Ending a lifetime’s rewarding collaboration, Lady Michelle Mone OBE is done with the media. Or its “ridiculous obsession with every tiny detail of my personal life”, as she put it last week.
“At this rate,” the baroness complained to her public, on X, “I’m surprised the Daily Mirror hasn’t sent an email asking to know how many bras and knickers I own!”
Maybe they’re worried, since that Laura Kuenssberg interview, about accuracy?
At one point, anyway, she would have found it a reasonable question. From rehearsals of her bra firm’s origin story (“I was taking off my bra in the cubicle”) to thrilling lifestyle disclosures (“I arrange my lingerie according to colour”), countless articles about Mone’s personal life created the profile that attracted patrons including Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron and the current king. Charles once described her as a “great ambassador” for Scotland.
It may be some excuse that, as with Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, nothing had fully prepared the men for anything like Michelle Mone. She designed, she records, an eye-catching corset to collect her OBE, “with lace detail at the top and panels that ran down the side to emphasise my curves”.
As recently as 2021, the baroness was able to tolerate press publicity generated by a picture of herself in a swimsuit on a yacht, the recently acquired Lady M (now priced at £7m for a quick sale). With its motivational caption for those at home: “Today I’m feeling reflective. I feel so grateful to be where I am, in a beautiful part of the world with the people I love the most.
It wasn’t easy. There were some real challenges, both emotionally and physically.” And many of them previously detailed by the baroness in promotional interviews and her memoir, My Fight to the Top.
Along with her achievements in lingerie she included, presumably at some personal cost, accounts of a potential overdose (“I just snapped out of it”) and a marriage breakdown. “I didn’t set out to write a book about Michael and our problems,” she confesses, “but there is no way I could leave it out.” For instance: “As you can imagine, our sex life was utter crap. Well, now and again when he was in the mood, but it was over very quickly.”
By the time Cameron, in a frenzy of female tsar creation, made Mone “entrepreneurship tsar”, soon to write an immediately forgotten government report, she had been hailed as a “brave bra tycoon” for posing in her underwear (“My board are against me getting my kit off”).
Once a dazzled Cameron, ignoring plausible objections from Scottish entrepreneurs, had added a title, Baroness Mone of Mayfair was well placed when the pandemic struck to urge upon fellow legislators a “VIP lane” contract with the newly formed supplier PPE Medpro.
It was awarded PPE contracts worth over £200m. A published contract indicated links with a financial services firm run by Doug Barrowman, Mone’s fiance. While she persistently denied a connection with Medpro “in any capacity”, the public received updates on her pre-wedding weight-loss journey. “I feel amazing.”
The Guardian later revealed that £29m of Medpro’s £65m profits were transferred to a trust of which Mone and her children are beneficiaries. Both the National Crime Agency and the House of Lords are carrying out investigations.
In the couple’s interview with Kuenssberg, Mone explained why she lied about her involvement with Medpro: “I didn’t want the press intrusion for my family. My family have been through hell with the media over my career.”
Perhaps the press was at fault for reporting it, but it cannot have helped that Mone has persistently used her family’s difficulties to underline her triumphs. From a poor old granny to the disabled father and a brother with spina bifida to the ex-husband whose coffee, she recalled in her memoir, she adulterated with laxatives. “My book is about telling the truth,” she explained. Including the bit where she says she hasn’t (though she has) replaced Ultimo model Penny Lancaster with the previous Mrs Rod Stewart: “I had no choice”. Sir Rod: “I hope Michelle chokes on her profits.”
So what changed between relentless truth telling and threatening the press with legal action for the same? Talking to Kuenssberg, Mone raised the interesting possibility that, far from them tarnishing the reputation of the Lords, it is wealthy conservative peers whose lives are ruined by their promotion. Have we thought hard enough about its impact on, say, a shy and vulnerable entrepreneur who wishes only to help the unfortunate? “I’m a very successful businesswoman,” Mone said. “Since I walked into the House of Lords it’s been a nightmare for my family.”
On the other hand, it was her very membership of the upper house that, according to one lawyer, meant her denials had to be acted on. “My client was also a member of the House of Lords and had therefore been deemed trustworthy by the state.” And what layperson could hope to argue with that?
As comforting as it would be to regard the ennobling of a Michelle Mone as a surpassingly rare event – caused when a brilliantly appealing press manipulator collided with premiership by the worst imaginable judge of character – her ascent suggests levels of credulity from which anyone with a half-decent rags-to-riches story could still benefit.
After inventing some early qualifications, Mone, who had left school without any, later found that colourful anecdotes and force of character – “balls of steel”, a “childhood dominated by struggle” – could bewitch amenable listeners into overlooking less picturesque episodes. It hardly ever mattered, for instance, that her bras were not, as claimed, worn in Erin Brockovich (the costume designer dismissed the idea), if she’d bugged an employee, flogged a “quack” slimming product, been declared bankrupt.
David Cameron couldn’t, pre-2015, have known about the laxatives, but her financial troubles were documented: one Scottish businessman said, “There is no way, by any measure, that she is qualified to advise anybody on setting up a profitable business because, quite simply, she hasn’t.” The warning was ignored.
Mone has recently complained of being “treated like Pablo Escobar”, the Colombian drug billionaire. As persuasive as this is, she seems to be forgetting something. Escobar was only metaphorically a lord.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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