EX-M&S exec Wade-gery joins John Lewis

FORMER Marks & Spencer high-flyer Laura Wade-gery is joining rival John Lewis Partnership’s board as a nonexecutive director.

Ms Wade-gery, who ran M&S’S store and online operations, had been at one time tipped to take over from Marc Bolland, the former chief executive. However, whilst she was on maternity leave Mr Bolland left the business earlier than planned and Steve Rowe was named as his successor.

Ms Wade-gery left M&S for maternity leave in August 2015, initially for a period of four months before extending it to a year. She announced she would not be returning to the retailer in September 2016 after five years with the group and said that her time away from the business had seen “some significant changes in both my personal life and in the business”.

Ms Wade-gery, a former Tesco director and daughter of a senior diplomat, was immortalised in William Dalrymple’s travel novel, In Xanadu, after she retraced Marco Polo’s 13th century voyage from Palestine to China with Mr Dalrymple, a friend whom she met at Cambridge University, in the late Eighties.