mean that everybody who’s been employed … are on the worst kind of possible [contracts]. That’s the point I was making. I agree that in politics, if everybody moves up, that’s the trick isn’t it? To get everyone to aspire.”
Brady recalls that her first job paid £7,500 a year; there was no minimum wage, and negligible support. “You were just thrown out on your own and you had to make the best of it. No one gave me a housing grant, no one gave me a free rail pass, no one gave me money for a suit to go and get a job, no one gave me anything. I think things have improved.” It’s possibly unfair at this point, but still accurate, to note that while Brady wasn’t given money for a suit, she was the daughter of a self-made millionaire – Terry Brady – who’d worked his way up in the printing industry. But then that’s her point: we should all be grafters, trying to make something of ourselves, persevering in rubbish jobs so we can get another one that’s better.
Her patter is on message, right down to buzzword level (“hard-working people”, “fairness”, “aspiration”). There is, surely, a political trajectory being plotted here. “I don’t have any political ambitions,” she insists. Really? “I don’t, no. I have an important job, I employ 810 people. What keeps me awake at night is employing 811 … I have no desire to become an MP.” Or mayor of London, as has been rumoured. “A myth,” she says. She was supposedly offered a handful of safe seats before the last election, but turned them down. Iain Dale (radio presenter, publisher, fellow Tory and Hammers superfan) tells me that he “privately urged her not to stand for parliament, because I thought she’d hate it and the day-to-day drudgery would bore her”. As to her political future, he’s uncertain: “She needs to be careful she isn’t used by the Tories for their own ends. She and George Osborne are very close and have formed a mutual admiration society, but she does need to be careful about being sucked into the political system in a way she is not comfortable with.” Brady laughs off her proximity to Osborne. “I’ve only met him three times. People say we’re best friends and know each other, but I don’t know him at all.”
In her own trade, she is, quite simply, “a ballbreaker,” says Dale, who runs the website West Ham Till I Die. When she started out in football, Brady was the only woman in the meeting; at West Ham she has brought in a raft of female executives. She’s also reduced the club’s debt from £100m to £70m in the five years she’s been there, and after protracted legal wrangles has secured its future home at the Olympic stadium, an arduous process, says Dale, that she handled “incredibly well”. Even the fans are on board: most “respect her even when they disagree with her”.
Some, however, think she’s a little preoccupied. A recent article on Dale’s site worried about her expanding commitments, and it’s true, her register of interests at the House of Lords is long, including representation by four different agencies for public speaking and “ambassador” roles. Her own website lists various companies she’s worked with or promoted – from Bupa to npower. There’s nothing untoward about it; it’s just an indication of the multi-layered nature of a high-powered individual’s commercial interests and relationships – the kind of thing that potentially becomes more complicated when you accept a public and political role such as a peerage.
She doesn’t appreciate my inference, however. “I’m not a paid-for politician. I don’t take any money. I don’t take any expenses. I don’t take any fees, so I don’t have any conflict. I’ve joined the House of Lords to contribute from my life experiences and help legislation.” All true, but is it not fair to suggest that she now has an accountability to the public that she didn’t have before? “Yes, but it’s never been on my mind,” she says. She likes variety, has an “incredible work ethic” and has got to a point when she doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do. “When I left school at 18, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was independence.” Now, at 45, she’s got it, and anyway, as she says in a blast of Brady at her most formidably self-assured, “I would never do anything I didn’t want to do. And if I wanted to do it,” she laughs, “it would probably be because it’s the right thing to do.”
|
