John Lewis chair Sharon White: ‘I always ask, what’s the upside?’

Five minutes before the agreed time of 1pm, I arrive at the place Sharon White has chosen for our lunch — the Authentique Epicerie & Bar in Tufnell Park, north London. It looks like a shop and it is, as well as a popular (and excellent) bar and restaurant dedicated to “francophone gastronomy”.

There, at a table near the door, sits White, a good friend since she married a former FT colleague, Robert Chote, in 1997. Robert is now Sir Robert, chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility in the 2010s, and his wife is Dame Sharon. As we greet each other, I ask why the restaurant is empty and she informs me that we are the only diners. The restaurant is normally not open for lunch but she has arranged a special opening for our Lunch with the FT.

Born in 1967, White joined the civil service aged 22, rising to be second permanent secretary at the Treasury. She was the first Black person and the second woman to hold this rank. After leaving the Treasury in 2015, she became chief executive of Ofcom and then chair of John Lewis in 2020, where her tenure has been embattled and controversial.

I had asked Robert to tell me something about her that nobody knew. His reply was that she was in the same 4x100m relay team as the British Olympian Sally Gunnell in the early 1980s. White explains that she reached 5ft 10in (her adult height) at the age of 10, and found running easy. But that was the peak of her athletic career. She still runs. But now it is jogging for an hour, twice a week.

A young woman comes to take our order. We can have anything we like, so long as it is the fish of the day — sea bream. We can also have tomatoes, a green salad and crispy Jersey Royal potatoes, with a Béarnaise sauce. We agree to have a glass each of a white Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis 2022. It turns out to be a lovely accompaniment.

I arrived just before the first global pandemic since the early 1900s and the first cost of living crunch since the 1970s. But we’ve come through

White’s father was 15 when he came to England from Jamaica, her mother 11. Her mother’s parents were subsistence farmers, she tells me. When in England, her father worked for British Rail and her mother was a dressmaker. The family settled in east London.

At the start, she says, “my parents were renting, and when they had my brother it was almost impossible to rent as a Black person and completely impossible if you were a Black person with children. But my parents managed to get a 25-year fixed-rate mortgage from Waltham Forest Council and bought in Leyton. We were the only Black people on our road.

“And the interesting thing for me,” she continues, “is that I now find it very uncomfortable being in situations where everybody looks like me, because it’s been so rare . . . I went to the States a few months ago with my older son [she has two boys] and went to stay with a friend. And by coincidence we went to a seminar which was run by the African-American dean of journalism and it was celebrating an African-American journalist. The room was 95 per cent African-American. For me, this was a really strange experience.”

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So, for White, being different is normal. It was true at her school, at Cambridge and even during her years as a senior economist at the World Bank in Washington DC from 1999 to 2003. “I had several dimensions of this at the World Bank: first, visually diverse but intellectually, very undiverse; second, living in America as a British Black person, there was no concept, including from African-Americans, that there were Black people living in Britain. They thought I was South African, because of the accent.”

Did working on Africa for the World Bank change this at all? “No,” she responds; this, too, “made me feel very British”. Her skin colour did not change the fact that she was an outsider in Africa. “I think it underlined, for me: never making assumptions. I never make assumptions about people, whether it’s based on class or background because I’ve been very lucky. My parents barely went to school and I’ve had the opportunities that I had.”

What does she think of the politics around identity? Does the idea of being told who you really are, who you belong with, make her uncomfortable?

“Yes,” she responds. “I have an extreme dislike of labels.”

I, too, am a child of immigrants: my parents were refugees from Hitler’s Europe. White knows this and adds, in passing: “I don’t know whether you ever felt this, but I’m from London and I feel a really deep attachment to it. I’m British and I feel deeply British. But am I English?”

She has mentioned, I note, that it was a bit uncomfortable at Cambridge. “I think the issue — I don’t know if it was class: I think it was the extreme confidence of some of the kids who had just been educated in very different schools to the one I went to.

“I was always being asked, ‘Where are you from?’ And I’ve had this conversation with other people who love being asked the question because they can then talk about their heritage. Whereas, for me, it comes back to my anathema of labels and boxes. I used to say I was 50 miles down the M11. To which the question was, ‘No, but where are you really from?’ And of course I’m proud of my parents’ heritage but I don’t regard myself as Jamaican.”

The lunch arrives — an enormous plate of fish, to be taken off the bone, plus the vegetables. It looks excellent and tastes even better. The fish is perfectly soft and moist. I particularly enjoy the potatoes. Both of us eat heartily. I fear I eat a little more than my fair share.

Did she feel equally uncomfortable at the Treasury, I ask. “No. Bizarrely, no.” I note that the Treasury has always been very meritocratic. “Yes, thank you,” she responds: the woman has left the Treasury, but the Treasury has not left the woman.

She worked in a church after Cambridge, and her faith is still important to her. “I go to Holy Trinity Brompton in Kensington,” she says. “So, I believe in Jesus and I also believe that’s got to show up in how you live your life.

“And that’s maybe why I was in the public sector for as long as I was. Maybe that’s why, when I did join a business, I joined one that has a fundamentally different purpose and is also employee-owned.”

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That leads us to a discussion of her period as chair of John Lewis. She announced last October that she will be standing down in 2025, after only five years in the role. I tell White that I was surprised she chose to take the job in the first place, because it seemed a completely different world. I also wondered, “Will it work?”

“The summary of how I will look back on it,” says White, “is that it’s been an enormous privilege. The reason for going to the Partnership was precisely because it’s a partnership. As you say, I was in the public sector for almost 30 years.

