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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Marina Hyde

Michelle Mone told us ‘business isn’t easy’ during Covid. How are things now, your ladyship?

Michelle Mone on her yacht, the Lady M, in 2021.
Michelle Mone on her yacht, the Lady M, in 2021. Photograph: michellemone/Instagram

By their own accounts, there have been two Westminster-adjacent victims of inflammatory language this week. One is the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, hurt to the point of requiring smelling salts by some politically commonplace words spoken by the prime minister. And the other is legally besieged bra baroness Michelle Mone, who has always been performatively sensitive, with chaos as her rising sign.

Alas, far from their shared victimhood drawing our two snowflakes closer together, in Michelle, we may have finally found the Tory from whom Nigel would not accept a defection to Reform. Which really means something, considering Britain’s would-be next prime minister currently has precisely zero peers in the House of Lords. Like the PPE she provided during the pandemic, Michelle would be deemed incredibly expensive and absolutely unusable.

Not that you’d get that vibe from the letter she sent to Keir Starmer this week, claiming that Rachel Reeves reportedly mentioning a “vendetta” against her retaining her peerage was a security threat. This began, amazingly, with the words: “I am writing to you … first as a wife, second as a mother, and lastly as a baroness …”

Surely writing at least second-and-a-halfly as a Range Rover driver? After all, in an earlier statement this week, Michelle had battled to get the public on side with a helpful analogy about the wrongness of the judge who had just ordered a company to which she and her husband, Doug Barrowman, were linked to repay £122m to the Department of Health for providing some defective surgical gowns. “To use a simple analogy,” her ladyship began promisingly in a diatribe against the “establishment”, “if a car looks, feels and drives like, say, a Range Rover, then unless you can show how the car is assembled by the manufacturer, it’s not a Range Rover.”

Nope, I’ve read that 15 times and I’m still no clearer. Maybe we would be on safer ground if we just pictured the specific Range Rover. I’m getting strong notes of Overfinch L460, maybe customised with monogrammed quilted leather and Swarovski crystal wheel caps. I also sense we peasants wouldn’t even be allowed to touch it unless we were wearing protective clothing – obviously sourced from a firm where it actually worked.

That said, and partly because she can’t help herself, it does feel as though we focus more on Michelle than Doug Barrowman, the person whose wife she’s firstly speaking as. If you can’t immediately picture Doug, he’s a striking confection of tweed and Turkey teeth, and it’s fairly difficult to get past the fact that his house boasts a new-build amphitheatre. But then, the Mone-Barrowmans always wanted to tell us how very, very rich they were, and how very, very well they were doing. They gave their first joint interview to Hello! long before they were engaged, pictured standing not just in front of their Isle of Man McMansion, but in front of their Ferrari. “I feel like I’m in a fairytale,” revealed Michelle, “a beautiful dream I don’t ever want to wake up from.”

Oh dear. Flash forward to the last time the couple attempted a spirited defence of their Covid antics, during an absolute helicopter crash of a BBC interview two years ago, and we find Doug saying: “There’s a reason why I live in the Isle of Man. I don’t want anyone in the press to know of any business activity or anything that I get engaged in.” Again: oh dear.

So these are testing times over at Hubris Towers. Whither the yacht Michelle posted a picture of herself on during the pandemic? Caption: “Business isn’t easy. But it is rewarding.” Apparently the good ship Lady M has now been sold, as Doug has liquidated an estimated £80m of things like a private jet and a £41m Caribbean villa. This reportedly happened shortly after a separate £75m of the couple’s properties and accounts were frozen as part of a National Crime Agency investigation (Mone and Barrowman deny any criminal wrongdoing). But don’t get your hopes up – it feels unlikely lawyers will ever “pierce the corporate veil” and get all the money back from such personal assets.

As for the wider context, it’s strange. No one more than the Conservative government of the day encouraged us to think of the pandemic as a war. You’d think the possibility of mass viral death was a sufficiently horrifying novelty not to require a metaphor to bring it home. But war they called it, and battle language was everywhere. Unfortunately, instead of Winston Churchill, we had Boris Johnson, and instead of remembering the revulsion towards profiteers in the wake of the second world war, we had something called “the VIP lane” for Covid contracts. This went … badly. If you haven’t watched ITV’s new documentary on the Covid contracts, Follow the Money, I strongly recommend it as a faultless roundup and exploration of what one contributor classes as “probably the biggest misspending scandal in the UK of all time”, from PPE to Covid tests, with particular emphasis on that VIP lane.

The people who jostled their way into this lane for a grotesquely outsize cash bonanza and then boasted about helping the nation were profiteering, plain and simple – and there were a lot more of them than just Michelle Mone. She isn’t being scapegoated, as she claims. But so many others have got away with it.

Michelle doesn’t know where the profiteer bodies other than her own are buried, or she’d be out there digging them up with her bare hands so she wouldn’t be the only one in the limelight. But the people who did it do. How relieved they must be that their misdeeds are buried in the Covid bad-memory hole, stuck in the mind-wipe warehouse like the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. A structure that, ironically, does not look like it would be remotely big enough to hold all the useless stuff purchased – or all the money they fleeced off this country.

  • Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

  • Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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