Please Let It Stop (18 page)

Grieving Mum was a very difficult process. Normally, when you lose someone you love you take comfort in reflecting over wonderful memories. Sadly, neither Vanessa or I could recall one happy memory to remember her by. My mother was terrified of life and met a man who made her more terrified. He eroded any confidence and self-esteem she had. She lived a totally negative life, one that may have not helped her when her illness came along and possibly made things worse. But she chose him. She had the chance not to choose him a second time, but she did, and it sealed her fate.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Serious cracks were starting to appear in my personal life in 2003 but I had some pressing business to attend to with the government which had begun around a year earlier. We’d been advertising Ann Summers job vacancies with JobCentrePlus for some years. In early 2002 I learnt that they were no longer taking our advertisements. JobCentrePlus is part of the Department of Work and Pensions and we couldn’t understand the change in policy. Our enquiries revealed that they didn’t seem to know why they’d done it, either. It seems that someone in the organisation had suddenly decided that it was inappropriate for JobCentrePlus to continue to advertise vacancies at Ann Summers because we were a ‘sex shop’. This is what happens when you have someone who doesn’t know what we do – they have their own beliefs and they cannot see past their own preconceived ideas.

I wrote to them, pointing out that we’d had great success
with our placements from them over the years and many of the people we’d hired had risen to managerial positions within the company. Their reply stated, ‘We do not accept any job ads for any business related to the sex industry.’ I wrote again letting them know that we were not a sex shop because in order to be one, you had to have a license – our shops were not licensed because they did not need to be. Moreover, we had somehow managed to employ about two thousand employees plus seven thousand five hundred sales organisers, including a high proportion of women, none of whom have felt uncomfortable in any way working for us. The response from JobCentrePlus was nevertheless a negative one, so I decided to invite them to come and meet us and see our operation. They duly turned up and we took them to some of our shops and showed them around our building, just as we’d done with the Dublin Corporation. And we introduced them to people who’d been recruited through JobCentrePlus – but it seemed that they’d made up their minds. Like the Dublin Corporation before them, they had their own agenda.

What also became evident is that they’d rewritten their policy so that Ann Summers fell outside their criteria. We decided to get our lawyers involved. They examined the policy and confirmed it was designed to exclude us. I was very angry about this because it meant we were being forced to hire staff through recruitment agencies, a move which could potentially cost us up to £250,000 a year. At
the same time jobs were being denied to young people who came through JobCentrePlus. The government, in its wisdom, had decided that jobseekers would be too embarrassed to apply for a job with us. The reality was that the JobCentres had never had a complaint from a jobseeker, nor had any of their staff complained.

Geoff Tyler from Pinsent Curtis Biddle, whom I trust implicitly, said the next step would be to take the case to the High Court. The thought that I could do that momentarily stunned me, but as the idea took hold I realised I had to do it. I suppose it goes back to what I went through in trying to set up a shop in Dublin, and even back in 1985 when I was almost arrested in Bristol. It all feels like bullying and for me that is like a red rag to a bull. I felt that I could challenge this. I knew that taking the case to court would cost money. It would also be a risk to the business because it would focus a great deal of attention on us, but I was confident we would have public opinion on our side because the government was effectively denying work to young people. On Wednesday, 11 December 2002, we issued court proceedings at the Royal Courts of Justice to sue the Minister of State, Nick Brown, and the Department of Work and Pensions. The date for the case to be heard was set: Friday, 16 May 2003.

Arriving at the Royal Courts of Justice is quite a humbling experience – I suppose in many ways these buildings are designed to do just that. The courts are housed in the
Strand, in London, within this magnificent Gothic building which was designed by a man called G. E. Street. The rumour is that the strain of such an enormous project led to Street’s untimely death. The building contains over a thousand rooms. Its architecture is very striking throughout and really does take your breath away. The role of this court is to hear some of the country’s most serious civil, libel and appeal cases. The public are permitted to view all eighty-eight courtrooms, unsupervised – though judges are quick to reprimand people who try to interrupt proceedings.

