POLITICIAN turned headhunter Virginia Bottomley glides briskly out of a corridor, wreathed in smiles. She is late — I’ll bet she often is, because she leaves me in a hurry, too — and she says sorry. But as we ride the lift to her office she seems lost for words.
That, you imagine, is a rare occurrence for the baroness, newly ennobled on Friday. After standing down as an MP this month, she has thrown herself into full-time work at Odgers Ray & Berndtson.
The headhunting firm, one of Britain’s top five with a turnover close to £40m, has employed her as a consultant since 2000. Now she will combine finding candidates for top jobs with following the Tory whip in the House of Lords, and she is going to be very busy indeed.
Yet she would have it no other way. “I care about work and I like to work for a worthwhile cause,” she says, explaining her career leap.
Her attraction for Odgers is obvious: a fistful of contacts, a name to open doors, and an ambition to push the company into the top position in its field. Her role, unlike that of some former MPs in corporate life, is not just decorative.
In a five-year relationship, she has already helped Odgers take pole position, handling appointments at not-for-profit organisations (government, civil service and charities). Neil Kinnock’s appointment as chairman of the British Council and NHS high-flyer Barbara Stocking’s move to chief executive of Oxfam are just two that carry Bottomley’s fingerprints.
More recently she has focused on Odgers’ boardroom practice, hoping to replicate her not-for-profit success among its FTSE clients. That makes her a key player in the push to get more women into the top slots at Britain’s biggest companies — a very visible figurehead for a movement that badly needs a kick-start.
The problem, she says, is twofold. The men in charge of the largest firms like appointing people similar to themselves. “There is a tendency to look in the mirror, not in the window.”
And women sell themselves short. “As a headhunter,” she says, “you do notice that women are more critical and full of self-doubt. When Margaret Thatcher offered me my first job, at environment, I said, ‘But PM, I don’t know anything about it.’ Any man would have said, ‘Great, I’ll bring a clear mind to the subject’.”
She laughs amiably. Tall and confident, standing in her fourth-floor Odgers office overlooking London’s Hanover Square, she looks younger than her 57 years. Her sandy hair is cut short, her tweedy suit is cut long, and her demeanour is halfway to bouncy.
That irrepressible drive is, of course, what irritated many who worked with her in government. Bottomley, former minister for both health and National Heritage under Conservative administrations, was never popular — certainly not as well-liked as her husband, Peter Bottomley, MP for Worthing West.
But her need to be busy got her further, and it has already made an impression in the pinstripe world of headhunting. Rupert Pennant-Rea, chairman of investment firm Henderson and an old friend, compares her with Anna Mann, former doyenne of headhunting at rival Whitehead Mann. “Virginia’s good at weighing up people,” he says, “and at working to a brief — you have to be as a minister. And she’s trusted.”
She also has a range of contacts beyond parliament — before becoming an MP, she trained as a behavioural scientist and worked for the Child Poverty Action Group. And she has added to all that a raft of today’s senior businesswomen.
Does she have an agenda — for instance, to get more women onto boards? Bottomley shakes her head.
“I do want to enable boards to have a greater choice of non-executives and chairmen from which to choose. And these days a board with no women on it looks old-fashioned, frankly. But I am not a crusader here.”
She would, however, like to see some of the women at the top in the public sector move their skills across. “Many senior women in the public sector operate huge budgets and headcounts.”
But perhaps they don’t want the hassle that goes with being in the media eye at quoted companies? She nods. “They do know they will get undue publicity because there is still an ambivalent view about women. The pretty photograph and the bitchy comment is still prevalent in the media.”
Yet headhunting itself isn’t exactly an admired profession. Many have a pretty low opinion of it. When I put that to her, Bottomley looks baffled. “Well, um, ha, um . . .” Eventually she composes herself.
Recruiting a leader, she explains, is one of the most crucial decisions any organisation will make, and often one it is not very practised in making. Headhunters can flush out candidates who don’t reply to ads, check those who do, and advise on procedure for the best result.
Ah, that sounds like a pitch to sort out the Conservatives. Her eyes widen. “I would love to headhunt the next leader of the Conservative party.”
