How Mary Portas reinvented herself at 63: Queen of Shops has ditched her fiery red bob and, after a ‘completely awful’ period of divorcing her recovering alcoholic wife and selling her £5million home after her affairs ‘hundreds of thousands’ were lost

Mary rose to fame in 2007 with the start of the TV program Mary Queen of Shops, in which she helped failing high streets.

She was then appointed by then Prime Minister David Cameron to lead an independent inquiry into the future of the high street in 2011.

Mary’s brother Lawrence Newton provided the sperm to conceive Horatio with Melanie’s egg through IVF.

“Honestly, I don’t know which kid is the most high-maintenance!” Mary told the Daily Mail in 2015, adding that she actually finds taking care of her older children more challenging than her youngest.

‘The [then] The 19-year-old is back from her gap year and will be heading to college this fall. I spend so much time providing emotional and loving guidance, it is much more emotionally draining than the three year old!’

Mary also explained her close relationship with her brother Lawrence, who she previously revealed in 2015 fathered her child with Melanie.

‘When you experience the death of a parent, you stick together like glue. So we were always close,” she explained.

“We’re family, that’s it… I’m a mother, I’m a businesswoman, I have kids, I have family, I happen to live with another woman and she had a child who happens to be my brother’s. The more I can normalize that, the better the world will be.”

‘It is much more emotionally difficult to deal with daughters. “I was very happy to have another son,” she admitted.

‘I don’t want to offend my daughter, who I love, but they are all for it. It’s all those emotions that young girls go through.

“From the acceptance of their friends to the way they look, there’s a huge amount of pressure on them that boys don’t have.”

But the unconventional circumstances of Horatio’s conception have their origins long before all this. They are set in the tragic childhood in which Portas was effectively orphaned at the age of 16 – and became a surrogate mother for Lawrence, now the surrogate mother of her child.

When she and her brother first carried the baby into the west London sunshine, outside St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, they could have been forgiven for thinking about this extraordinary life cycle. Or as Portas puts it: ‘I know now that it could only have been Lawrence who was Horatio’s father.’

To fully understand these words, it is necessary to turn back the clock forty years, to the time when the multi-millionaire retail and branding consultant was a feisty sixteen-year-old who dreamed of becoming a famous actress and hoped to take up a career . a place at RADA.

That all changed suddenly and irrevocably when her mother, also named Mary, died of meningitis in 1977.

While Portas’ three older siblings were already on the verge of leaving the family’s dilapidated semi-detached house in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, her grief-stricken father found solace in another woman. Portas had to take care of 14-year-old Lawrence. washes his clothes and feeds him, while she struggles to come to terms with her own broken heart.

She may have achieved celebrity status through her TV series Mary, Queen Of Shops, not to mention her role as an adviser to David Cameron on the future of the High Street, but Portas’s beginnings were far more humble than her rich life today would suggest.

Her parents were immigrants from Northern Ireland; her red-haired, green-eyed mother, Mary Flynn, was a laundress and her father, Sam Newton, was a bus conductor. Both were fiercely ambitious and encouraged their five children to study hard in their Catholic schools.

While Sam later became a factory manager for Brooke Bond, his wife devoted herself to raising her children, Michael, Patricia, Joe, Mary and Lawrence.

The sudden loss of their mother – wrongly diagnosed with menopausal depression even as she was dying – was compounded by the reaction of their father who, after throwing himself over their mother’s body sobbing, declared that there was nothing left to live for. .

However, he quickly replaced his wife with another after meeting office worker Rebecca at a social club for widows and widowers.

He then sold the family home despite the fact that young Mary, who had barely left school, and Lawrence, who was still a student, were still living there. Both became homeless and Mary developed a fierce independence and self-sufficiency that is still so evident today.

Everything in the house was sold or simply disappeared. She has no photos to commemorate her mother, only a cookbook and a statue of a saint.

Despite Lawrence’s love of music, he was actually instructed by his father to join the police force, largely because he would be given accommodation at the training school in Hendon.

But despite her own ordeal, the ever-capable Portas was never far from her younger brother’s side. She quit her course at RADA because she couldn’t cope financially or emotionally, and devoted herself to caring for them both.

In fact, she sacrificed her dreams of becoming an actress to become Lawrence’s surrogate mother, not knowing that one day he would step in and thank her in the most poignant way imaginable, by becoming a surrogate mother for her to become a child after deciding he hadn’t. I don’t want any from himself.

