Mary Portas hates to use the word “transformation” with clients: she doesn’t want to spook them. “They get scared. They’d be like: ‘Oh dear God, let me lie down.’” But transformation is Portas’s signature move – whether she is overhauling a charity shop or a pair of knickers or the British high street. Over the past few years, Portas, 63, has turned her magic on herself and undergone her own metamorphosis. It’s not so much a makeover as “a proper epiphany, an awakening”, she says, pointing to the ceiling of the office where we meet – by which she means to invoke not so much God or religion but “the greater energy and force” that has carried her here.
There are several visual cues to the new Mary. There is the hair, of course. The flame-coloured bob has long gone, scuppered by lockdown. In its place is a honeyed style, whose floppy top Portas lifts to show me the natural colour beneath: salt and pepper, but easy on the salt. Her brother, Lawrence, cuts it. And she is wearing beige, of all things. “This is me now. This is me,” she says. She has a habit of saying things twice, but is quieter than her television persona. “And, actually, this feels Mary.” One thing that hasn’t changed is that she is very much on first name terms with herself. She is sort of self-curious.
The new Portas emerged from a period of personal and professional challenge that came to a crisis when the first lockdown hit. “The last four years were horrendous. Completely horrendous,” she says. “I divorced. I had to sell my family home, I had to reset my family with this young son [Horatio, 10, whom she co-parents with her ex-wife, Melanie Rickey], find another home and work out how things were going to work.” (Her two older children, from her first marriage, to Graham Portas, are grown up.) Rickey has written about her alcoholism, but Portas will say only that her marriage was “incredible, lovely”, but addiction is “a shit thing” to share a home with. She was navigating all of that when the pandemic arrived, and suddenly her consultancy business, Portas, was losing “hundreds of thousands”.
She has always had within herself the certainty “that I’ll be all right”. But now she felt real fear and another deeply unfamiliar sensation: doubt. She phoned her chief executive and said: “If we do rebuild, I don’t want the business the same. I don’t want to help people sell more shit … But it might not make money. Shall we do this?”
Portas says her thinking had already begun to shift. Shortly before lockdown, she gave a Ted talk on what she calls “the kindness economy” – and her most recent book, Rebuild: How To Thrive in the New Kindness Economy, is heavy on how “rampant consumerism has been killing our planet”. When we meet, she has been filming a new programme for Channel 4 on the climate crisis, in which she lobbies government figures. She says it is “the most important thing I’ve ever done for TV”.
People often tell Portas she should go into politics, but she doesn’t like that idea. “No, no. I’d have to fit into a system that is, quite frankly, fucked.” As co-chair of the business-led campaign Better Business Act, she is pushing for amendments to the Companies Act to make businesses benefit workers, customers, communities and the environment – rather than just shareholders. She has met Keir Starmer, the Labour leader. And she is always on the road delivering keynote speeches: “You cannot go out in this world today and not think, ‘What am I doing that’s affecting or healing this planet?’”
She buys fewer clothes, she says. How many fewer a month? “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even think I will buy each month.” All the different glasses she wears are free pairs people have sent her. Anyway, she says: “It’s bigger than that. Am I going to walk around in knitted muesli jumpers? No, I’m not.” She seems an unlikely advocate for less is more; it’s a brave move. “Was it brave? I don’t know. There was no option. It was in there,” she says, hitting her heart, chunky gold bracelets jangling.
After that heartfelt gesture, it feels mean to ask, but is this a genuine transformation or a rebrand? “That’s a fair enough thing to ask me,” she says, sounding only slightly wounded. “I think that would be a terrible thing I would be doing. I couldn’t face my … god. There’s a beautiful poem by Gus Speth [the former president of the World Resources Institute],” she says, rummaging in her bag for her phone and pulling out an assortment of different-sized wallets. “Rebranding! I love that. That’s a good question. Why wouldn’t people think that? You know what’s interesting? No one’s come at me. No one’s started any of that shit. I used to get more of it.”
She finds her phone in her pocket, types Speth into the search bar and reads. “‘The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy. And to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.’ I didn’t know any of this,” she says.
In all those years as creative director at Harvey Nichols in the 1990s, she had no idea of the damage consumerism was wreaking. Portas loves reading, from Hannah Arendt to the poems of Brendan Behan, keeps Rilke by her bedside, and has a quote for every occasion. To explain her time at Harvey Nichols, she borrows David Foster Wallace’s tale of two fish. They are swimming along when an older fish asks, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” They continue in silence before one of them finally asks the other, “What the hell is water?”
“I didn’t know the water! When I made it at Harvey Nicks, I had brilliant years. I wasn’t living a lie. But none of us knew what we were doing to the world, did we? But I do know now.”
Anyhow, she didn’t choose fashion. “I ended up in it. “It wasn’t my world. I don’t like it.” Really? “I don’t like the fashion world at all,” she says. “I think that the fashion world is a very skin-deep world. And I think it is full of people who are also skin-deep. They might dislike me for saying that, but I look at the Met ball and I go, really? Is this what we’ve come to? It’s like Marie Antoinette. It doesn’t sit with me at all. If I got tickets to the Met ball, I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t go!” In any case, she dislikes “a huge social diary”. Her daughter says she’s “a lone wolf”, her friends know to wait for her call.
