Nicola Horlick annoyed a lot of people in Britain last week and most of them are women. The 37-year-old mother-of-five, who hit the headlines earlier this year when she was sacked from her £1 million a year job at top bank Morgan Grenfell is back on top with another big job in the City and a new book called Can You Have It All? Serialised in the Daily Telegraph last week, the book tells how she successfully juggles the roles of wife, mother and millionaire and how we can all do it too if we try.
That trouble is, women are saying they don't want it all - or at least they don't want it the Horlicks way.
Here is a woman who works long hours to earn more money - vast sums of money - to keep an incredibly expensive household and raise a large family that she only sees at bedtime. And that kind of hectic juggling-act is rapidly going out of fashion.
Horlick is a throwback from the 1980s, all sleek bob, bright lipstick, boxy suits and adrenaline to burn. Her £2.5 million Kensington home is spotless from top to bottom, her children are immaculately turned out, her husband earns lots of money in the City too and they plan their lives with electronic diaries. Sounds perfect. But it isn't.
The Horlicks' adored eldest daughter Georgie, aged 10, has leukemia and though she is now in remission they are terrified of a relapse. Georgie's leukemia is why Nicola had baby number five - she was desperate to find a bone-marrow donor, and the other three children's marrow did not match. Neither did Antonia's - the fifth child - and now Nicola Horlick is seriously considering having a sixth.
It seems to be her relentlessly organised existence that irritates most of her female critics: the fact that she wraps her Christmas presents in October, or that she feels positively ill if she has a lie-in; or that she organises all the domestic drudgeries because she believes that the woman has to do it, or that she planned to have all her babies around Christmas time so she could have more time off.
"Even her womb has a diary," sneered one columnist, who found her "positively scary". "She is just not human," said a colleague. "Yes Mrs Horlick, we can have it all," shrieked one headline, "but we don't want it."
Today's working woman is more likely to empathise with another new author, Elizabeth Perle McKenna, a former high-flyer in American publishing whose best-selling book When Work Doesn't Work Anymore describes the angst of American working women who are doing very well at work but find that they are missing out on things they value more, such as family and general well-being.
The problem with Nicola Horlick, as some see it, is that she is still playing the game the man's way - putting in the long hours, drawing down the big salary and not striving for the elusive ideal - a better balance between home and work. In other words, she is a bad role model for the late 1990s, when "downshifting" is all the rage. Mrs Horlick has no intention of downshifting just yet, so she can expect a good deal more criticism when her book hits the stands next month. She won't be admitting that juggling home and boardroom is an exhausting business - because to her, it obviously is not. She is blessed with boundless energy and buckets of determination: her career has been one swift gallop to the top.
Born in 1960, the daughter of a wealthy businessman and his Polish wife, Nicola was considered hyperactive as a child, and precocious as a teenager at Cheltenham Girls College. She had early ambitions to be a journalist or an actress and starred in a number of plays at Balliol College, Oxford where she read Law. But Mammon beckoned and in 1987 she joined Warburgs investment bank as a trainee fund-manager. By then she had married Tim Horlick, an accountant, and they had Georgie. They had already bought and sold two flats and would move house three more times, making a tidy profit each time despite the recession.
Headhunted by Morgan Grenfell in 1991, Horlick was put in charge of an investment team that became one of the most successful in the City, tripling profits in five years. But Morgan Grenfell fired her early this year, claiming she had planned to move her entire team to Dutch bank ABN Amro.
She gave interviews to journalists outside her house, then stormed her office, more journalists in tow, to get her job back. When that didn't work, she took off to Frankfurt, followed by yet more journalists, to plead with head office at Deutsche Bank. That didn't work and she didn't get much sympathy for her plight as she allowed the paparazzi to swarm over her and her family. Then she turned to writing instead, dashed off the book and is now heading up a new investment team for French Bank Societe Generale. None of this would have been possible, she acknowledges, without the help of one exceptional person - her nanny. Joan Buckland has been nanny to the Horlicks for more than eight years. She is 45, unmarried and has no children of her own. She runs casa Horlick like clockwork, working 12-hour days without a break. She never gets sick. The children love her and it is she who turns them out beautifully for the cameras.
BY now, the nanny has probably had far more job offers than the banker. Joan is Nicola's real Achilles' heel: the latter admitted in a recent interview that the one thing that terrifies her is that Joan will hand in her notice. Surely we can all sympathise with that.
Can You Have It All? by Nicola Horlick is published by Macmillan and will be available from October 24th, price £15.99. All proceeds from sales will go to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital.
