AT 3pm on Sunday May 2, 2004, Martha Lane Fox was on top of the world. Riding in the front passenger seat of an open-top jeep on a coastal road in Morocco, chatting to Chris Gorell Barnes, her boyfriend of six weeks, and with £5m in the bank at home and many more millions locked up in Lastminute.com shares, life was sweet for the then 31-year-old.

“We had been for lunch at a local cafe and were on the way to the beach to fly a kite. Chris is obsessed with kites,” Lane Fox recalled.

Duncan Flower, Gorell Barnes’s best friend, who was working in Morocco as assistant location manager on the film Kingdom of Heaven, was driving. “It had been rain-sun, rain-sun,” she said, and there were large puddles on the road. But as the sun came out once more, carefree Lane Fox felt no need to put on her safety belt.

Five months earlier the UK’s internet “It girl” had shocked the City by announcing she was stepping down as group managing director of the online travel company Lastminute.com. Six years after she had founded the company with Brent Hoberman in his front room, the time had come for her to move on.

Thanks to Martha-mania, Lastminute’s share price rose as high as 487½p on its second day of trading on the stock market in March 2000, valuing the firm at £733m. Over the next year and a half, the market value collapsed to £32m. But by the time the Westminster and Oxford- educated businesswoman decided to leave at the end of December 2003, the share price had recovered to 222½p, valuing Lastminute at £667m.

“I had always made it clear to Brent that I would leave Lastminute when it did not need me any more. The impact I could make was getting less and less,” she said.

Friends said that Lane Fox was off to have a “football team of babies”, but the truth was different. She wanted to relax, travel, find a boyfriend, and then get a new job running an established business.

“I would love to have children but that was not the reason I was leaving. I stopped because I am furiously ambitious and I would love to do something else,” she said.

By April last year she had already been backpacking in Colombia with a friend and visited South Africa with her mother. Now it was the first bank holiday weekend in May, and she was enjoying the sort of short break that she had been selling to Lastminute customers.

“I had always wanted to go to Morocco, but had never had the chance while I had been working 18-hour days at Lastminute,” she said. It would be a chance to relax, spend time with Chris, and begin planning the next phase of her career.

AT about 3.30pm on that Sunday, Lane Fox’s wonderful world was turned upside down. Literally. A wet road forced Flower to swerve — “just one of those things, not because of a camel” — and Lane Fox was thrown out of the car.

“My body flew across the desert and landed on a rock,” she said. In a second the dotcom millionaire’s perfect life had vanished, to be replaced by a version closer to hell.

Lane Fox had been propelled into the air and landed on her right side, shattering her right arm, smashing her pelvis in six places, and almost destroying one of her legs. And worst of all, lying on the desert ground, she was suffering from massive internal bleeding. “I don’t remember any of what happened next, but the doctors said there were bits of bone and blood floating around inside me. The danger was that they would spread to my brain.”

Flower and Gorell Barnes had only minor injuries, but Lane Fox was clearly in deep trouble. Forty-five minutes outside Essaouira, a small Moroccan town, it seemed to her two friends she might die there and then. But because Flower was working on a film set, he was able to mobilise a rapid response. “To be able to call people from the filming did literally save my life,” she said.

Lane Fox was rushed across the desert to the nearest hospital where doctors did what they could. But “faced with me they were frightened,” said Lane Fox. So, dipping in and out of consciousness, she was flown to a more sophisticated hospital in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. It was there that her mother, Louisa, and brother, Henry, first saw her. And it was there they were told that Lane Fox was more likely to die than live. “They did not think there was much chance of me making it,” she said.

In a last throw of the dice to save her, friends — including Hoberman and then Lastminute chairman Allan Leighton — and family worked together to charter a plane to pick her up. It had to fly at low altitude, such was the danger to Lane Fox’s life from the pressure in the cabin. After an extraordinary journey, she made it to the trauma unit at John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford.

She was home but far from safe. Over the next week Richard Keys, the hospital’s consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, and his team went to work on her. In Lane Fox’s words, “Mr Keys put me back together.”

