Mary Portas says she can’t explain her sexuality

Retail guru Mary Portas says female sexuality isn’t black and white.

The presenter of the BBC’s Mary, Queen of Shops was ranked joint top of the Independent on Sunday’s Pink List last year, alongside Gareth Thomas.

She recently had a civil partnership with magazine journalist Melanie Rickey, having ended her 13-year marriage.

Speaking to the Guardian, Portas said she could not define whether she felt like a lesbian or a straight woman who had fallen in love with another woman.

She said: “When you look at female sexuality it’s very different. Lots of women have been in love with men and then women and vice versa, it’s just not so defined and I couldn’t explain it in black and white.

“Have I loved men? Yes. Have I loved more than one woman? No. But did I know that I’d had crushes on men and women in the past? Yes. So it was never like, oooh! But was I happy in my heterosexual relationships? Yes. That’s the way it just happened.”

Portas says she had an amicable divorce from her husband, with whom she has two teenage children.

She added: “I certainly wasn’t a suppressed lesbian thinking, ‘God, I can’t wait to get out of this marriage’, cos that would be just awful, awful, awful.

“No, my ex-husband and I know what we had, and it was great, some of the best years of my life, really some of the best. We just grew apart, and that happens. And I happened to fall in love with a woman.”