By Katie Strick
Copyright standard
There’s a post on Michelle Mone’s Instagram grid from November 2021, just a few days before she tied the knot with her billionaire second husband Doug Barrowman, which reads as strangely prophetic today. It’s a picture of the Tory peer and former lingerie tycoon standing in a garden, her hair in a perfect signature blow-dry, stood amongst several pictures of herself smiling in glamorous locations around the world, from the south of France, the Maldives and St Barts to the snooker room in her plush £120m home set on 37 acres on the Isle of Man.
“Never get too big for your boots!” reads the caption, alongside a couple of her go-to aspirational hashtags, #staygrounded #neversettle, in reference to the rags-to-riches story she has proudly told throughout her career: of how that little girl who grew up in the poverty-stricken east end of Glasgow, with no hot running water and a “cupboard” for a bedroom, left school at 15 and went onto become one of the most successful businesswomen in the UK.
She was made a Conservative peer by then-prime minister David Cameron in 2015 and was for many years billed as billed a “working-class heroine” for her sheer tenacity and drive. “You might be a big fish… but there will always be a bigger pond,” the caption continues. “I constantly have a voice in the back of my head reminding me that I could lose it all tomorrow.”
That voice is likely to be ringing in Mone’s head today, as a firm linked to the Glasgow-born mother-of-three and multi-millionaire businesswoman, 53 — nicknamed Baroness Bra for her role as the boss of the now-folded celebrity lingerie brand Ultimo — is ordered to repay nearly £122m after breaching PPE contracts.
PPE Medpro, the company linked to Mone, was found to have breached a government contract of nearly £122m to supply surgical gowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the High Court has ruled.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) brought the case to the High Court, saying it provided 25 million “faulty”, non-sterile gowns. On Wednesday, October 1, the High Court ruled against PPE Medpro, saying that the gowns did not comply with the requirement of having a validated process to demonstrate sterility, making it impossible for the DHSC to sell them and recoup the loss.
PPE Medpro must now repay the £121.9m sum in full.
The company is linked to Mone via her husband Doug Barrowman. It was awarded the government contract after she recommended it to ministers. Neither Mone nor Barrowman gave evidence at the trial this June, but both deny wrongdoing. After initially denying all involvement, Mone was identified as the “source of referral” which moved PPE Medpro into the “VIP Lane”.
On Tuesday, September 30, Mone doubled down on her denial of wrongdoing by accusing the government of using her as a “scapegoat” for the PPE scandal.
“This case was never about gowns or money,” she said. “It has always been about politics and blame-shifting, a way to cover up the government’s disastrous £10bn PPE write-off. Doug and I have been deliberately scapegoated and vilified in an orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement.
“The government decided to make us the poster couple for the PPE scandal, a convenient distraction to take the blame off them.”
She added that “many other suppliers who ran off with deposits or provided defective goods face no action,” saying: “Singling out one company in this way is not justice; it is scapegoating.”
In 2023, several high-profile figures — including Sir Keir Starmer, Lord Callanan and Nadine Dorries — called on Mone to quit or be barred from the House of Lords. Now, those calls will be reaching a fever pitch. But with a life peerage essentially impossible to relinquish and Mone determined to hang on to her place in the Lords, what will be the result of Baroness Bra’s wrongdoings?
For years, hers was the ultimate rags-to-riches success story: a young girl from a poverty-stricken area of north-west Scotland whose childhood home had no bath or shower and whose bedroom was a “cupboard” in her parents’ room, who went onto become a baroness and one of the UK’s richest and most successful businesswomen.
Mone — or Baroness Mone of Mayfair, to use her full title — shares many of the details in her autobiography, My Fight to the Top, which was published in 2016 — four years after she was awarded an OBE for ‘services to the lingerie industry’ — and tells of growing up in near-poverty on the rough streets of the east end of Glasgow, one of the most deprived constituencies in the country. Nine out of ten people there are on welfare benefits and the average male life expectancy is five years less than the Scottish average, according to recent statistics. “I thought it was normal to go to the local swimming baths to get a wash two or three times a week,” she once reflected.
The now-Baroness has spoken of how her younger brother, who had a condition called spina bifida, died at the age of eight when she was just 10 years old, and how she became Glasgow’s best-selling Avon rep at the age of 13 after persuading her mother, Isobel Allan, a seamstress, to sign up to the door-to-door cosmetics company on her behalf.
Mone’s father Duncan, an inkmaker who was suffering from cancer, lost the use of his legs when Mone was 15, the same year she decided to leave school with no qualifications to pursue a modelling career and reportedly look after her father. “I left school at 15 without a penny to my name… The only thing I owned was determination and a can-do attitude”, she wrote on Instagram many years later.
