From Ibiza to a Peruvian jail cell

As a City high-flyer who also had six children Nicola Horlick was often referred to as a “superwoman”. But she has always acknowledged that she had a lot of help at home, and if her success at work was ever in danger of going to her head, the death from leukaemia of her eldest daughter, Georgie, aged 12, certainly put that into perspective. It was 21 years ago, and the family still hasn’t recovered, she told Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester in The Times. “My next daughter is getting married and I know she will be thinking it is all marvellous, but there is one terrible thing: Georgie won’t be there. The problem is that every happiness is tinged with sadness. I will never ever get over it, but nor will they.” She thinks her youngest daughter, Antonia, who was 18 months old when Georgie went into hospital, was affected the most. “I had to live in Great Ormond Street for an entire year, and when Georgie was having a bone-marrow transplant I wasn’t allowed to see the other children because of germs. Antonia had to stand outside looking in to me and Georgie in a glass box and talk to me on a phone. It was extremely traumatic for her. Then Georgie died and I was sobbing and sobbing, so I don’t think that helped either.” At 58, Horlick has lost none of her professional drive: fiercely anti-Brexit, she is standing as an MP for the Lib Dems. But she will never tell women they can have it all. “Yes, I had this amazing career, but Georgie got sick and died… It actually makes me angry when people refer to me as the woman who had it all.”

Michaella McCollum was barely 20 when she was caught trying to smuggle £1.5m of cocaine out of Peru, says Hilary Rose in The Times. Brought up in Northern Ireland, she’d struggled with drugs in her teens, then moved to Ibiza to escape an abusive boyfriend. There, she fell in with local dealers, who offered her £5,000 to do a “run” to Peru. It seemed like easy money. “Of course I knew [drugs] were illegal, but in Ibiza people did them in the street… You have this image of drugs being bad and dangerous, but when you take them, your opinions change: you think they’re not that bad... I really didn’t think that lifting drugs and taking them somewhere was a big deal.” Besides, she was so naive she thought Lima was in Spain. Only on the plane did she realise she was off to South America. In Lima, she and her fellow mule were handed 11kg of cocaine to put in their suitcases. They were told that the airport staff had been bribed to usher them through – but at check-in, she noticed sniffer dogs, and thought, “You can’t bribe a dog”. She ended up serving three years in a Peruvian jail. Released in 2016, she’s now a single mother to twins and is studying for A levels in the hope of going to university. She is, she says, sorry for what she did – and expects no sympathy; but she is glad of the hard lesson it taught her. “All my life I’d been running away,” she says. “In prison I couldn’t run any more. I had to reflect on my life and sort it out. And I did.”