By SUSANNAH JOWITT
Published: 20:42 EDT, 19 August 2025 | Updated: 20:52 EDT, 19 August 2025
Karren Brady is a hero of mine. Exactly my age at 56, she's an icon I've always worshipped: a woman of hard head and good sense, flying a feminine flag in a man's world. With just a jut of her chin she turns all footballers, Apprentices, her gorgeous husband and, now that she's Baroness Brady, the Lords of the realm, into putty in her hands.
She is an inspiration to those who want to flourish not by denying our femininity but by flaunting it.
Brady always looks the part – with her immaculate hair, nails and makeup, coupled with tailored trouser suits and stylish dresses that hug her perfect curves. She is not afraid of a low-cut neckline, and yet she matches it all with an equally assured flair for business, taking leading roles in sport, politics and on TV, all while boasting a net worth of over £30million.
As the take-no-prisoners boss of West Ham, the steely judge and mentor of The Apprentice and as a business pundit who comments regularly across the Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, The Economist and Forbes Magazine, she has always combined brains and style with great acumen.
Which is why I am so stunned and disappointed to see her recent posts on Instagram. At first I don't recognise her and assume she's posted a picture of her beloved daughter Sophia, 28, but then I look closer and gasp.
Put on your black mourning armband, because Karren Brady has gone – all that unique style shoved into a sausage machine of celebrity homogeneity.
Our ballsy Baroness has been replaced by a lollipop Jane Seymour lookalike, bent like a wire coat hanger into a teeny Chanel sundress, which hangs off her suddenly handspan waist.
She pouts at the camera, Kardashian-like, with skin the colour of a hundred sunbeds.
Karren Brady pouts at the camera, Kardashian-like, with skin the colour of a hundred sunbeds, writes Susannah Jowitt
During her days on The Apprentice Brady was known for her immaculate hair, nails and make-up, coupled with tailored trouser suits and stylish dresses that hug her perfect curves
Underneath the post, waffling on like a TikTok 'body influencer', she raves about the 'miraculous' effect on her arms after a course of skin-tightening treatments from Dr Rita Rakus, a well-known body 'tweaker', which can cost up to £4,000 and appears to have given her the limbs of a 12-year-old.
'I never thought I'd have the confidence to wear short sleeves again,' she gushes.
Having already credited Dr Rita with a non-surgical facelift, she now looks as if she's gone into the Rakus Lab and been wheeled out as an ageless plastic poster child.
One of the commenters below the post says, sadly, 'From Curves to Bones', while another chimes in with, 'Oh to be rich'.
This and the next Instagram post, showing her on a family holiday tottering after her tiny 17-month-old grandson in the same dress and vertiginous high heels (definitely not designed for running after a toddler), have elicited a slew of comments which, if you discount the polarised extremes of trolls and sycophants, share a mainly sad and mournful tone.
Many point out that she looks as if she's been on fat jabs like Ozempic or Mounjaro (the Baroness told the Mail On Sunday in November last year that she 'hadn't joined the Ozempic club', but was 'on a health kick'), while others have suggested that she has leaned far too heavily on Photoshop and/or face filters to look like anything other than an AI construct.
'Where have you gone, Karren?' says one. 'Why have you done this to yourself? You seem to be shrinking both inside and out. How can any of us ever take you seriously again when you lose yourself in a Kardashian spiral of vanity like this?'
'I've always held Baroness in high regard, but lately it feels like she's shifting into a "looks-first" Kardashian-style persona,' says another.
Brady pictured in February this year. Our ballsy Baroness has been replaced by a lollipop Jane Seymour lookalike, writes Susannah Jowitt
Brady was a woman who seemed to speak for me and for so many other women determined to strut through everyday sexism and judgementalism
In her Instagram post Brady raved about the 'miraculous' effect on her arms after a course of skin-tightening treatments from Dr Rita Rakus, a well-known body 'tweaker', which can cost up to £4,000
'Of course, everyone wants to look their best, but this is starting to look excessive – and a little disappointing – coming from someone I've always seen as a highly intelligent and deeply respected businesswoman.'
But is it vanity or insecurity? Brady's caption about never thinking she would have the confidence to wear short sleeves has enraged thousands of commentators.
'You're a Baroness not a bimbo!' says one.
'No one cares about your body and, newsflash, every woman looks lovely in a sleeveless dress or top if she has the confidence you're always banging on about,' says another.
All this from a woman who seemed to speak for me and for so many other females determined to strut through everyday sexism and judgementalism. For example, when she wrote, in her 2012 autobiography, Strong Woman, 'Focus on what you can control – your attitude, your work ethic, your resilience. That's what really counts.' And later, in a 2018 Woman's Own interview, 'Confidence is what really makes you attractive, not size or shape.'
