How on earth does she do it?
She juggles a multi-billion-pound City portfolio with being mum to NINE children. Oh, and she’s just helped her daughter give birth to her first grandchild. We meet superwoman Helena Morrisey, 52, and ask...
DAME Helena Morrissey has an enviable capacity for filling each millisecond of her day with productive activity.
We’ve just spent an hour chatting in an airless basement studio. It’s a sweltering July day and Helena has a succession of radio interviews lined up, but between each there are a few minutes’ pause, during which most people would draw breath and gather their thoughts. Not Helena. Because we’ve more to discuss, she rushes out between each interview, picks up the conversation where we left off, rattles off a few sentences — she speaks so fast I’m frightened she’ll run out of breath — then dashes off.
And so her day continues for the next few hours. ‘ Oh, I’ve talked about everything this morning!’ she cries. ‘Brexit (she’s a committed supporter), big families, women’s pensions, the environment . . .’ Her sharp mind switches adroitly between each subject.
The phrase ‘I don’t know how she does it’ could have been coined for Helena. Even her relaxation is timetabled.
She had achieved a stellar City career by the age of 35, and for 15 years earned a seven-figure salary as an investment
As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people don’t CARRIE FISHER
company CEO. Now, aged 52, she is head of personal investing at Legal & General, which has £ 983 billion worth of assets under its management.
at the same time she campaigns for gender equality and the environment, is a trustee of a cancer charity and a governor at eton, her sons’ school.
Were this litany of triumphs not enough, she and richard, her husband of 27 years (a former Buddhist priest, now a stay-at-home dad) have nine — yes nine — children, aged nine to 26, and a seven-month-old grandson.
She is the poster girl for an elite club of highflying career women — women who not only sustain hugely demanding jobs, but embrace motherhood on an epic scale.
Only last week another hit the headlines — technology entrepreneur eileen Burbidge, who at 47 is trying for her sixth baby through IVF. and, of course, there’s Nicola horlick, 57, perhaps the first to set the bar for working mums impossibly high by balancing a dazzling career in finance with raising six children.
I expect helena to be crisp, businesslike, a little daunting. actually she is warm, chatty, accessible, self-deprecating.
‘My days are like university exams, really taxing and full-on,’ she admits. ‘I work pretty intensively for ten hours, and most weeks there’s a 12-hour day when I get home and just can’t talk to anyone. I’m human. I get exhausted. I have to decompress.
‘richard wants to talk. I don’t want to, which is good, I suppose, because I just listen.
‘People say I’m superwoman, a role model; that I make it all look so easy. But it isn’t! I’m professional at work, of course, but behind the scenes there are cars failing their MOTs, washing machines that break; all the usual domestic disasters.’
YET today she is a paragon of effortless elegance, slender as a willow wand in her roksanda sheath dress and standing six foot tall in her stiletto heels. after nine pregnancies, how does she still have a washboard stomach?
‘all my family are slim. I think it’s nervous energy,’ she laughs. ‘I do Pilates to keep a waist. I try to go three times a week: once in the early morning, once at lunchtime and once on my way home from work. I use a studio near where I happen to be, so I’m not wasting time in transit.’
helena practically apologises for not being terribly adventurous with her wardrobe: ‘I don’t have a stylist. I have a very simple formula: I’m comfortable in brightly coloured dresses in distinct shapes and neutral shoes. It’s an easy recipe.
‘and I’m not embarrassed to admit I wear high heels because I feel more powerful in them.
‘I’m not quite as bad as Mark Zuckerberg, who wears the same grey T-shirt every day, but there isn’t much imagination about what I wear.
‘I shop online. I have six or seven dresses that I know suit me and I wear them almost in rotation. I’ve got a red one that I wore until it practically fell apart, then I bought exactly the same one on The Outnet in the past season’s sale.’
I comment that she must have breezed through her pregnancies — how else would she have coped with those arduous working days? — but she wails: ‘No! I had preeclampsia with my first and through the others I was very, very sick, morning, noon and night, which makes me slightly masochistic.
‘I’d struggle to work by bus and then Tube, and I’d often have to get off the train twice to throw up. I had to work out which stations had open bins so I could rush out and be sick in them.’
She galloped back to work after each child, spending the least time out — five weeks — with Millie, child number four.
‘I bled a lot with her and had to go into hospital,’ she recalls. ‘She was born a month early and it was a difficult birth.
‘It was also my annus horribilis at work because I’d had a bad year on fund performance. I had a computer at home and I’d torture myself by looking at it all the time. I made a pragmatic decision to go back five or so weeks after Millie was born. It was too soon. I regretted that.’
These days, ‘only’ four children live at the family home in Notting hill, West London, fulltime: Clara, 18, Octavia, 15, Cecily, ten, and Bea, nine, all attend independent schools nearby. Theo, 12, is about to start at eton