The suicide bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005 killed 52 innocent people and wounded hundreds more. All of them must live with their memories. And the rest of us will always remember where we were when we heard that London had been hit by the worst terrorist attack in its history.

When I first left university, I thought about going into the private sector. But I discovered when I went to interview that I could only have a career in the back office, or doing HR. The attitude was, 'My dear lady, you cannot possibly think about going on the board.'

The British security industry has the capacity to be a world leader and it should be our shared objective to achieve this.

I was certainly never conscious of 'playing the woman.' I would not have approved of that. It is not a winning tactic. I operated in the world as I found it, and it was a man's world.