‘Being a strong person doesn’t necessarily mean you can cope with the loss of a daughter’
boutique venture capital firm. She now runs Money & Co, a crowdfunding operation which focuses on business loans. Today her offices are in Hammersmith, about eight miles west of the gleaming citadels in the City.
Her Money & Co business is one of many based in a building with shared flexible meeting rooms and a cafe, where coffee is served in mugs with Because Life Is Too Short printed on the side.
Here, men with interesting beards and scatty-haired women breakfast on crumpets and bananas as they talk about ‘intensive one-on-one sessions’.
Nicola shares her office with about six members of staff. There is a bath towel on the coat rack and a shrine to Barry Manilow on top of one filing cabinet. ‘Not mine,’ she says.
Various estimates put her wealth at £20million, but is that accurate? ‘Any entrepreneur will tell you that wealth fluctuates dramatically, but hopefully I will be worth a lot more than that,’ she says.
Her annual salary is £120,000, but she doesn’t always take it depending on whether it has been a ‘good month or a bad month’.
Home is a palatial new-build in West London with all mod cons, including an internal courtyard used as a dining room in the summer. ‘You press a button and the roof opens. It is very Grand Designs.’ There is also a chateau in France, just south of Bordeaux. ‘Technically it has 15 bedrooms, but we only use eight of them.’ I absolutely love the story of her second marriage. Both of them were separated from their respective spouses when ‘Martin came along to interview me for his newspaper and I thought, oh, he is quite nice. We were talking about Georgina and he started crying, because he is very emotional.
‘ He said that he had three children himself, and that he just couldn’t contemplate the death of one of them. So I ended up comforting him.’
Their fledgling relationship survived his first article about her, in which he described her hairstyle as like that of a ‘ lightly feminised Nazi Stormtrooper’. And you still married him?
‘Well, I had this very glossy bob that he thought looked like a helmet,’ she shrugs.
The next time they met, she was having a moan and said to him: ‘Who would be interested in a middle-aged woman with five children?’ And he swiftly replied: ‘A middle-aged man with three children.’ A month later he asked her to marry him.
So life moves on, but only just. Two of her daughters are soon to be married themselves. ‘ Two weddings,’ she says. ‘And we will be very happy on those days, but they will be tinged with sadness because Georgina is not there.
‘When Martin and I got married, our blessing was in the church where she is buried. We had this dilemma, we couldn’t just walk past her grave. So we stopped and the girls threw rose petals on her grave and we said some prayers.
‘It is always going to be like that. We are always going to have this slight sadness. How can it not be? I can’t ever get over one of my children dying. I think about her every single day. She would have been 33 this year and I make sure we all talk about her. I don’t want to be like one of those Victorian mothers, who just pretended the child never existed.’
Should she be successful in the election she claims her business won’t suffer because she employs ‘talented young people who will step up to the mark and take control and responsibility’.
And at least Nicola is prepared for the abuse that female politicians suffer online because, as a high-profile woman, she is sadly already used to it.
Given this, one wonders why she pushes herself forward into the abyss of public life, but she has grown up a cherished child in the limelight and seems reluctant to let it go.
As a girl, she was one of a handful of female pupils at a boys’ school: ‘I was spoiled. I was always the centre of attention. In every play I had the leading role.’
No wonder she lasted for only two years when she moved to Cheltenham Ladies.
‘It was vile. A thousand girls being bitchy and nasty. I hated it so much I ran away.
‘I understand men better than I understand women. Men are much more straightforward. Women do this needling and needling,’ she says, grinding a finger into her palm.
Later,at Oxford, she and Metropolitan Police Commander Cressida Dick were among the first women to be admitted to the formerly all-male college Balliol. They are still friends today and met at a reunion recently. ‘Cressida, can you believe it has been 40 years?’ said Nicola as they shook their heads over a convivial sherry.
Perhaps the simple truth is that Nicola Horlick needs the theatre of politics to validate herself as her finance career simmers on a back burner, her children have grown up and the spotlight veers away from the once all-powerful superwoman.
If so, there are worse reasons to get into politics. Today, she says that one of her strengths is that she is ‘just more used to dealing with men than with women’.
And sadly at Westminster, that will still come in useful.