When I meet Martha Lane Fox she is crunching her way through a bag of
carrots. She hates business lunches and it has been a busy day. With a diet
like that, your eyesight must be perfect, I say.
“It is about the only part of me that is working properly,” she shoots back,
referring to the car crash that nearly killed her five years ago. Although
her body is full of titanium pins and plates, the only obvious signs of her
ordeal are a scar that runs down one arm and the walking stick that lies on
the floor by her feet. It is talk of babies (mine not hers) that recalls her
battle to recover from her injuries.
“Having to learn everything after my accident again – walking, eating,
standing, everything – I watch babies with even more wonder and amazement,”
she says.
It is 10 years since Lane Fox was Britain’s dotcom darling at the helm of
Lastminute.com, the flights and hotel-rooms website. Feted as the poster
girl of a new wave of entrepreneurs, she was later hated when the company’s
share price crashed after a hyped-up float at the peak of the bubble.
She is still one of Britain’s most recognisable business people, though she
now fronts only Lucky Voice, a small chain of karaoke bars. If people
approach her on the street for a chat, it is about Marks & Spencer,
where she sits on the board as a non-executive director.
“People talk to me about M&S in micro-detail and with either more
fury or passion than I have ever encountered,” she says.
That may be about to change. Lane Fox’s new challenge is to persuade the
poorest 6m Britons to go online so they are not left behind by the digital
revolution. Almost half of them are over 65; 800,000 are children who have
access to computers at school but not at home. The role comes with the grand
title of champion for digital inclusion. “It is hugely important that we do
not create an entire subclass,” she says.
Lane Fox is more than simply a commercial animal, although she is in demand.
“Her knowledge of changing consumer behaviour and understanding of how to
build an online business are invaluable,” says Luke Johnson, the chairman of
Channel 4, on whose board she sits.
She may have made a tidy £18m when Lastminute was sold but it is mainly social
issues that drive her these days, including Reprieve, the prison justice
campaign, and Antigone, her own charity.
“Martha has always been very interested in trying to find a resolution between
those two positions,” says Kip Meek, the consultant who gave her her first
job at Spectrum, the media and technology strategist.
“I would say she is imaginative and creative and therefore she has a good
chance of being more successful than other people in the same type of role.”
We meet in an attic office next door to Private Eye’s headquarters in Soho.
Lane Fox’s team has hardly had time to unpack. She tears a strip off the
photographer, who was expecting something sassier as a back-drop for his
snaps. “You wouldn’t want us to spend taxpayers’ money on that, would you?”
she exclaims.
It seems Lane Fox has got her timing just right. A month ago, a French court
ruled that internet access is now a basic human right. Gordon Brown said it
is as crucial for everyone as electricity and water. Although Lord Carter,
the communications minister, pledged to provide broadband for all in last
month’s Digital Britain white paper, Lane Fox is less bothered by how people
log on, than why.
“We need to bring the online world to life, show that it is more than just a
device, that there are applications on it,” she says.
Reading statistics off her iPhone, Lane Fox says that 70% of people in social
housing have never used the internet. An individual’s earnings power
increases by 10% if they have web skills, she says. But, for many, ignorance
is bliss. A survey by the regulator Ofcom found that 42% of people who don’t
have the internet at home were not bothered. Another 30% said they couldn’t
afford it.
“My experience of technology is that it is a tool, an enabler that allows you
to spend more time doing what you want to do,” she says, suggesting that the
hard-up can save money ordering shopping online or using Skype to make free
telephone calls.
Of course, the subtext is that as soon as everyone is online, the government
can start shutting down post offices and the like. Some 80% of government
interactions with the public take place with the bottom 25% of society, so
failing to encourage everyone online keeps government costs high, says Lane
Fox.
It is early days but her plan so far includes trying to set up a volunteers’
network of trainers, possibly by persuading big firms such as Google, BSkyB
and the BBC to lend staff with suitable skills. At £2m, the budget isn’t
much, which is why she will have to call in some favours.
“I will use my address book mercilessly,” she says with a wink. “People will
start to reject my phone calls.” Lane Fox thought Digital Britain, designed
to bolster the digital economy, was fine, but worries that more is not being
done to prevent Britain falling behind as a home for creative internet
ventures.
“The top 10 websites are all owned by American companies. How are you going to
ensure that doesn’t just continue with every new wave? That is where I would
have liked to see more work.”