“The Partnership,” she continues, “has a history of recruiting from the civil service and the armed forces . . . And so the fact that it is a membership organisation, the fact that the business is held on trust for 70,000 people, the fact that even in the toughest markets it is trying to practise a kinder, more benevolent form of capitalism — that’s the thing I really want to succeed.

There is a fine line between trying to manage expectations that things are going to get worse before they get better . . . You also want hope and joy

“Now, I think even Philip Pullman wouldn’t have written a book in which I arrived just before the first global pandemic since the early 1900s and the first cost of living crunch since the 1970s. But we’ve come through. We’re back in profit. This is a business that has no access to equity capital. This is a £12.5bn business that took on a lot of debt to grow in the past. I’ve a lot of pride in how the Partnership has responded.”

So, why, I ask, given the business has survived the storms, has she withdrawn?

“It is the end of my five-year term and it’s definitely a ‘phase of life’ thing. It was very much my decision. The business is in a more stable, solid position. And I’m going to take a little bit of time and decide what I’ll do next, probably a mixture of commercial and public service activities.”

I ask whether she thinks that this sort of business, with its admirable premises around the country, can survive in today’s new retail environment?

“The answer to that is yes. And, I think it depends on using the unusual attributes of the partnership in a way that makes us more commercially successful. You’ve got an enormous amount of consultation, enormous amount of engagement, which should mean that we can also have more commitment.”

White has come in for a great deal of criticism over her role at John Lewis. The past five years have been a firestorm for retail businesses. She has certainly made tough and unpopular decisions, especially concerning job cuts. But John Lewis is now profitable again and is even opening new branches of Waitrose, its upmarket supermarket chain.

Does she, I wonder, have much contact with the new government? “Rachel [Reeves, the chancellor of the exchequer], I know,” she replies. “Keir [Starmer] lived five minutes around the corner and I also dealt with him when I ran the Office for Criminal Justice Reform and he was director of public prosecutions. But I’ve had almost no contact since the election.”

“If you were running the Treasury,” I remark, “you would be having some pretty tough conversations right now, wouldn’t you?”

“It feels like a version of 2010 again,” she replies.

“Which is not something we expected to have twice,” I interject.

“It is about making sure that we don’t take decisions for the short term that mean the country is in a much worse shape in the medium and longer term,” she says.

“I was running public spending during the austerity period and I will go to my grave believing that a period of fiscal retrenchment was the right thing for the country. I think the biggest lesson looking back is to look out for what happens with capital investment, because it’s the easiest thing to cut and it’s the worst thing to do from a productivity point of view.”

Well, I offer, at least you didn’t have to go through the Truss shock, which must have been very painful for the Treasury.

“Oh, God,” she responds. “I have to say it was very difficult to be sitting through the Truss Budget in a retailer a month before peak trading. It was incredibly tough.

“This is why I always ask, ‘what’s the upside?’ The upside was that it showed how important institutions and sensible, consistent, well-trailed policymaking are. That’s the upside of the downside.”

I am a poster child for migration. I’m massively positive about the ability of Britain, through many centuries, to have amalgamated, absorbed, adjusted, adapted

We have finished our food. I have even had another glass of the excellent wine. White is more abstemious. I ask for a double espresso and she asks for a cappuccino.

What should the Treasury be thinking about the UK’s dismal growth performance and prospects?

“I think the question about the balance between capital and current spending is central,” she responds. “I think it will be really important that we’re looking at the capital investment trajectory for the next five to 10 years and not just what makes the numbers add up over the next one to two years. We also need to think about how to do the green transition in a way that harnesses private capital and doesn’t place undue burden on those with the most narrow shoulders.”

White says she always describes herself as a realistic optimist. “I think there is a fine line between trying to manage the country’s expectations that you’re in for a hard slog and it’s all going to be very difficult and things are going to get worse before they get better. But actually, you also want hope and joy.”

I raise the long-term stagnation of productivity in the UK. White remarks that “the interesting thing with the UK, particularly given that so much of the debate over the last two or three years has been about artificial intelligence, is that many private sector British companies haven’t even digitised.”

We turn briefly to her experience at the head of Ofcom and the challenge of regulating the media in the age of digital technology. It must be frighteningly difficult to know that you’re regulating these sectors sensibly, given, on the one hand, their dynamism and merits and, on the other, the dangers.

“I think the really thorny issue, which has obviously arisen in recent weeks with the riots here in the UK, is what you do about the notion of ‘legal but harmful’,” she says. “This is a concept that doesn’t sit within the current legislation and is nigh on impossible to regulate. So, this is speech that is legal in the normal world, but causes vastly more harm if it spreads on the global digital superhighway.”

The subject of the riots brings us back to our starting point. What does she make of what happened? She is characteristically positive. “I think the UK has managed migration — multi-ethnic, multifaith immigration — I cannot think of another country that has managed it more effectively. Now, that’s not to say it doesn’t come without its issues or discomfort. But if you simply look at the proportion of so-called mixed marriages or multi-heritage relationships, schools which are becoming less rather than more segregated, all this is encouraging.

“Now, take the positive and then have a real conversation about what is driving the discontent,” she adds.

“I am a poster child for migration. I’m massively positive about the British experience and ability of Britain, through many centuries, to have amalgamated, absorbed, adjusted, adapted, mostly without huge disorder.”

It’s an upbeat perspective. I realise that we share gratitude to Britain for offering our parents a home and us in particular great opportunity. I leave the restaurant feeling exhilarated.

Martin Wolf is the FT’s chief economics commentator

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