'My Kids Are My Greatest Achievement!'

The Apprentice star Baroness Karren Brady talks to Woman’s Weekly about success and why she wants to age gracefully.

- Hayley Minn

There’s no denying that Baroness Karren Brady has worked extremely hard to get to where she is today. At 23, she became managing director of Birmingham City FC in 1993, and the youngest MD of a UK plc four years later – but there’s so much more to her than football. Karren is involved in numerous businesses, including being a former chairman of Taveta, which owns the Arcadia group; she’s a Conservative peer in the House of Lords; a champion of women in the workplace; a mother to her two children, Sophia, 23, and Paolo, 22; and last but not least is Lord Sugar’s advisor on The Apprentice – which is what she’s talking about to Woman’s Weekly today.

‘My ambition was only ever to be independent, to have my own money and to be able to make my own decisions,’ Karren explains.

She grew up in Edmonton, north London, and was sent to an all-girls Catholic school, which is where that ambition stemmed from.

Talking of her time there, she says, ‘You get up when you’re told, you go to bed when you’re told, you eat when you’re told, wear what you’re told, you spend your life doing what you’re told, and I’d had enough of being told what to do. I wanted to have control of my own life.’