Who Is Peter McMahon? What We Know About Dana Perino’s Husband

On August 17, 1997, a plane left Denver for Chicago. Two strangers sat next to each other. She was 25, with a brand new job waiting for her on Capitol Hill. He was 43, British, and reading a book. She noticed he had no wedding ring.

That woman was Dana Perino. Today she is a Fox News host and a former White House press secretary. The man beside her was Peter McMahon. Twenty-eight years later, they are still married and living in Manhattan.

Who is Peter McMahon?

It was a short hop. Denver to Chicago, August 17, 1997. Dana Perino had just come back from a trip. Peter McMahon was flying east too. Neither of them planned for anything to happen.

She looked over and noticed two things. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. And when he spoke, he had a great British accent. He was reading a book, so she asked him about it. That was her opening line.

He asked how her trip had been. Simple, polite stuff. But it kept going. And going. By the time the plane landed, they had been talking for two and a half hours straight.

What kept it alive was his stories. Peter McMahon talked about international business deals. He talked about growing up in a Royal Air Force family. His passport was full of stamps from all over the world. Dana had never met anyone quite like him.

Years later, when asked what she noticed, she mentioned the ring and the accent. Peter jumped in with his own answer: “he was a handsome guy.” He’s not shy about that part.

The timing was terrible, though. Dana had just landed a job she really wanted in Washington. A long-distance romance with an older man in England was not on her list.

Peter McMahon’s Early Life

Peter McMahon was born in 1954 in Blackpool, a seaside town in Lancashire, England. Blackpool is a working-class place, known for its beaches and its tower. It’s a long way from Manhattan.

One quick note here. The two main bio sites online give two different birthdays — June 6 and July 6. They can’t both be right. Nobody has confirmed which one is correct, so treat any exact date you see with care.

The most interesting detail comes from the plane conversation. He described a Royal Air Force childhood. That usually means a father in service, and a family that moved often. RAF families were posted around Britain and overseas.

That kind of childhood teaches you things. You learn to settle in fast. You learn that maps are real places, not just lines. It’s not hard to see how a boy like that grew into a man who ran supply chains across borders.

Beyond that, the record goes quiet. We don’t know his parents’ names. We don’t know about brothers or sisters. Peter McMahon has never given a proper interview about his childhood, and honestly, that seems to be on purpose.

What He Did Before Dana

Peter McMahon studied Business Administration and Management. The University of Liverpool is listed as his school, though that comes from a low-quality source, so it’s worth a pinch of salt.

His first big job was at Sainsbury’s. If you’re not British, think of it this way: Sainsbury’s is one of the largest supermarket chains in the country. Millions of people shop there every week.

He didn’t work the tills. He worked in supply chain and distribution. That means getting products from farms and factories into stores, on time, without waste. It’s the invisible engine behind every shelf you’ve ever seen full.

He covered a lot of ground. Northern England. Ireland. Scotland. Different regions, different roads, different problems. One source says he was there from 1992 to 2000 — but the same source then says he joined Tesco in 2002. There’s a two-year gap nobody explains.

What this period settled was his reputation. Peter McMahon became known as an operations man. Not a showman. Not a face for the press. The guy who makes the machine run.

His Big Retail Career

In 2002, he joined Tesco as a supply chain director. Tesco is Britain’s biggest grocer and one of the largest retailers on earth. He worked on Central European operations — which meant handling several countries at once.

Two years later, in 2004, he moved to Walmart. He was based in the German office, running supply chain work there. Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, so this was a serious step up in scale.

Then came the big one. From 2006 to 2013, Peter McMahon worked at Loblaw, Canada’s largest food retailer. Seven years. It was the longest and biggest stretch of his career.

Now, an important correction. Some sites call him Loblaw’s CEO. He wasn’t. He was Chief Operating Officer. The CEO in that era was Galen Weston Jr. It’s a real difference, and plenty of articles get it wrong.

The COO job was still huge. He oversaw distribution, IT, human resources, labour relations, merchandising, store operations, and loss prevention. That’s thousands of stores and a very large workforce, all at once.

In October 2013, he became President and CEO of Shopko, a discount retailer based in Wisconsin. Shopko served smaller towns that bigger chains often skipped.

Their Long-Distance Years

So they’d met. Now what? He lived in England. She was building a career in Washington, D.C. There was an ocean in the way and no obvious fix.

Dana had a private worry too. Peter McMahon was 18 years older than her. How do you tell your friends that? How do you tell your parents?

The reaction surprised her. Her family and friends backed the relationship. Her father even admitted he thought an older man was exactly what she needed — “because I was [always] a little bit in a hurry in my life,” Dana said.

She still had doubts of her own. Moving to England meant pausing a career that was just taking off. And she had never pictured herself with a much older man. It wasn’t the plan.

Then a friend gave her one line of advice. “Do not pass up the chance to be loved.” Dana calls it the best advice she’s ever received. It changed everything.

That line stuck with her for decades. It became a central idea in her book, I Wish Someone Had Told Me. Her point is simple: love isn’t a detour from your career. It’s not a distraction. It’s a foundation.

The 1998 Wedding

Less than a year after the flight, they got married. The wedding was in England in 1998. One site claims the exact date was September 30, but the others just say 1998, so I won’t state it as fact.

What made it possible was pure timing. Dana had been working as press secretary for a Colorado congressman. In 1998, he announced his retirement. Her job was ending anyway — so she took the chance and moved to England.

The honeymoon was ten days on Santorini, the Greek island with the white houses and blue roofs. If you’re going to start a marriage somewhere, that’s not a bad pick.

Then Peter McMahon said something that mattered more than it sounds. He told his new wife that if she ever changed her mind about living abroad, he would support her. He knew the move was harder on her than on him.