The Coates family’s fortune now stands at £6.856bn after seeing a rise in their wealth of £754m last year.

Denise Coates’ latest bet365 pay packet is the largest seen by Rich List compilers in the past year – a whopping £220m – helping to rank the family second in the inaugural Sunday Times Tax List.

She worked in her father’s bookies as a schoolgirl, but in 2000 she deduced that big money was to be made online and so started bet365 in a prefab in Stoke-on-Trent.

In 2017-18, profits shot up by 28% to £660.6m on turnover of nearly £2.9bn. The firm is worth at least £6.5bn, in which the family has a 93.3% stake, 50.25% of which belongs to Denise Coates’ alone.

Her brother, John, 49, is joint chief executive and her father Peter, 81, chairs Stoke City football club.

Coates has commissioned architect Lord Foster to build a glass mansion with an artificial lake near Crewe, and also pumped £75m into her charitable foundation in 2017-18.