“We are so close,” she told The Times this weekend. “Our bond will never change, will never change.”

Meanwhile, Portas grew up having unequivocally heterosexual relationships and romantic feelings for men she met, eventually marrying chemical engineer Graham Portas after meeting him in a wine bar.

By then, she had achieved significant career success. After attending Watford College Of Art, Portas began her career in retail in the early 1980s with a Saturday job at John Lewis before moving to Harrods where she gained her first experience in window display design.

She moved to Topshop before being poached by London department store Harvey Nichols, where her exceptionally creative window displays made her the talk of London. At the age of thirty she was a board member.

For a while, it seemed that her professional success was accompanied by domestic happiness. Her son Mylo, now 21, was born in 1994. Her daughter Verity, now 19, almost two years later.

But slowly the relationship began to fall apart and the couple divorced in 2003, very amicably, after 13 years of marriage. She has since described those years as “some of the best years of my life… we just grew apart, and that happens.”

It wasn’t long after that Portas met Melanie Rickey, a fashion magazine editor, at a Royal College Of Art dinner, and the pair fell for each other almost immediately.

Until that point, Portas had never considered a relationship with a woman – “I certainly wasn’t a repressed lesbian,” she later reflected – and insists her love for Rickey took her by surprise, adding: “She gives the world complete love . and it’s the most refreshing, beautiful thing there is.’

Rickey also had not come out as gay before meeting Portas. But their relationship soon became both public and serious, making them Britain’s most high-profile lesbian couple.

The couple had a civil ceremony in 2010 and began IVF the following year, with Melanie carrying the child as she was the younger woman.

They were among the first same-sex couples to convert that partnership into marriage on December 9 last year, when Portas took Melanie out for dinner and then surprised her by going to the Westminster Register Office at midnight, where their family and Horatio were waiting for them.

Today they share a £5 million home in London’s Primrose Hill with Portas’ eldest children, Mylo and Verity. Portas’ ex-husband, the first person she told about Melanie, is a regular at the dinner. Melanie also spoke this week about the unusual circumstances surrounding Horatio’s birth and emphasized that she had no qualms about Portas making it public.

“Gay people get married and have children, so I don’t think there’s any downside to sharing the information,” she told the Observer.

“We’re simply sharing something that feels very normal to us as a family, and if it inspires people or makes them think differently – or even if it changes their perception of ‘normal’ – then that can only be a positive thing.”

But while Horatio’s legal mother is Britain’s leading retail and branding expert, his biological father is a bit quieter.

Despite embarking on a career as a police officer, he has recently worked as a bar manager for his eldest brother, successful entrepreneur Michael Newton.

Indeed, Portas and her siblings remain close and very protective of each other.

While Lawrence worked for his eldest brother, he lived for several years with another brother, Joe, in North London.

For the past three months, he has been living with Portas, Melanie and their children in her beautiful London home, where toddler Horatio takes turns addressing each other as Mom, Mom and Dad Lawrence.

But Lawrence is about to emigrate to Bermuda to start a new life with his girlfriend.

Portas, who says she watched her brother struggle for years after their mother’s death, says that as Lawrence coped by taking control and trying to micro-manage everything, “walked away” and “became the hedonist later in her life.

And the anger she felt as a child only grew as her own children grew up. This week, she recalled, “I look at these two kids and think, ‘Jesus! That was me coming home to do all the cooking. That’s you, Laurens. This is simply criminal.’ And I mourned this 14-year-old boy – and I guess I mourned the 16-year-old girl that I was.

‘I had no life for five years. It was a gray world, a very gray world.’

But the anger she once felt toward her father, who died suddenly of a heart attack the same year he remarried and left everything to his second wife, has been soothed thanks to years of therapy, not to mention the birth of Horatio.

Referring to her book, she said: ‘With all the trauma in it, this is a beautiful, happy little world.’

In an extract from her autobiography Shop Girl, published this week in The Times, she uses the present tense as she recalls the existence she and Lawrence built together as teenagers home alone without an adult to guide them.

“Together we have created our own way of being,” she writes. She might as well be describing the present. For while the choices she has made may seem unconventional, it seems clear that after years of private pain, Portas fought her own way to a happy ending that also involved the beloved younger brother she always promised to care for .