So here I am, all 5 feet 2 inches of me (aided by some four-inch heels, of course), walking into this most imposing and formal of buildings.

I am always very interested in what other people do and how they do it, so quite aside from it being my case, I found the whole process fascinating as well. Meeting our barrister was a key moment for me: I needed to know that she actually believed in what we were fighting for. Her name was Kate Gallafent, a young woman whom I immediately respected and who I felt was right behind me. She was brilliant. She argued that we had been allowed to advertise in the past, ‘apparently without bringing civilisation to an end’. She made the point that it was unfair to allow other companies, whose jobs could offend certain groups of people, to advertise. For example, would a Jew or a Muslim
want to work in a non-kosher or non-halal butcher’s shop? There was also the fact that department stores such as Liberty and Selfridges sold sex toys but were allowed to advertise in JobCentres. Kate Gallafent also said that if people were going to get embarrassed surely they would be more likely to be offended if they found a vibrator where they might not expect to, such as in Selfridges, rather than in one of our shops.

The judge was Mr Justice Newman and I saw he had a twinkle in his eye. There was one point during the case when he said, ‘But even the downstairs part of the Oxford Street store is non-offensive.’ Oh my God, I thought, you’ve been in there. He’d obviously done his research. I had the distinct feeling that he was a fair man. We didn’t get the result straight away so I was on tenterhooks, waiting for almost a month. The judge said we had been singled out unfairly. He said that the JobCentre policy had paid ‘insufficient regard to its legal obligation to assist employers and appears to have paid no regard to the potential benefit which jobseekers could obtain by taking up employment with Ann Summers’. He also said it had neglected the possibility that job ads could be accepted in a way that did not lead ‘to any significant embarrassment to jobseekers’.

We had won! It was a major moment and one that had no doubt been propelled along by the media. It was also good, knowing public opinion was on my side. I wanted to win because I like winning. But I am also fair and even-handed,
and what annoyed me was that the JobCentres broke all the rules on fairness. When you believe so much in something, you want the right outcome. And now I had it.

As we came out of the High Court, dozens of photographers and TV crews were waiting. I gave a short statement to the journalists, followed by a couple of TV interviews with the BBC and Channel 4. Dan was away that day on a golfing trip while family and colleagues were busy with their commitments, so I took Gary Burgham, my Human Resources Director, and the legal team off for some lunch and much-deserved champagne.

Defeating the government was a highlight in what was otherwise a very dismal period. My depression – and I still didn’t know for sure if it
was
depression – was getting worse. I was not only going through bereavement, but somewhere I’d had to find the strength to get through my third IVF attempt. In what was a spectacular piece of timing the eggs for the third attempt were collected the day after Mum’s funeral. I’d previously asked the doctor if I should postpone it but she said it wouldn’t make any difference. I wasn’t so sure – how can stress not play a part? After the first attempt we’d moved to the Lister Hospital in Chelsea, regarded as a centre of excellence for IVF. From a personal point of view the overall experience we had at the Lister was much better than the previous hospital, but once again the treatment did not succeed.

While all this was happening, my relationship with Dan
was going downhill; we were not enjoying ourselves anymore. As I’d feared, the desire to have a baby was threatening to split us up. When one thing is wrong in a relationship and it stays around long enough, it tends to dredge up other issues which may have laid dormant otherwise. That was particularly the case with Dan. He later told me that at this point he had started wondering whether he could have a relationship with me without children. He was grappling with the worry that the person he loved might not be enough for him, and was generally beset by negative thoughts and questioning everything. Was Dan looking for problems? I don’t know. All I do know is that he’d lost sight of the positives in our relationship, and it was starting to bring me down as well. I tried to help him see the bigger picture but I just couldn’t do that
and
look after myself – something I was struggling to do.

