Amol Rajan speaks to Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership.

Overseeing a team of 80,000 partners working at branches and offices of supermarket Waitrose and department store John Lewis around the country, White took over the retailer in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus lockdown forced her to shut shops all over the UK. During her two years in the role, she has had to close 16 branches of John Lewis and make many staff redundant in response to the unprecedented economic circumstances of the time.

White tells Rajan about her upbringing in Leyton as the daughter of a Windrush generation family, her time at Cambridge University, her fast rise to the top of the civil service and her position as chief executive of media regulator Ofcom. After discussing topics like code-switching, class and social mobility, White and Rajan visit her childhood home and branches of John Lewis and Waitrose, before she shows him around the partnership’s main distribution centre, Magna Park in Milton Keynes, to show him a vision of the future of online retail. Show less