Nicola Horlick was once the kind of superwoman who was in her City office at 6am with her blow dry gleaming, power suit immaculate, blood red nails thrumming on her executive desk.
Since those days she has suffered the death of a child, divorce, remarriage and an OCD compulsion to clean every kitchen worktop as she cooks perfect roast chicken dinners for her large family.
She was famed as the have-it-all heroine who could run a home while still being formidable in the workplace — but that was all a long time ago.
Today she is ten minutes late for her first meeting at lazybones o’clock, and pads in with a pair of Jimmy Choo pom-pom trainers on her tiny feet. She also wears a High Street dress and cardigan. ‘Both from Uniqlo, if you can believe it,’ she says and I simply cannot.
Nicola Horlick, 58, (pictured) who is standing as the Liberal Democrat candidate in London’s Chelsea and Fulham constituency, told how Brexit sparked her interest in politics
Not the Uniqlo bit. More the cardigan — any woman who wants to be taken seriously in the office knows never to wear a cardigan. You might as well have a coaster on your desk that says Age And Glasses Of Wine Should Never Be Counted — and she has one of those, too. Her hair now forms two long curtains framing her Miss Tiggy-Winkle face and when she talks there is still enough of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in her voice to make her sound rather like the television personality Kirstie Allsopp.
‘You are not the first person to say that,’ she says. ‘Someone mentioned it on Twitter and Kirstie replied: “I’ve never been so insulted in my life.” ’
Nicola laughs. I laugh. Although today is no laughing matter. An election has just been called and Nicola Horlick will be standing as the Liberal Democrat candidate in London’s Chelsea and Fulham constituency.
At the age of 58 she is leaving the shores of finance behind to plunge straight into the far murkier waters of politics. Why, Nicola, why?
‘Brexit,’ she says briskly. She joined the Lib Dems immediately after Leave won the Referendum in 2016 and, like everyone else, has become more passionate about the issue ever since. ‘I got sick of just shouting at the television every night. I decided that I had to get up and do something to stop Brexit.’
Oh no! Is she another expert who is going to tell the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit that they are wrong?
‘No. I’m looking to persuade them that I am right,’ she says. ‘Quite a few people are being persuaded that maybe it wasn’t quite as easy as they were told. People realise the only way to stop the chaos is to stop Brexit. It is impacting on our economy severely.’
Nicola’s (pictured with her first husband, Tim) first marriage broke down when her husband had an affair, following the death of their daughter Georgina from leukaemia
In what way? ‘The car industry, for example. They could just decide it’s not worth making cars here any more. People are worried about that.’
Perhaps these are the same ‘people’ who Nicola says also desperately want proportional representation, the constitutional reform Lib Dems have been campaigning for since the last century. ‘So many people are now saying we ought to have PR,’ she insists.
Yes. And all six of them are currently standing around Jo Swinson’s kitchen, drinking decaf as they wait for the morning conference call with Nicola Sturgeon.
Yet I am surprised. With Horlick’s background as a high-flying financier who once managed billions of pounds worth of assets, she seemed to be a natural fit for the Conservative Party, but no.
Growing up in the Wirral, her businessman father was once a Liberal candidate. She remembers leafleting for him during campaigns, and this seems to have been a formative experience. ‘I’ve always been a Liberal. I have never been a Conservative, nor ever once voted Conservative.
‘Maybe I was brainwashed by my family, but now I think I’m just naturally very liberal- minded. I want to do something about the inequalities in our society. I think it’s completely unacceptable for nurses to end up using food banks.’
Nicola (pictured in 1997 with baby Antonia, and from left, Rupert , Alice Georgina, and Serena seated behind their nanny) hopes to become health secretary
She doesn’t want to be prime minister — yet. She simply wants to be health secretary and put in charge of the NHS, which needs to be ‘completely re-engineered’. Horlick has been on NHS boards and she praises NHS managers (‘they have a terrible reputation and that is just wrong’).
She wants proper primary care facilities with proper diagnostic tools. ‘And for acute hospitals to be only for people with acute issues,’ she says.
Well, if anyone is qualified to talk about the NHS from the inside out, then surely it is Nicola Horlick. She had six children with her first husband, a fellow investment banker called Tim Horlick.
Their eldest child Georgina died from leukaemia in November 1998 and her death is the rock in Nicola’s placid lake, the sorrowful incident that shaped everything that came before and after.
Being a strong person doesn’t necessarily mean you can cope with the loss of a daughter
Horlick is not one to shy away from fame and has often discussed this in public.
Yet even now, as she talks about Georgina in her quiet, matter-of-fact way, one can still glimpse the terrible chasm that peeled open beneath this blighted family.
Georgina was two when she was diagnosed and 12 when she died. ‘So I had ten years to think about it and her death was still so much worse than I ever imagined,’ says Nicola.
She praises the staff at Great Ormond Street who cared for her daughter and ‘truly loved her’. Yet she still finds this time of year particularly difficult.
‘The 19th of October is her birthday and the 27th of November is the anniversary of her death.
Nicola (pictured with her husband Martin Baker) met her financial journalist husband, Martin, during a newspaper interview
‘I am not an actual depressive, but it is dark and it’s cold and it’s raining and it is hard. Being a strong person doesn’t necessarily mean that you can cope with that sort of loss and grief because it’s so extreme.’
Georgina’s death was the catalyst that ended Nicola’s first marriage — her husband had an affair with a receptionist, but she doesn’t blame him, saying that grief manifests itself in many different ways.
In 2006 she married financial journalist Martin Baker, who came along to interview her, but fell in love with her ‘dewy, dormouse dark eyes’ instead.
Her surviving children all thrive. Alice has a handbag business, Serena is a doctor, Antonia recovered from teenage drug issues and has just graduated from an American university, Rupert is a computer scientist and Benjie has just joined Extinction Rebellion. What?
‘Oh Benjie is a joy,’ coos mama. ‘I didn’t want him climbing on roofs of trains or preventing people going to work, but he would never do that as he’s much too sensible.’
Still, my suspicions are confirmed; that the son of two investment banker parents is exactly the sort of young person who would join Extinction Rebellion. ‘He just wants to pressurise governments,’ his mother insists.
If Nicola Horlick really did once have it all, she has got a lot less of it now. Or was it all just an incredible mirage, like so much in the world of finance?
Since leaving a high-flying City career, Nicola (pictured) now runs Money & Co with an annual salary of £120,000
After a bust-up in 1999 with her last major fund, she quit the City and moved into film finance before chairing a 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.
Nicola (pictured) believes her business won’t suffer if she’s successful in the election because she employs ‘talented young people’
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.
Nicola (pictured) who was once of a handful of female pupils at a boys’ school, says she understands men better than women
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.