So what has happened?
Is it a midlife crisis, exacerbated by the ageing effect of double grandmotherhood?
Her lingerie model daughter is expecting again, after all, and posting pictures of her ripely pregnant body all over Instagram.
Is it no longer enough in the harsh world of the media to be a bastion of evergreen brilliance?
Does your waist measurement now have to be a tenth of your IQ to get the same praise you used to get just for being a business brainiac?
Is her own daughter telling her that, in the modern world, it's not what you do, but how you present it on social media?
On one level, of course, she does look stunning. By which I mean, on the puerile level of a 56-year-old who's still brainwashed by the 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' ethos of the 1990s.
I've spent the decades since then hating myself for this Pavlovian reaction of envy and admiration when I see friends who've lost weight – especially when it happens so swiftly with the jabs – and have finally trained myself into genuine acceptance of my curves and a preference for fitness over skinniness.
I have friends in their mid-fifties who have spent a lifetime insisting on body positivity for the sake of theirs and their daughters' mental health, only to be sucked in now by a world that insists approaching your sixties simply means you have to try harder to deny the ageing process.
For the well-heeled such as Brady, tweakments offer a quick and easy fast track to the new nirvana of eternal (filtered) youth. So what happens next? Because, the midlife cynic that I am, I peer narrow-eyed at Karren Brady's new look and have one overriding thought: maintenance.
No one wants to go grey and give up entirely – I plan on being sexy and sassy until I'm carted off to an old people's home – but with an exhaustive beauty regime comes an even more exhaustive maintenance programme, holding back the tide of natural softening with ever more unnatural sea defences.
Ask Pamela Anderson – two years ahead of Karren and I at 58 – who has given up Botox, filler, surgery and make-up, in favour of a natural wrinkly look (even, shock horror, a suggestion of a tiny tummy) – that, just for the record, seems to have hooked new squeeze Liam Neeson.
Women like Pam know that if you go down the path of primping and interventions, via surgery or tweakment (there's an increasingly blurred line of invasiveness between the two), it gets harder and harder to avoid the temptation of 'just one more thing'.
Once you pop, you just can't stop: more Botox, more Restylane, more skin-tightening, higher doses of weight-loss drugs. And that way lies madness and the fate of poor Sharon Osbourne and over-worked Madonna.
For aeons, Karren Brady has been one of my fantasy dinner party guests (alongside Galileo, Heath Ledger, Lizzo, George Washington, Winston Churchill and Boudica) because she's always been my perfect concoction of brains, balls and beauty.
But now I'm not so sure: beauty chat can only take me so far and my own laissez-faire attitude to personal grooming might make her feel uncomfortable, insecure even, in her own skin if she was sitting next to me.
No, today Brady has clearly decided that brains and balls no longer give her the confidence that beauty does; that women are, in the end, still not judged on their deal-making abilities or skills, but on their looks. I for one think that's a darn shame.
What she did to get her new look
Karren Brady has admitting to the odd 'tweakment' and in interviews swears by one cosmetic practice: Dr Rita Rakus's Clinic in Knightsbridge. Here is what she's had done over the years...
Face: 'I'm not a big fan of filler and Botox but I love a good facial,' Brady has said in the past. 'I'm addicted to a laser treatment because as you get older, parts of your body start to sag.' In 2021, she had a treatment called Sofwave using 'Superb Synchronous Ultrasound Parallel Beam Technology'. Costing £2,600 upwards, it involves heating up the middle layer of the skin to induce 'controlled injury', which reduces wrinkles. A year later, she spoke about her Endolift, a nonsurgical skin-tightening treatment that uses laser technology.
Arms: This week's Instagram post raves on about Exion skin tightening. 'It uses radiofrequency and targeted ultrasound to naturally boost hyaluronic acid, while stimulating collagen and elastin for more youthful-looking skin,' she wrote. The price of a course starts at £4,600.
Body: In 2010 Brady said her weight was a key insecurity. Standing next to Lord Sugar, 'I worry I look posh and fat,' she said, adding: 'I've spent 20 years battling my weight.' She's also used EMsculpt Neo, which uses electromagnetic technology to engage your muscles as though you are doing crunches up to 20,000 times per session. Kim Kardashian is a fan. A course starts from £3,000. Recently, Dr Rita posted a video of Brady undergoing Emerald laser treatment, which uses a 'green light, non-thermal laser' to break down 'stubborn' fat cells. Multiple sessions are needed to see a difference. The price of 10 sessions? £2,500.