At 17, she met her first husband Michael Mone. She was working in sales and marketing for the Canadian brewery firm Labatt’s and part-time as a promotions girl for Radio Clyde at the time and together they went onto found her now-famous lingerie brand Ultimo in 1997, after she reportedly attended a dinner dance with Michael, wearing an uncomfortable cleavage-enhancing bra. She decided there must be a way to make such bras more comfortable, and Ultimo was born three years later, with Penny Lancaster — the then-girlfriend and now-wife of singer Rod Stewart — starring as one of the brand’s first ever models.
Mone and her husband had their first daughter, Rebecca, when Mone was 18 and went onto have two further children, Declan and Bethany. By 2010, their company was valued at £50million, but the 19-year marriage ended two years later in 2012, when Michael reportedly walked out on the family on Christmas Day. “He had literally just taken two massive turkeys out of the oven and my parents were coming up the drive ready for Christmas dinner,” Mone revealed years later, in 2016.
“It was only about 1pm when he announced he was off. The kids were in pieces. I was broken-hearted and spent the day crying. I’d been married 19 years, just turned 40. It was devastating. It was a horrible time but I got through it and I am grateful to Michael now.”
Michael went onto marry and have another child with a woman called Samantha Bunn, a close family friend and senior Ultimo employee who he denies starting a relationship with while he was still with Mone. Mone later claimed in her book that she believed the pair had an affair behind her back.
It was reported that Mone gave her ex-husband £24 million as part of the divorce settlement (she has disputed this but refused to reveal the correct figure) and and she eventually bought him out of the Ultimo business. She later admitted to vandalising his Porsche, cutting up his clothes and putting laxatives in his coffee during the split, but went onto tell presenters on ITV’s This Morning that she had been “bitter” about the alleged affair and regretted her actions.
Mone went onto date Barbados-based golfer Stefan Soroka following the divorce, after initially suffering a breakdown. She spoke of being “madly in love” with Soroka and wanting a child with him, but they parted ways in 2016 after reportedly struggling to make the long-distance relationship work. She was open with the press at the time, telling reporters she was on the hunt to find a new partner and hadn’t ruled out having a fourth child if she met the right person.
Mone did meet the right person, in the end — even if she didn’t have that fourth child. Less than a year later, in the summer of 2017, it was reported that she was dating Doug Barrowman, a twice-divorced Scottish father-of-four and fellow Glaswegian who’d grown up three miles away from Mone in north-west Scotland and made his fortune via a private equity business he headed up from the Isle of Man, where there is no corporation or capital gains tax.
The pair met at a business meeting at private members’ club, 5 Hertford Street in Piccadilly, sometime in 2016 and reportedly bonded over their similar rags-to-riches stories. “When they got talking they couldn’t believe how much they had in common,” their publicist later said. “They knew all the same people and places from their past.”
Mone and Barrowman quickly embarked on a luxury, jet-set relationship, holidaying at their homes homes in France, Thailand, Wales and the Caribbean (Barrowman is reported to have six homes, 15 cars and a private jet) as well as on his £20 million, 183-ft superyacht complete with underwater scooters, handmade silk carpets and a “seven-star” service. She spoke openly about their various properties around the world, telling reporters about the “two superyachts” she and Barrowman owned and how her dream was to build a sailing boat and cruise around the world together.
“I don’t want to sound spoilt but this would be the way of really seeing the world together,” she said at the time. “We plan to sell our villa in the south of France and probably one of the yachts.”
By the end of 2017 — the same year she sold her £13 million seven-bedroom villa overlooking France’s Cote d’Azure — Mone and Barrowman had already set up their first company together, MMI Global Unlimited, which was registered in Mayfair. Barrowman’s company Knox Ltd., which employs 5,000 people globally and has assets of more than £1 billion, had a 51 per cent stake, while Mone had 49 per cent.
Theirs was to be a whirlwind public romance. Mone announced their engagement in December 2018, sharing pictures of her eight carat diamond ring. “I said YES,” she captioned a photo of the pair standing next to a Christmas tree at their £120 million mansion set on 37 acres on the Isle of Man and reportedly featuring a paved drive, an amphitheater and a Ferrari parked outside.
After having to axe three planned weddings due to Covid, they finally married in November 2020 in a small, 30-person ceremony on the Isle of Man, streamed on Zoom. Mone wore a white Suzanne Neville wedding dress and chose her two daughters and friends including football WAG Teresa Lovenkrands and Irish Dragons’ Den star Chanelle McCoy as bridesmaids.
Mone documented much of the wedding on Instagram, from the virtual hen do her bridesmaids put on for her in May 2020 to luxury dress fittings at various boutiques. She and Barrowman have since gone on to mark their wedding anniversaries with equally glamorous celebrations, including a 32-course meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Wales and a luxury holiday to the Maldives.