Lastminute, though, didn’t need inclusion schemes or broadband for all to be a
big success. Set up in 1998 from Spectrum colleague Brent Hoberman’s flat in
South Kensington, it was valued at £733m when it floated in 2000 and sold
for £577m to Sabre Holdings five years later.
The way Lane Fox tells it, those were easier times. “Now the playing field is
so different. Brent has strong views on this. In terms of, do we mind that
Google is so omnipresent in this country?, his view is that it certainly
does matter and we have to keep a real eye on that.”
To get the point of inclusion over, Lane Fox knows she needs to borrow other
voices and not keep harping on in her own “annoying middle-class voice”. She
singles out an example in the Blackout Crew, a group of mates from Bolton
whose cheaply made video for their dance track Put A Donk On It garnered 5m
views on YouTube last year – showing how easy it is to make a splash online.
Her privileged background has left her wanting to make a difference – her
father Robin, a classical history professor at Oxford and gardening writer,
sent her to Westminster, the top public school.
“I was lucky because I was given this amazing platform by my parents,” she
says. “I was over-educated, buoyed up and overconfident. I was given every
bit of the tool to enable me to have a shot at creating something in my
life.”
After Magdalen College, Oxford, Lane Fox’s first job, at Spectrum, allowed her
to travel the world researching how other countries were preparing to drive
up the information superhighway. Laughing, she recalls a presentation in
Tokyo from ministers about their plans for the unfortunately-titled Penis
network.
These days, her main business interest is Lucky Voice. Despite the recession,
trading is fine at its five branches. Her theory is that people are happy to
spend, as long as it is on something with meaning. “So going out just to get
drunk, that’s not so fun. Going out to eat, that is okay but it’s not
lasting in the same way that the joy and love of karaoke stays with you for
ever.”
Lane Fox would like to get more people through the doors. Like digital
inclusion, “you need someone to show you it’s fun”.
Her boyfriend is Chris Gorell Barnes, who recently produced The End of The
Line, a documentary on overfishing. He nursed her back to health during the
year she spent in hospital after the near-fatal car crash in Morocco in 2004.
It hasn’t stopped her lending digital nous to companies as a non-executive.
Sir Stuart Rose at M&S is “brilliant”. She dismisses the row over how
the company has mishandled his succession as “a media mauling rather than a
shareholder mauling” – even though at its annual meeting 38% of votes cast
backed a resolution seeking the appointment of a new chairman. “Of course
there will be life without him, but it will be different,” she says. “But
there will be life.”
On the future of Channel 4, Lane Fox will be drawn even less. Rather than talk
about the likelihood of the broadcaster saving itself by fashioning a joint
venture with BBC Worldwide, she prefers to flag the creativity of its
educational programmes, which have shifted their entire £6m budget online.
That’s her thing these days. Rather than threatening society, the internet is
improving things, she believes. “It isn’t taking the community out of
things, it is putting it back in.” Andrew Davidson is away
The life of Martha Lane Fox
Born:February 10, 1973
Marital status:unmarried
School:Westminster
University:Magdalen College, Oxford, where she obtained a BA in ancient and
modern history
First job:management consultant at Spectrum
Salary package:£30,000 in her role as champion for digital inclusion
Home:Marylebone, London
Car:none; she can’t drive since her accident
Favourite book:War and Peace
Favourite music:Showtunes
Favourite film:High Society
Favourite gadget:iPhone
Last holiday:Mozambique
WORKING DAY
“THERE really isn’t a typical working day – that is what is so fun,” says the
government’s champion for digital inclusion. The only thing that doesn’t
change is getting up at 5.30 every morning.
From now on, Martha Lane Fox will split her time between her digital-inclusion
role, Lucky Voice, which is also in Soho, and her home office.
Business lunches are out. “They are a complete waste of time and I try to
avoid them at all costs. I would much rather have a meeting or cup of tea,”
she says. The rest of her time is spent on “speaking engagements and a lot
of rallying the troops”.
DOWNTIME
MARTHA LANE FOX spent the first half of the year reading an “inordinate amount
of fiction” after joining the judging panel for the Orange Prize for
Fiction. Since her car accident, exercise has become a crucial part of life.
“I do all sorts of things just to keep my body moving and get my muscles
back,” she says.
She spent a week on islands off the coast of Mozambique recently. It was “a
beautiful, devastating, disturbing, complicated place”, she says.
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