I wasn’t coping well with Mum’s death but, despite my feeling of total despair, I was still trying to help myself, something I have done all my life. I decided I needed to talk to a bereavement counsellor but had no idea who to turn to. Because of my high profile I wanted to be careful whom I approached in case they took advantage of me, so I decided to contact Beechy Colclough. Beechy had worked with a lot of stars like Elton John, Michael Jackson and Kate Moss, so I thought, well, at least he knows about privacy. Beechy had appeared on television, written a number of books and had a good reputation. Or so it seemed. In 2006 he was actually
struck from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy list after a number of female patients complained about his alleged behaviour.

However, this was 2003 and he was held in pretty high regard. I was in such turmoil and had no idea how to find him so I called directory enquiries and got his number – and his fax number. I didn’t want to call so I wrote him a letter explaining what had been going on and why I wanted his help, and sent it off. I’d included my telephone number so he could phone me and make an appointment. The next day I received a phone call from an unlikely-sounding chap. ‘This is Colclough Garages here and we deal in servicing cars.’ Shit! Of all the things to happen now, I had sent the fax to the wrong person and told him all about myself, the abuse, problems with Dan and everything. I was absolutely mortified and, to make matters worse, I couldn’t get this man off the phone. He just kept on talking, and finally I just apologised and put the phone down on him. I was back to square one.

Dan’s behaviour had changed since just before the funeral: he’d started to roll in late and I was getting suspicious about what was going on. Remember, I’d learnt a bit about cheating men from Ben and Paul! One night in early July, just after I’d had the embryos put back in, my curiosity got the better of me and I looked at the text messages on his phone. There was one from a girl called Steph, which was
very explicit. His reply to her said, ‘You rock.’ I was absolutely devastated as I felt the bottom had just dropped out of my world. I immediately woke him and challenged him about it. Naturally, he denied it, but I didn’t believe him. The next morning the situation was still unresolved and despite our huge row the night before which meant I was still very upset about the texts, he still went to work. He rang me later that morning to say the girl had explained. She’d made a mistake and sent them to him by error – they were meant for her boyfriend. But that still didn’t explain his response to her.

In the following days he orchestrated a series of emails that began with her sending one to him explaining what happened and him sending it on to me. I knew it was staged and designed to substantiate his story, but I couldn’t prove it and in any case chose to believe that they hadn’t actually slept together. With a not-insignificant sense of déjà vu, I decided to ring her. I’d done this sort of thing before and had absolutely no qualms about doing it again. As I did when both Ben and Paul cheated, I took this course of action because I didn’t want to waste time with lies and denials. I wanted to get to the bottom of things and hear it for myself.

The problem was I didn’t have her telephone number. I knew she worked in a dealing room for another bank, so I’d have to be a bit clever. I figured out the bank name from an email address I’d seen, so I rang them as if I often did and said, ‘Can I speak to Steph, please?’ I thought that if I used
the shortened form of her name and said I was a friend, I would have some credibility. I did exactly that and they put me through to her. I questioned her and she miraculously had the same story as Dan’s. I then asked her if it was true. She said yes, and giggled. In fact, she giggled all the way through the conversation; it was all just pathetic. I felt I’d invested so much in the relationship that I decided to give Dan the benefit of the doubt. We talked – and decided we both wanted to stay together. But over the following weeks we continued in much the same vein as we’d been doing since the beginning of the year, which meant we hadn’t fixed anything: we’d only swept our problems under the carpet.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

On 16 July 2003 I received an urgent telephone call from Julie Harris. She had taken a call from a man who told her that a friend of his, called Anita, had been the victim of a house fire in Nottingham two days earlier. Apparently, the fire department had told her that it had been caused by her Rampant Rabbit. Anita was a depressive whose eight-year-old daughter had died a year earlier. It was very tragic; the little girl had had a terminal illness, but died prematurely due to hospital negligence. Now all Anita’s precious mementos had been destroyed, along with most of her other possessions. She now had nowhere to live, and her friend said Anita and her young daughters and son needed our help. He said they had no contents insurance and the council could only offer them a hostel, which would split up the children and, given the trauma they’d all been through, Anita didn’t want to do this. He also said that the
News of the World
had been in touch and wanted to buy
their story. It was a lot of information for me to take in; and questions were formulating in my mind.