First he clamped her shattered pelvis, then her arm and then her leg. Lane Fox’s body is now full of metal, a permanent reminder of her Moroccan trip. “I am the bionic woman,” she jokes. Lane Fox does not know exactly how much metal she is carrying, but a friend has warned her that to get through airport security on her next trip to America she will need to carry a special card stating that she is not a terrorist. “My arm is metal, my leg is metal and my pelvis is fairly metal.”

Thanks to the short-sleeved top she was wearing when we talked, it was easy to see several of the seven scars on her right arm. She accepted they were “cool” but Lane Fox, now 32, said it would be some time before she was willing to show off the “shark bite” that has disfigured her right leg. “I lost a chunk of my leg. One day when I am walking down an Australian beach I will get it out and people will point and say, hey, that must be a surfer dude,” she laughed.

After the week of emergency operations in Oxford, Lane Fox was shifted from intensive care to the neurological unit of the Radcliffe. There her brain was declared safe, but then the “shark bite” leg needed a skin graft. And so a pattern emerged — operation after operation after operation.

Asked to describe the worst part, Lane Fox was clearly spoilt for choice. But having a so-called metal “fixator” strapped around her pelvis to hold it together, preventing her from moving almost everything, ranked highly in her worst-bits league table.

Lane Fox’s darkest moments came when she felt she was not in control of anything. “I remember a friend saying to me, you have just talked about yourself as an it, and she was right. I felt like I was an animal. But I never thought I was going to give up. It just made me think this can’t be happening. My mother was there every day for six months, just reiterating, you can do this, we can do this.”



IN JULY Lane Fox was moved to the Wellington hospital in St John’s Wood, north London. She was out of danger and her recovery was going well. But “that’s when a couple of things went wrong”. After one operation her lungs filled with blood. And an infection in her leg necessitated more operations. “My leg bone was disintegrating,” she said.

Lane Fox said she would rather not dwell on “a couple of procedures that did not go to plan”, but when pushed said that one of them led to her having part of her intestine removed. “So my projected recovery period of eight weeks turned into months of more operations and more recovery”. Lane Fox is hazy about exactly how many operations she’d had by the end of last summer — “10, 11 or 12.”

Eventually, in September, she made it into rehabilitation. Nevertheless, weeks of pain ensued, with Lane Fox having to learn how to sit up, how to stand, and how to use her arms and legs. She set herself the target of getting home for Christmas and to help achieve this, by the side of her bed she had a daily and weekly goal sheet.

“The human spirit is formidable not just in me but in other people. You just do not want to give up, even when you are in unbelievable pain, feeling like your life has ended. I performed best when I had a day- by-day, a week-by-week list of things you can expect. Otherwise, what’s the point.”

Today, the goal-focused recovery programme lives on. Friends say that the reason she agreed to be interviewed was to set herself the challenge: could she do it?

So Lane Fox made it home for Christmas. The “appalling” Zimmer frame was dumped, replaced by state-of-the-art crutches. However, the operations were far from over. She had two in February and March, including a bone graft, and “kind of went backwards for a while. I had to get my leg better”. That she did in spring. Now with summer approaching, Lane Fox was keen to talk about the future.







“YOU CAN see I’m not dead then.” Lane Fox greeted me at her Mayfair flat with a wry smile. Walking slowly on two crutches was clearly a huge effort. But there was a point to prove. A picture published in a national newspaper recently had made her look half dead — a skeleton. She and her friends had been horrified. So she wanted to prove that she was very much alive.

A year after the accident and, in her face, Lane Fox is no different. The beautiful looks are still intact. And her mind is as sharp as it ever was. Physically she is weak, but getting stronger. We talked for 75 minutes, and by the end she was extremely tired. Come December Lane Fox hopes to be back to full fitness.

The all-clear on her troublesome right leg is expected soon, but friends say she may have to get used to walking with a slight limp.

Lane Fox is upbeat. “The prognosis is all fantastic,” she said. “I very much hope that by the end of the year I will be pretty much back to normal.”

The voice was still Martha Lane Fox, but not yet as strong as it was. At one point she shouted for the nurse to pop into the kitchen where we were sitting, but most of the conversation was her speaking in a near-whisper. She still has physiotherapy every day and is aided by a nurse and a personal assistant at her flat. She is able to go to the swimming pool twice a week. “I love it. But I would not exactly call it swimming. I can do walking and a funny kind of floating. It is the only time of the week when the pain goes. Your body feels detached.”

