Mary Portas’ Reign Is By No Means Over

Retail revolutionary Mary Portas tells Charlotte Metcalf why she has never been afraid of change.

Interview: Mary Portas

‘What were you really expecting me to be like?’ asks Portas. I admit I had been worried her formidable success might make her forbidding. Yet the severe red bob is gone and we’ve been chatting away for over two hours, during which she has proved warm, open, excitable, fearlessly outspoken and very funny.

She has a mighty reputation, with six books to her name (her latest is I Shop, Therefore I Am), hundreds of newspaper columns, over half a dozen TV series and an OBE to boot, awarded in 2024 for services to business, broadcasting and charity – all the more impressive given her beginnings.

Portas was born in Watford, the fourth of five children to Irish parents – her Catholic mother, ‘a fiery, beautiful redhead’, and her Protestant father. Their home was ‘full of love, warmth, food and dogs barking’ until her mother died suddenly of encephalitis when Portas was 16. Two years later, her father remarried and moved out, leaving her with her younger brother. The following year he died of a heart attack, and their home passed to his new wife.

‘I hope that wasn’t deliberate and he just hadn’t got round to changing his will,’ she says. ‘I felt no anger, just fear. We had nothing.’ Family friends took them in, and although Portas won a place at RADA, she turned it down. ‘How would I finance it all? Where would I live?’ Instead, encouraged by her sister Tish, she enrolled at Watford College of Art. Miserable at first, her direction crystallised when a fellow student found work at Harrods. ‘I thought, now that’s where I want to be!’ She rang every day for six weeks until the display manager finally gave her a job.

The rest is, almost, history. Aged 28, Portas went to Harvey Nichols – then on its last legs – serving a handful of ‘desultory Sloanes’. She collaborated with artists to create installations and partnered with models and actors, famously getting Ab Fab to be filmed there. The store became a major cultural destination and the global press came flocking. By 32, she was a board director. However, ‘when a financial director’s wife disliked my windows, I thought, “That’s why they’re so bloody good,” and knew it was time to go. Besides, I’m not afraid of change.’

With two small children, Portas set up her eponymous brand consultancy. She soon scooped up a shopping column for The Telegraph and a TV shopping series, Mary Queen of Shops. In 2009, Portas launched her successful Living & Giving charity boutiques in partnership with Save the Children, and was later called into Downing Street to advise Cameron’s government on how to revive our ailing high streets.

She was expected to work miracles, but the government didn’t implement her radical advice. Now, small shops are taxed out of existence and towns are ‘hollowed out’. So, what’s the answer?

‘People!’ she says. ‘Never forget that we hold the power. The government now has a Pride in Place scheme and communities have a right to buy and say no to another vape shop or faceless foreign bank taking over an empty building.’

As co-chair of the Better Business Act, Portas wants laws amended to ensure businesses step up their ESG responsibilities. ‘We’ve always been a nation of shopkeepers. As a country, we’re creative and have brilliant designers but we lack the storytelling, the push and the belief that our brands can compete. Brands must find a way of connecting with people, creating those human and spiritual experiences and sense of place that make people really feel a brand and invest in it emotionally. It can be done – look how Ralph Lauren inhabited Sloane Square last Christmas.’

It’s clearly an uphill task but as we leave, I feel sure if there’s one person capable of galvanising communities to adapt their high streets and advising British brands how to grow and thrive, it’s Mary Portas. Her reign is by no means over.

Mary Portas In Brief

• A Book That Changed Me: The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. We are really messing with our planet.
• Style Icon: Inès de la Fressange. She has that French, louche confidence that her clothes are part of who she is.
• Favourite Designer: Marques’Almeida, a husband-wife team that believes fashion is about attitude, not hemlines.
• Ideal Dinner Companion: William Morris – what a divine, soulful genius.
• Desert Island Disc: Elton John’s Tiny Dancer.
• Favourite Piece of Clothing: Rifat Ozbek’s bone-inspired army jacket, which I gave away and regret.