Besides, Portas’s love of shops has always been about much more than buying and selling. As a child she would travel in her dad’s van – he was a sales director for Brooke Bond tea – and she shopped daily with her mother. “You saw what life should be about,” she says, slowing right down. “It’s about connections, it’s about community, it’s about social infrastructure that makes us feel safe.”
Not surprisingly, Portas’s first Saturday job was in retail. It bugs her that reporters always say it was at John Lewis when really it was Garner’s bread shop in Watford, near the family home. “They keep writing that shit. I had a Saturday job in John Lewis for a day and thought, I am bored stiff.” So she left. “I’m sorry, but they were so dry. I thought, I can’t bear this.” She later worked as “a floater” in Watford’s Clements department store, a place so revered that her mother put on a jacket to shop there.
Portas had just turned 17 when her mother died suddenly of meningitis, and in the months that followed she would get the bus back from school and stop off at those same shops her mother had stopped at, and the proprietors would hand her a bag of cut-price meat or groceries. No wonder she says that her connection to shops “was about the feeling of security and warmth and the physicality of these places”.
It might seem a leap from Watford’s kind-hearted grocers to Harvey Nichols, but when Portas started work there, “I felt I was coming home,” she says. “You’d walk in, in the morning, and the women on the makeup counter would be getting ready. ‘Look at this’, ‘The new Dior lipstick’s come out’. You talk to them, then you go up to the next floor and see the buyers flitting around, then the homeware … It was exciting. It was alive. Alive with the people. The byproduct was what we sold. Somehow that touched me.”
It is this sort of emotional connectedness that Portas wants to foster when she advocates, instead of consumerism, “a shift of us coming together”. She calls this “us-ness”. She has a name for everything. AI stands for “aesthetic intelligence” (“Isn’t that nice?”) and ethical business is “beautiful business – to make people feel, ‘Yes, I can be that.’”
In line with the shift to “us-ness”, will Portas rethink the branding of her own ventures, which, like Alexander the Great, she has a habit of naming after herself? There’s Mary’s Living & Giving charity shops for Save the Children, the Portas Pilot towns that she worked on when she was the “high street tsar” to David Cameron’s coalition government. At the mention of these she rolls her eyes – after five years, nearly 1,000 shops in the pilots had closed, and they are still a sore subject. Then there’s Portas, and Mary, the now defunct clothes line. Does she ever consider “us-ing” her brand?
“That’s like saying you can’t be Paula. Of course I’m me,” she says. “I’m using my name to make the world better.” She says the charity shops have made £32m for Save the Children. “If I’m using my name and I’m making a shitload on the back of it, I think that’s fair.”
As for the so-called Portas Pilot towns, “I shouldn’t have let them call it Portas Pilots,” she says. The towns received £1m funding on the back of a white paper Portas produced in 2011, called – inevitably – The Portas Review. In it, she considered many factors that had a negative impact on high streets, from parking to retail parks. The report was “multi, multi, multi-layered. They would say to me, ‘Have you met with Justin King, the CEO of Sainsbury’s?’, and I’m thinking, what’s he going to tell me? ‘Have you met with Philip Green?’ And I’d say, ‘Sadly I have.’ Cause what do these people have in common? Profit and money! This is where I should have stopped. This is where I should have said” – she slaps the table – “there’s your white paper, you bunch of … You’re not listening.”
When we meet, Portas has just returned from Turkey with her older sister, Tish – they go away every year. “We get quite emotional,” she says, reminiscing about their childhoods. Portas is the fourth of five children: she interlocks the fingers of both hands to show how close they are. When their mother died, the three older siblings had already left home and Portas looked after her younger brother, Lawrence. Portas was the one who went with her father to organise the funeral.
“I don’t know why I ended up being in that role in the family, but I did,” she says. “I [went] from this naughty kid to … OK. I’ve got to do this.” In adulthood, she is a sort of bossy matriarch. Her father soon moved in with a new girlfriend, leaving Portas and her brother at home. He would “drop into us once a week, leave money on the table for food and go. I remember him saying:, ‘You’ve got your lives before you and I’m only 50.’ I remember thinking, I’ve just lost my mum. I’ve just lost my mum.” She says this so quietly she is almost inaudible. She has come to understand that “he just crumbled”.
He died two years later, and left the family home to his wife, making Portas homeless. She loved theatre and had won a place at Rada, but enrolled instead on a college course in visual merchandising, to look after Lawrence, and cried on the bus there and back. They lived with family friends in a council house. “I was obviously in grief and trauma but I didn’t know it … That was tough,” she whispers. “I was left with nothing. And I mean nothing. I used to get embarrassed about that because I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me, and I never want people to feel sorry for me.” But the problem with struggling to survive is that “you never really follow your true rhythm”.
Portas has made a career from her ability to foresee and direct change, but it began with an urgent need to adapt young to extremely traumatic circumstances. “I have had an extraordinary and incredible life,” she says. “I have had ups where I have soared and I’ve had downs where my face has been in the mud. And I mean right in the mud. Actually not as soft as mud. It’s been in the concrete. I’ve been broken. But I’ve always got back up.”
Now Portas feels that she has finally found her true rhythm. When she stops to think about her life, she can see that, “There has always been this thing in me: I believe that if I get involved, I can make change happen.”
• Mary Portas is an ambassador for Mastercard’s Strive initiative. To find out more, visit mastercard.co.uk/strive