Lane Fox is equally excited about being able to read again. With the pain of the past year she did not have the mental strength to pick up a book or company documents. But with the encouragement of friends she has been exercising her mind.

After stepping down as an executive director of Lastminute, she stayed on the board as a non-executive director. This month, she and other board members sanctioned the sale of the company to Sabre Holdings, owner of Travelocity, an American rival, for £577m. Lane Fox had kept a shareholding and will get about £13m from the deal, bringing her total earnings from Lastminute to more than £18m.

I put it to her that £18m is not a bad place to be after six years starting and running Lastminute. “Absolutely. And I have landed on it big and splat, I tell you.”

Some of that splat money has been, and will be, used to invest in other people’s start-up ideas. The first is a karaoke bar in London’s Soho called Lucky Voice. It will open this month and Nick Thistleton, an old friend and former colleague, is running the business for her, aided by two others.

“There is only one karaoke bar in London. I hate pubs and I’m too old for clubs. But you want to be able to go somewhere and do something with your friends that makes you feel naturally high and exuberant. So I think it is worth a punt.”

Lane Fox is clearly ambitious for the project: “It is absolutely not about one bar in Soho. At the appropriate time I would like to turn it into 5, 10 or 15 bars,” she said.

Investments in other business ideas are more likely to be what she terms “social entrepreneurship”. That is, investing in entrepreneurs who might otherwise not be able to raise the cash for their start-ups. A bit like the Prince’s Trust, I suggest. Lane Fox looks at me in disgust: “Not the Prince’s Trust. I am fervently anti-royalist.”

Clearly the accident has done nothing to quell her radical political views. In previous elections she had supported Labour, but could not bring herself to do so this time. “I fundamentally disagreed with the war.”

She voted Liberal Democrat, and was supportive of the party’s plan to introduce a 50% tax band for people on salaries of more than £100,000. “I believe in paying high taxes. I never try to avoid tax. I’m quite socialist like that.”

In the past Lane Fox has confided political ambitions to me. Or a desire to work in the public sector, perhaps as a prison governor or for a charity. Are they still there? Possibly, she said, although for the next few years it was going to be all about business.

“I have come to the realisation that I am probably best at the wealth-creation stuff, or being a spokesperson. So I will probably go into a full-time commercial role.”

Before the accident, Lane Fox was in discussions about the possibility of helping to run Selfridges, the department store owned by Galen Weston, the Canadian billionaire. That opportunity has been and gone, but it is this sort of job that will probably tickle her fancy next year. Consumer-facing, prominent brands and privately owned firms will be the key criteria. “I don’t have ambitions to run a plc,” she said. “I wanted to see if I could go into a business that was established. I did a good impression of being an entrepreneur at Lastminute but I want to see if I can run an established business.”

There have been approaches from private equity, but it is too early, she has told them.

At Lastminute it worked well between her and Hoberman, but nitty-gritty operational management is not her forte.

She quotes Allan Leighton, chairman of the Post Office and a close friend, as saying the most important bits of a company are its head and its feet.

“I agree with that. I’ve never really enjoyed the middle bit.”





ASK Lane Fox if she feels lucky and you get an instant response. “Absolutely. Yes. I feel unbelievably lucky on many levels. I feel lucky that I had people around me to help me get better. I feel lucky that I had family contacts to get me out of Morocco. I feel lucky that the doctors I had put me back together. I feel lucky that I have money so I can pay people to look after me.”

But surely the past year has changed her? “It’s reinforced what I thought, my absolute belief that the only way to be is optimistic about the future, and I would much rather go through life thinking everything is possible than impossible.”

The interview over, Lane Fox suddenly looked extremely tired. She could not make it back to the door of her flat to say goodbye. Instead we shook hands by her bedroom door as she asked one of the nurses to attend to her. In the corridor, a wheelchair loomed, a reminder that she needs help to get about. Despite her tiredness, in her bedroom, no doubt, she would have reached for her new goals chart and ticked off “first interview with press”. Somewhere on the list will be “ get job”, “have children”.

This determined, brave, and highly focused businesswoman is most definitely not dead. And she will tick all the boxes on her chart. But not just yet.