href="http://lastminute.com">lastminute.com, the dot-com-era-defining start-up that sold for half a unicorn. Nor that she was the youngest female appointee to the House of Lords, impressive though that is. And it is neither the car accident that nearly killed her and resulted in two years confined to a hospital bed as they rebuilt her shattered body, nor that she now runs Doteveryone, her charity focused on making the UK the most digitally advanced nation in the world. Remarkable though these things may be, the nugget that best gives you a sense of the woman is her number of godchildren: she has nineteen. That’s two more than Princess Di.
When you meet her, it’s not difficult to see why. She is alive with a sense of possibility, potential and optimism. ‘I love building things, I love ideas and I love that you can always empower people and improve systems and make things better.’ And her guiding philosophy? ‘Without sounding too kooky about it, you feel much better as a person if you default to generosity as opposed to being mean-spirited.’ What lucky godchildren.
Ironically, she herself has not always been on the receiving end of people’s better natures. When her friend and co-founder Brent Hoberman floated lastminute.com and the share price crashed, she received more than 2,000 pieces of hate mail, ‘including death threats and people calling me every name from B to C’, as well as business journalists writing in the press that they wished they could shoot her, or that she ‘should be put in a burka and told to stay in my box’. Not much generosity of spirit there. And, tellingly, all that vitriol was focused on her, not her male co-founder.
The lastminute.com story is a time capsule that reflects the internet of the late 1990s. They were ahead of their time, launching in an era before Google even existed. Their original name was LastMinuteNetwork.com but they thought it would be cooler if they dropped that third word. They struggled to raise funds because venture capitalists said people wouldn’t buy things over the internet as no one would put their credit card details into a website. It seems laughably naive now, but Martha says it was a different internet back then. ‘It was so new and exciting, a real sense the whole world was going to change, we didn’t foresee that these huge monopolies like Amazon, Google and Facebook would just go boom and lock down the internet.’
Her belief in the fundamental power of the internet to help people change things is the driving force behind her organisation Doteveryone, which has the mission to democratise access to and understanding of the internet for, literally, everyone. She is mobilising the government, businesses, schools and communities to ensure everyone has the skills to get online and in a non-curated way: ‘No disrespect to Facebook, but the internet is not just Facebook. If you know how to really use the internet, you have access to every opinion, piece of information and tool out there. It can help us all change things.’
It is this spirit of wanting to improve herself and others, and of seeing the endless possibilities in the world, both online and off, that drives her and it is reflected in the advice she passes on:
‘Be bold. If you’re bold you might right royally screw up, but you can also achieve much more, so be bold. You’ve only got your own reputation to lose and that’s not important. It’s much better to strive for something that seems impossible, that’s quite nuts on some level. So be bold, whatever it is. Even if you work on a customer help desk somewhere, ask yourself how can I be bold? Find those small moments of boldness because they are everywhere.’
‘BE BOLD. IF YOU’RE BOLD YOU MIGHT RIGHT ROYALLY SCREW UP, BUT YOU CAN ALSO ACHIEVE MUCH MORE, SO BE BOLD. YOU’VE ONLY GOT YOUR OWN REPUTATION TO LOSE AND THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT. IT’S MUCH BETTER TO STRIVE FOR SOMETHING THAT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE, THAT’S QUITE NUTS ON SOME LEVEL. SO BE BOLD, WHATEVER IT IS. EVEN IF YOU WORK ON A CUSTOMER HELP DESK SOMEWHERE, ASK YOURSELF HOW CAN I BE BOLD? FIND THOSE SMALL MOMENTS OF BOLDNESS BECAUSE THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.’
– Baroness Martha Lane Fox
HARRY BELAFONTE, KINGSMAN
I’M TALKING US POLITICS WITH Harry Belafonte, the eighty-nine-year-old Grammy award-winning singer, titan of the American Civil Rights Movement, and confidant of Martin Luther King. It’s a big conversation. He is a man of extraordinary eloquence, intellect and life force, the latter being fuelled by the twin engines of his anger at social injustice and his enduring love of the better side of his country.
We talk about the Republican primaries, which are raging around us while we’re in New York. Donald Trump is given short shrift – ‘a character clearly smitten with ignorance and arrogance, one doesn’t need to linger too long on him’ – but he says what is worth greater consideration is the amount of people responding positively to Trump’s messages of hatred, which reveals to Harry the extent to which the American Dream has been corrupted.
Conversely, Harry sees Barack Obama as one of the most intellectually gifted people ever to occupy the office but believes he’s endured eight years of the worst animosity of any president in history – a fact that Harry puts down to ‘one thing and one thing only. Because he’s a man of colour.’
These two phenomena – Trump’s popularity and Obama’s received animosity – support his assertion that racism and inequality are alive and rampant in modern-day America and the wider world. And Harry shows no sign of resting while that is still the case. His work extends from fighting AIDS in Africa and serving on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to educating American students on the importance of non-violent protest.
Harry Belafonte wasn’t born into the worlds of social activism or stardom. Raised in Harlem to working-class parents, his path to a life in the spotlight was precipitated while working as a janitor’s assistant in New York. A tenant of his building, short on cash, tipped him with two tickets to the American Negro Theater. Watching the play ignited within Harry a love of the art form and he decided at that moment to become an actor. He signed up for acting lessons and, to pay for them, started singing at night in a New York jazz club. But unexpected success there gave him the opportunity to launch a pop career, popularising Caribbean music through his ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O)’, releasing many successful albums of different musical styles and then forging an equally successful film career. All in all, not a bad outcome from a couple of free tickets.
Like many remarkable people he claims his life has been shaped by such moments of happenstance, those chance events none of us have control over. He advises making the most of them. ‘The greatest force in my life has been coincidence, and having an openness to receiving whatever the people I met offered and wanted. Due to this my life opened up into a whole set of challenges and joys that I would not have had otherwise.’ He summarises this into one of his main philosophies for living: ‘It pays to always answer the knock at the door.’
With his subsequent fame came considerably more of those knocks, including one that turned out to be the most significant of all. From a young pastor by the name of Martin Luther King, asking for Harry’s help at one of his events. And at that first meeting ‘Dr King called me to help him with his mission, and there I was caught up in a social movement that changed the American political landscape and the global family.’ He became Dr King’s mentor and provider, supporting Dr King’s family, bailing him out when he got arrested, financing the Freedom Rides, and organising the March on Washington, and he has been carrying the torch for the Civil Rights Movement and other social injustices ever since. ‘Those guys left me with my hands full.’
So, given all that he has stood for, fought for, and seen his friends die for, it makes sense that his greatest
