THE phone rings. Martha Lane Fox, managing director of Lastminute.com, snakes out a skinny hand and checks her mobile. “Oops, it’s my mum,” she says, with a guilty giggle. We had just been discussing her parents. Spooky.

She pauses. The first-floor meeting room at Lastminute’s central London base echoes to the phone’s continual ring. Why not put mum on the speaker? Absolutely not, laughs Lane Fox, switching the phone off firmly. “She would hate it. She always says to me, why the hell do you have to speak to anyone in the newspapers? She thinks it’s vulgar.”

Lane Fox looks at me for a second, then makes a face. “Sorry, no disrespect.”

None taken, but spare a thought for her mum. Not speaking to people is pretty difficult for Lane Fox. Bright, funny, loquacious and a whole lot sharper than the occasionally ditzy front she projects, she has for more than half a decade provided an attractive focus for Lastminute, the online travel and holiday business she helped to set up.

Then last Thursday, just as Lastminute announced its first pre-tax profit (before goodwill amortisation and exceptional costs), she revealed that she was quitting as an executive director.

Lane Fox, sitting on a £25m paper fortune — the most prominent boss to emerge from the dotcom boom — had had enough. The business world raised a collective eyebrow.

Had she had a row with the Lastminute co-founder Brent Hoberman? Is her firm about to be snapped up by a voracious American media tycoon? Has she had a better offer? She has to tell us, really.

“Actually, I was a bit disappointed when I checked my in-box earlier,” she laughs, dark eyes widening under her Jennifer Aniston bob. “I haven’t had any job offers yet.”

But there has been no bust-up — as proved by the fact that she is staying on as a non-executive — no sell-out, she just wants to try something different. “It’s always been the plan,” she says. “I’m only 30, after all.”

And she gives a wide pixie grin, head to one side, flicking her hair back. I am beginning to feel what it’s like being reeled in by an expert angler. With her slinky patterned dress clinging to her slight frame, the dangly bracelets clunking on the table, the easy shifts between frank and flirty, she is — how shall I put this? — a confident act.

Women tend to think Lane Fox flirts too much. Men rather like it. She knows this and is disarmingly open about it. “So what? I like people, I flirt with women too. Everyone uses their natural skills. You do, I do. It’s about using all the talents you have to sell and convince and build credibility.”

Anyway, enough flirting for now. Lane Fox’s exit from Lastminute is, it seems, a parting of the business ways arranged to mutual advantage.

Hoberman, 34, fellow Oxford graduate and dotcom innovator who thought up the Lastminute concept, needs to be seen as clear leader of the outfit. Lane Fox, an extrovert ball of energy with left-leaning politics who ran the day-to- day operation, wants to get involved in different kinds of projects, away from the internet.