They say you should never meet your heroes. What a load of rubbish. I was lucky enough to meet one of mine and, miraculously, she even became my friend. Dame Stephanie Shirley was a person who should be widely celebrated across the UK for her extraordinary life.

She arrived here on the Kindertransport with her sister and, having been settled with a new family just outside London, embarked on a life of meaning in this country.

I respected and admired Stevie, as she was affectionately known, for many reasons - but there are three that I return to again and again.

Firstly, she built a company from scratch, in the IT industry, in the 1960s. When I think of the barriers women face now when founding companies, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for her all those decades ago.

She started a company in an era when banks wouldn’t give women business loans without a male guarantor, when programming was seen as clerical work beneath “serious” male engineers, and when the very idea of flexible work was considered absurd. Yet, at just 29, Stevie founded Freelance Programmers with just £6 as capital and her kitchen table as her office.

What Stevie built was revolutionary. She recognised that programming was intellectual work that could be done anywhere, and she structured her company to prove it. By the 1980s, F International employed over 300 people—nearly all women, many working part-time or from home, long before “hybrid” became a buzzword. Her programmers worked on everything from Concorde’s black box flight recorder to stock exchange systems.

The company’s valuation eventually reached £3 billion, making Stevie one of the wealthiest self-made women in Britain.

But beyond her commitment to women at work, Stevie was a truly exceptional technologist: she understood the technology business at a fundamental level that many of her contemporaries missed. While others were focused on hardware and systems, she grasped that software was where the real value lay.

She also saw that talent was being systematically wasted—brilliant women sidelined by corporate structures that couldn’t accommodate anything beyond the traditional male career model. Her solution wasn’t to work within those constraints; it was to build something entirely different.

The programming work her company delivered was technically excellent and commercially successful precisely because Stevie had created the conditions for women to do their best work. She often quipped that it was only the introduction of the Equalities Act, and her need to employ men, that meant men “finally screwed me.”

I defy anyone not to find some inspiration in her commercial success.

Secondly, she made a significant pivot in her life after her son Giles died. He was born extremely autistic. Not satisfied with the enormous dent she made on the commercial world, she set out to do the same in the world of services provided to autistic children. Her pioneering work was done most notably through the Shirley Foundation, which distributed over £67 million in grants.

Motivated by her personal experiences of caring for an autistic child, she also established several vital charities, including Autism at Kingwood, Priors Court School, and Autistica—the UK’s first national autism research charity.

I made a programme for the BBC in 2010 about how arts and science are too often treated as separate domains. In one episode, I visited Priors Court with Stevie and filmed a segment on her commitment to building a school. I was interested that she used science and art as a basis for understanding and developing the needs of highly challenging autistic children. It was so moving to see her in this setting, in her characteristically vibrant jewellery and clothes, revelling in the classes and the environment offered to pupils. There was art and sculpture all over the grounds, and I immediately felt that yet again, Stevie had created an environment intended to help everyone thrive.

It will always have a lasting impact on me to see a woman of such business success have no hesitation in devoting her life to the philanthropy she cared about. Stephanie also supported other innovation-focused organisations, such as the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. She was always committed to using her wealth and expertise for broad social impact.

Examples of these kinds of multi-faceted leaders are still too rare, and I know that her refusal to be pigeonholed will have had a long-lasting impact on many others, not just me.

Finally, Stevie was a constant reminder of the importance of empathy and kindness. I don’t want to write only about my own experiences because I know she had so many friends, but they are an indication of her character. Picture this: I have newborn identical twins of three months old, and I am due on stage to do a double act with Stevie in the Methodist Hall in Westminster. Ten minutes before I am due to leave home, my somewhat erratic new nanny walks out. I panic. I cannot possibly let down Stevie or the several thousand people who have come to see her. I call her. Quick as a flash, and with no complexity at all, she simply says: “Bring them, we will make it work.” In that instant, she made everything seem manageable.

Similarly, during Covid, she pinged me several times to have a chat on the good old-fashioned telephone. No agenda, no need for preparation—just to check in. I was so struck by the kindness of the question: “I just wanted to see if you and your family are doing OK.” When I was lucky enough to give the Dimbleby lecture on BBC1, I devoted a chunk of the time to her story. The next day, a huge bunch of flowers turned up.

She always showed up. Even as she approached 90, she was still talking to groups of women about the importance of technology or to groups of entrepreneurs, giving them courage to continue building their businesses. While many in Silicon Valley are obsessively trying to find the key to longevity, she was a lesson in how being active, present, and generous is one of the best answers to this aged old question.

I will miss the colour of her jackets, the elegance of her jewellery, but mainly the sparkle of her conversation. She truly was the best—not only of business and of tech, but of the UK.

At this time, as our rhetoric about those who seek refuge in our country reaches new and scary heights, we would all do well to remember people like Stevie, who came here as a child facing war, and have enriched our society so deeply.

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