Louise Patten

Louise Alexandra Virginia Charlotte Patten, Baroness Patten (; 2 February 1954) is a British businesswoman and author, who is the wife of the Conservative politician John Patten and the granddaughter of the RMS Titanic Second Officer, Charles Lightoller.

Background

Patten went to St Paul's Girls' School and then to Oxford University where she was a contemporary of Theresa May at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She married John Patten, later a Tory cabinet minister, in 1978 and has one daughter, Mary-Claire Patten.

In 1998 she started as NED of Somerfield, a chain of small supermarkets.

She was a non-executive director of Bradford & Bingley when the company failed and was nationalised in 2008. She has remained on the board and is now an NED of UK Asset Resolution, which combines the run-down mortgages of the former Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley.

Novelist

She is the author of the novels Bad Money, a thriller based in the City of London, However, this claim, reportedly told her by her grandmother Sylvia Lightoller when Patten was ten, goes against multiple witness accounts at the U.S. and U.K. inquiries into the sinking and has been dismissed by Titanic historians due to lack of evidence and corroborating accounts.