The Magnificent Mrs Gates: Why Melinda will be a force for good in the post-Bill years

When strangers at parties find out I’m a journalist they immediately ask me to name my favourite interviewee. The conversation invariably goes something like this.

“The one magnificent, inspirational person who stands out to me for both personal and much, much wider reasons is Melinda –”.

“OMG Melinda Messenger? Seriously?”

“No,” I explain, “Although I did once interview her about National Fish and Chips week. I’m talking about Melinda Gates.”

I wait a few beats and watch the puzzlement before clarifying: “Melinda Gates. Wife of Bill? Bill Gates.”

Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover the range of expressions on their faces. They obviously expect someone ritzier and glitzier; a Hollywood A-lister or pop royalty. At the very least a household name.

But as the dust settles on this week’s shock announcement that her 27-year marriage to Bill is over, everyone knows who Melinda Gates is.

Reports that in order to avoid the media she rented a private island in Grenada for £132,000 a night and took the children and their partners, while Bill stayed in the US, have fuelled speculation the split was not amicable.

Whatever the truth – which will surely emerge in the coming days and weeks – the ultimate philanthropic power couple have dramatically parted ways.

Both parties have emphasised their shared commitment to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, set up in 2000, with the specific aim of donating 95 per cent of their shared wealth to society.

It has already given away – in seed funding, investments and grants – over $55bn and mobilised the super-rich to do the same. In response to the pandemic they swiftly committed $1.75 billion to vaccine programmes as part of the battle against Covid-19.

There is no reason to disbelieve their pledge to continue running it together. Sharing a bed and sharing a vision are two very different propositions.

But as Gates, 56, steps out of her 65-year-old husband’s shadow and starts to promote her personal projects, I predict she will become a hugely influential game-changer in her own right. And women will be the main beneficiaries.

“Looking through a gender lens to address centuries of inequality helps women and helps communities,” she told me the last time we met. “It’s a win-win situation.”

She has already set up her own “investment and incubation” company, Pivotal Ventures, to advance social progress in the United States and in February of this year launched a detailed proposal aimed at the Biden administration, entitled “Put Women at the Center (sic) of Economic Recovery”.

“You could imagine Melinda Gates being a much more progressive giver on her own,” David Callahan, founder of the website Inside Philanthropy, told The New York Times this week. “She’s going to be a major force in philanthropy for decades to come.”

The dynamic mother of three has already learned some tough lessons about the challenges of being heard in a man’s world.

“In the early days I’d walk into a meeting with a prime minister or president with my husband, and their opening question would be for him, or they’d assume he would answer,” she revealed.

“If it was about family planning, I’d have far more information so I had to learn to assert myself early on in the conversation and you could almost see their face change. People would assume he would know more or be the one in the lead.”

Having spent time with Gates, the current media speculation over how much she’ll get in the divorce feels bizarrely venal, despite the sums involved.

Microsoft founder Bill was already a billionaire when they wed. Together they have accrued a fortune of £145 billion, with multiple luxury homes, cars, private jets and Da Vinci artworks.

But take it from me, Melinda Gates is worth her weight in something far more valuable than a beachfront estate in Florida. She possesses soft power, persuasiveness, the ability to change lives, communities, societies across the globe.

One rumour doing the rounds is that she will enter politics. Although she and Bill kept scrupulously away from political debate and have never endorsed a presidential candidate, her break with him could signal a reframing of her goals.

Her liberal credentials point clearly towards the Democrats. Unlike Hilary Clinton, who lost to Donald Trump in 2017, Gates is neither a divisive figure nor part of the Washington establishment.

In the US, where philanthropist qualifies as a job title, the Texan-born Gates could have joined the black tie, gala dinner set, schmoozing with the super-rich and gaining kudos for writing eye-watering charitable cheques.

But she has never had any interest in joining that particular chichi circuit. Naturally diffident, she has long since overcome her reluctance to speak in public, but grandstanding is alien to her; she far prefers rolling up her sleeves, getting things done at grassroots level.

Raised as a Catholic, volunteering was a mainstay of the family ethos, which is why I doubt very much that the drily humorous Gates will be losing sleep over something as banal as an alimony settlement.

Bill famously got stuck in by inoculating children against diphtheria. His wife would travel to off-grid Masai villages in Tanzania to sleep in a hut like a local and see first hand the issues that affected them.

“All lives have an equal value,” she said to me, bluntly, back in 2012, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged to increase access to contraceptives for 120 million women and girls.

“There’s a false perception that women in Africa somehow don’t love their babies they way we do, don’t grieve their loss the way we would. That is simply not true. These women are as heartbroken as any of us would be, and that’s why they need access to contraception – so they can breastfeed each baby and give him or her a good start in life, without becoming pregnant again immediately.”

Logical and pragmatic, the Gateses’ modus operandi has always been to drill down into the detail – in happier times they described themselves as “a pair of number-crunching geeks” – and they agreed a separation contract well ahead of their announcement.

No one would have expected anything less. But like so many others, I was genuinely shocked and saddened by the news they have grown apart.

Gates, who was working at Microsoft when she met and married Bill, resigned from her job to bring up the couple’s three children: medical student and talented equestrian Jennifer who is 25, Rory, aged 21, who is studying law and 18-year-old Phoebe who appears destined for the performing arts.

She knew then he was a confirmed workaholic and that she would be doing the domestic heavy lifting. Melinda has spoken in the past of the challenges of being a stay-at-home mother while her husband works 16-hour days, calling the marriage “incredibly hard” at times.

But an apple pie mom she most certainly was not. Gates was also busy with the foundation; problem solving, strategising and pushing for real progress on equality.

“Empowered women – women who are healthy, can exercise some decision-making power and have some economic means – make life better for everybody in the community,” she told me at the launch of her 2019 book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World.

More recently, she conceded that redressing the socio-economic imbalance between men and women “isn’t our most immediate task” in stopping Covid-19. But added an important caveat.

“Viruses move fast, and gender equality is slow, generational work,” she said. “But by taking it on, and drawing on the brightest and best of both genders the world can be better prepared for health crises in the future.”

It’s a tall order, but if anyone can pull it off, I guarantee it’s Melinda Gates.