Mary Portas says her brother is the biological father of her son

Mary Portas became emotional as she spoke about her brother Lawrence being the biological father of her son Horatio.

The retail expert fought back tears as she opened up about her unique family situation during an interview on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast.

Mary, 65, joked her brother did not ‘s**g’ her now ex-wife Melanie Rickey but was instead the former couple’s sperm donor.   

‘So, Mel decided she wanted a child, and I was very clear that I wanted to have a bloodline,’ she explained.

‘I wanted, if I was going to have another child, I wanted to make sure that it was related in some way and biologically related to my other kids.’

Mary added that because she shares a close bond with her brother and knew that he ‘didn’t particularly want to have children’ she asked him to be their donor. 

‘He looked after me. It was a real symbiosis,’ she said.

‘And Lawrence turned up to the old donor place and said, “Done it, sis!”‘

Mary’s ex-wife Melanie carried Horatio who was born in 2012, with the TV star saying he is the ‘image’ of her side of the family.

‘Lawrence lives abroad now, but he rings us regularly and they talk about football. God, it’s so boring!’ she said.

Mary became emotional as she recalled the sweet moment when Lawrence held Horatio for the first time.

‘The most beautiful time is when, you know, he came into the world and I rang Lawrence and Lawrence turned up and picked him up.

‘And it was like, it was his gift to me. God, I get emotional. It was his gift. And it was the greatest gift,’ she said.

‘Why the greatest gift?’ Jamie asked.

‘Oh my God, you know, like because of the years that we helped each other,’ she said. You know, I was always his big sis, and then he was able to give me this gift.’

Mary’s maiden name is Newton. She changed her surname after marrying her now ex-husband Graham Portas in 1990. 

The former couple, who divorced in 2003, are parents to Mylo, 31, and Verity, 29. 

She became a lesbian only in her 40s, when she met Melanie and fell for her. 

The unconventional circumstances of Horatio’s conception began long before all this. 

They lie in the tragic childhood during which Mary was effectively orphaned at the age of 16 — and became a surrogate mother to her youngest sibling Lawrence.

When she and her brother first carried the baby into the West London sunshine outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, they could have been forgiven for reflecting on this extraordinary circle of life. 

Or as Mary previously put it: ‘I now know that it could only ever have been Lawrence who was Horatio’s father.’

When Mary was 16, she harboured dreams of becoming a famous actress and hoped to take up a place at RADA.

All that changed, suddenly and irrevocably, with the death of her mother, also called Mary, from meningitis in 1977.

While her three older siblings were already on the verge of leaving the family’s run-down semi-detached home in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, her grief-stricken father found solace with another woman — leaving Mary to care for 14-year-old Lawrence, to wash his clothes and feed him, while struggling to come to terms with her own broken heart.

She may have earned celebrity status through her TV series Mary, Queen Of Shops, not to mention her role advising David Cameron on the future of the High Street, but Mary’s beginnings were much more humble than her wealthy life today might suggest.

Her parents were immigrants from Northern Ireland; her red-headed, green-eyed mother, Mary Flynn, was a laundress and her father, Sam Newton, was a bus conductor. Both were hugely aspirational and encouraged their five children to study hard at their Catholic schools.

While Sam later became a factory manager for Brooke Bond, his wife devoted herself to raising her children, Michael, Patricia, Joe, Mary and Lawrence.

The sudden loss of their mother — erroneously diagnosed with depression caused by the menopause even as she lay dying — was made worse by the reaction of their father who, having flung himself sobbing across their mother’s body, declared that there was nothing left to live for.

However, he swiftly replaced his wife with another one after meeting office clerk Rebecca at a widow and widowers’ social club.

He then sold the family home despite the fact that young Mary, who had barely left school, and Lawrence, still studying, were still living there. Both were made homeless, and Mary developed a fierce independence and self-sufficiency still so evident today.

Everything in the house was sold or simply vanished. She has no photographs to remember her mother by, only a cookery book and a statue of a saint.

Despite Lawrence’s love of music, he was virtually ordered by his father to join the police force, largely because he would be given accommodation at a training college in Hendon.

Yet despite her own ordeal, an ever‑capable Mary was never far from her younger brother’s side. 

She dropped out of her course at RADA because she couldn’t cope, financially or emotionally, and devoted herself to looking after them both.

Effectively, then, she sacrificed her dreams of becoming an actress to become Lawrence’s surrogate mother, unaware that one day he would step in and thank her in the most poignant manner imaginable, by becoming a surrogate father to her child after deciding that he didn’t want any of his own.

‘We are just so close,’ she told The Times in 2015. ‘Our bond is never going to change, never ever going to change.’

It was not long after her divorce from Graham that Mary met Melanie Rickey, a magazine fashion features editor, at a Royal College Of Art dinner, and the pair fell for each other almost immediately.

Until that point, in 2003, Mary had never considered a relationship with a woman — ‘I certainly wasn’t a suppressed lesbian,’ she later reflected — and insists her love for Melanie took her by surprise, adding: ‘She gives complete love to the world and it is the most refreshing, beautiful thing.’

Melanie, too, had not come out as gay before meeting Portas. But their relationship quickly became both public and serious, making them Britain’s most high-profile lesbian couple.

The pair had a civil ceremony in 2010 and embarked on IVF the following year, with Melanie to carry the child as she was the younger woman.

They were among the first same‑sex couples to convert that partnership into marriage when Mary took Melanie for dinner and then surprised her by heading to Westminster Registry Office at midnight, where their family and Horatio were waiting for them. 

Mary and Melanie split in 2019 after 17 years together and sold the £5million home they shared in north London.