[4] She grew up in Bayswater, White City and Stanmore in the London Borough of Harrow, attending Bentley Wood High School and Lowland Sixth Form College before graduating from Kingston Polytechnic in 1985 with a degree in economics.

[12] She was nominated as a Conservative life peer in August 2015 for services to British Business[5] and took her seat in the House of Lords on 16 October 2015.

[16][17] Her report 'Race in the Workplace: The McGregor-Smith Review'[18] was published in February 2017 and found that UK growth was being curtailed by £24bn due to poor practices.

[20] However, after the Commons had considered these Lords Amendments and rejected them, she joined all but 21 Conservative peers and supported the Government and the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill at ping-pong.

[21] On 18 July 2018 it was announced that McGregor-Smith was putting her name forward as the Conservative Party's candidate for Mayor of London.

[8] After qualifying, she joined Serco Group PLC in 1991, where she worked for nine years in a range of operational and financial roles.

[4] In 2005 she was promoted to group chief operating officer, and became CEO two years later[6][10] when her predecessor Ian Stewart retired to take over the role of deputy chairman.

[27] McGregor-Smith's tenure as CEO initially saw Mitie's top and bottom lines grow, boosted by strong demand for integrated services, but ended with the issuing of a profit warning and a substantial drop in performance.

[28][29] In May 2015 she appeared before senior officials at HMRC to discuss complaints that MiHomecare, a company owned by Mitie, was failing to pay its employees the minimum wage.

[32] In October 2016 McGregor-Smith announced that she was stepping down from the CEO role and would hand over to Phil Bentley, the former Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) chief executive.

Shares in the company closed 2.52pc higher as investors reacted positively to the news of Ms McGregor-Smith’s departure.

[37] Her views on gender diversity in management have been widely reported in the mainstream media, specifically her opposition to positive discrimination in the form of quotas.

[53] In August 2015, she was nominated to be a life peer in the UK House of Lords, and was created Baroness McGregor-Smith, of Sunninghill in the Royal County of Berkshire on 16 October 2015.