Any tips? “Not for me to say,” she says, suddenly reticent.
Others confirm that she takes her new role very seriously. “She is a natural headhunter,” says Odgers’ chief executive, Richard Boggis-Rolfe. “It’s about who to ask and how to ask it. She makes call after call, and she is brilliant at getting ideas and really driving it.”
Bottomley describes her own key characteristic as resilience. It was instilled young, as part of her upbringing in a “vast, tribal” family with political and business connections. Her father, John Garnett, ran the Industrial Society, her cousin Peter Jay became ambassador to America and two other relatives are life peers. Her brother, Christopher Garnett, is chief executive of GNER, the railway company.
As a child holidaying at the “family compound” near Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight, she was encouraged to swim to the Napoleonic-era fort that stood a mile out in the Solent.
“I held the record at the age of ten, my children did it at eight. It’s not difficult, it’s just about resilience. The decidedly dogged quality of not giving up is the only strength I have.”
Others have found that resilience more akin to bulldozing belligerence, and Bottomley’s attempts at self-deprecation sometimes miss the mark.
“I don’t do work-life balance very well, I just work,” she confesses.
“I don’t cook and I don’t sew . . .”
Then she tells me twice that all three of her children got into the same college at Cambridge. “Entirely unoriginal,” she beams. Telling me once would have been sufficient.
But perhaps she is only practising what she preaches: don’t sell yourself short. Her experience of the male-dominated world of politics has taught her that, if nothing else. “As a woman who knows what it’s like, I can give people some counsel and encouragement.”
She thinks it will get easier for women — so much is changing, not least the attitudes of men. She succeeded in politics because her husband was happy to take on many of the “childcare crisis” duties.
“Some of the debates about women in the corporate world are being done in a timewarp now. Men will be happy caring in future, and women will be happy working — provided the packages are right.”
Anyway, she is running late again, her PA is making faces through the glass door. But, before she goes, she wants to tell me about the photo of herself with her father, shown above. “We are going to Peter and Margaret Jay’s wedding, and the dress I am wearing, I made myself. That shows I’ve always been thrifty.”
But I thought she said she couldn’t sew? “Absolutely not. I buy clothes from M&S and John Lewis.” And, with that, she is gone.
Virginia Bottomley's Working Day
ODGERS’ head of boardroom practice rises at 5.30am. “I wake up to money,” says Virginia Bottomley. Her new job? “No, the programme on Radio 5.”
She leaves her Westminster home at 6.10am and drives herself to work by 6.30am. Later she will meet contacts for breakfast at Claridge’s or the Wolseley. “I am very much part of the breakfast mafia.”
Back in the office she will check on work progress. “Because I oversee quite a lot of teams, if there are any problems I want to know at once.”
She will skip lunch, unless she is meeting someone, work through the afternoon and often go straight to one of her non-executive commitments in the evening.
Does she ever stay in and watch Desperate Housewives? “Er, no. I am quite a devoted grandmum, though.”
Vital Statistics
Born: March 12, 1948
Marital status: married, three children
School: Putney High, London
Universities: Essex and London School of Economics
First job: researcher for Frank Field MP
Salary package: £150,000 plus bonus
Homes: Westminster, Surrey, Isle of Wight
Car: silver Daewoo Matiz
Favourite book: Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Favourite music: La Traviata
Top film: The Longest Day
Best gadget: mobile phone
Interests: work, grandchildren
Working space
VIRGINIA BOTTOMLEY works from a large, light-filled office at Odgers’ base in a 1960s block overlooking Hanover Square in London’s West End. Furnished with a long meeting table and modest desk, and lined with locked cupboards, the room is decorated with various mementos of her parliamentary career.
“I need to take more time and trouble over it, but I am always thinking about my work,” she says. The pictures include a large aerial photo of the Greenwich peninsula, pre-Dome, and a contemporary oil painting that she bought in her former constituency, Surrey South West.
Opposite hangs a print of the Athenaeum club, where her father and grandfather were members. “One of my great delights is that I am also a member now, and I can sit and commune with my ancestors.”
