Gina Miller: Who is the woman who won the Brexit legal battle?

"People say I am a passionate person with a feisty tone of voice."

So says Gina Miller, the lead claimant in the Brexit challenge, on her LinkedIn business profile page.

"This is because I love what I do, and do what I believe is right," she writes. "I am not afraid to speak out when I confront intellectually or morally bankrupt arguments, and have an independent mind-set."

The 51-year-old businesswoman and philanthropist can now add taking on the Government and winning in a historic legal battle to her list of career achievements.

However, the Guyana-born and British-educated Miller was quick to declare in a self-penned article for the Guardian: "The Brexit judgment isn't a victory for me, but for our constitution."

Gina Miller said the legal action was about 'the elephant in the room - and an elephant ... that could do a lot of damage'. Credit: PA

The victory was shared with her co-claimant, the hairdresser Deir Dos Santos, and the thousands of anti-Article 50 campaigners who called themselves the "People's Challenge".

But Ms Miller became the face of the original High Court challenge - now upheld by the Supreme Court - to force the Government to seek Parliament's approval before triggering Britain's exit from the EU.

She paid a high emotional price for the exposure.

At its most extreme Ms Miller received threats of rape and beheading by online trolls that saw her advised by police to hire security while attending the Supreme Court.

Gina Miller endured media intrusion and vile threats for her central role in the legal case. Credit: PA

She also spoke out against the "dangerous and reckless headlines in some of the papers" as she came under the unsympathetic glare of the Brexit-supporting media, who trawled through details of her three marriages and leapt upon her enemies in the City who dubbed her a "black widow spider".

The mother-of-three embarked on a career in business having studied law at London University.

She had left her parents in South America to move, with her brother, to Eastbourne in East Sussex. The pair supported their education by taking odd jobs.

She married her first husband at 20 before divorcing and marrying the financier Jon Maguire. The couple divorced in 2002, eight years before he would stand for the anti-EU English Democrat Party in the 2010 election.

It was alongside her third husband, the hedge fund manager Alan Miller, that she co-founded an investment firm SCM Private in 2014 with a foundation that campaigned against mis-selling and hidden charges in the fund management industry (prompting the black widow nickname).

Gina Miller learned from her counsel that the 11 justices had sided with her against the Government barely 15 minutes before they delivered their verdict. Credit: PA

"I embrace the values of conscious capitalism," she declares on her LinkedIn profile, adding that a sizeable percentage of profits from seven "innovative brands" she has founded have been donated to charities or community projects.

Her profile also reveals a love of climbing, driving fast cars, flowers, Oscar Wilde, music and dancing. She does not list politics among her interests.

Despite her central role in the biggest political issue in decades, Ms Miller said the world of Westminster holds little appeal.

"I make no pretence at being well-versed in politics," she wrote in the Guardian article. "It is all too often about personalities and emotion - but I do know a thing or two about our constitution, as I once trained to be a lawyer.

"Even a first-year law student learns that an overriding principle is that parliament is sovereign. This is what we should be eternally grateful to the judges – in the face of enormous pressure from most of the press – for upholding."

At 9.15am she learned, along with the Prime Minister through their separate counsel, that the 11 justices of the Supreme Court agreed with her.