Mone’s book ‘My Fight to the Top’ offers a glimpse into her self-described “fairytale” rise from the mean streets of Glasgow to Baroness Mone of Mayfair, as she is now officially known. She first came to public prominence in 1999 with the launch of the Ultimo bra, later claiming that the Hollywood actress Julia Roberts wore one of her bras in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich despite there being no evidence of that fact and staff working on the film denying it.
She went onto invest in a range of ‘Trimsecrets’ diet pills, after claiming they had helped her to lose six stone in weight in 2010. Customers were encouraged to pay £14.95 for a two-week supply of the capsules, made from ingredients including citrus compounds, sweeteners and guarana extract, with the accompanying diet plan restricting food intake to 1,500 calories for women and 2,000 for men, along with exercise. Mone was later criticised for endorsing the plan. “Selling quack weight-loss pills to vulnerable people, who actually need proper evidence-based help from medical services, is out of order,” Mike Lean, professor of nutrition at Glasgow University, said at the time.
Mone’s company MJM partnered the likes of Asda and Debenham’s and ran modelling campaigns with A-listers including Kelly Brook and Mel B over the years until Mone resigned in 2015. It was wound up in 2021 with debts of over £300,000.
Her sidestep into politics began in 2007, when she threatened to leave Scotland if the SNP won the Holyrood election and went onto firmly support the No vote in the 2014 Independence referendum. Then-PM David Cameron went onto appoint her to an unpaid role as the Tory government’s ‘start-up tsar’, attracting backlash from other entrepreneurs, and she received an OBE by the Queen in 2010 for her contribution to business. “I’ve always been Labour through and through. But I think the Conservatives did inherit a really bad business five years ago, and I think they’ve done a hell of a good job,” she had said during the Tories’ election campaign.
Cameron attracted further criticism a few years later, in 2015, when he awarded Mone a peerage after having reportedly been sent a gift of “clothing” by the lingerie tycoon the previous year. The item in question later turned out to be a Scottish woolly jumper, not underwear, as was initially claimed, but the correction did little to settle controversy around the appointment.
Mone, by then a former The Apprentice and Celebrity Masterchef contestant, was worth £20 million by this point, and had met everyone from then-Prince Charles to US President Bill Clinton. The peerage meant she would be able to claim up to £300 for every day that she attended the House of Lords.
Critics were quick to call the appointment “absurd” and “ridiculous”, pointing out a tweet of Mone’s from 2011 where she said she was “falling asleep” at the House of Lords. “Yes, Michelle Mone is a successful entrepreneur, but to become a national legislator overnight without the fuss of an election is obscene,” MP Stewart McDonald, who represented Glasgow South for the Scottish National Party, said on Twitter at the time.
But Mone’s supporters fought back, accusing critics of “inverse snobbery”. “This is typical misogynistic and inverse snobbery from the intellectual left in this country,”
Conservative MSP Alex Johnstone said ahead of Mone’s appointment. “It would be great news if Michelle Mone was appointed to the Lords as she is someone from a working-class background who has achieved a huge amount in by creating jobs.”
“Find what makes you tick and make it your job. “If you want it, go get it, you’re the only one that can make it happen”. “It doesn’t come easy unless you work hard for it… but when you do — it makes it all worth it”.
These are just some of the captions Mone has posted on her Instagram page over the years, a carefully-chosen mosaic of the mother-of-four posing in her plush Isle of Man home and glamorous locations around the world. #Findingyourpassion #ambition and #workhard are among her most common hashtags.
The lingerie tycoon has long claimed she is thick-skinned and doesn’t care what others think of her, but she clearly makes a great effort to curate a very specific social media persona. The majority of photos are of Mone herself, hand on hip or sitting businesslike in various parts of the home, each with an aspirational, motivational caption sometimes aimed at starting a conversation (“Tag someone who has helped you when you were down x” or “What dreams are you trying to make a reality?”).
Her husband, daughters and dogs Rory, Rusty and Rocket, who Mone adopted in lockdown, make the occasional appearance — as does her mum Isobel, now 73, who has been seen joining Mone on yachting holidays since battling breast cancer a couple of years ago.
“My brilliant mum was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and if it wasn’t for the dedicated and hardworking team The Royal Marsden she wouldn’t be here today,” Mone wrote on Instagram in 2021 as her mum was recovering after having one breast removed and reconstructive surgery. “Thank you to all of those who give their time, so we can spend more time celebrating life with the ones we love most.”
Mone credits her mother for teaching her to be humble. “Mum taught me to treat everyone the same, whether you’ve got a million quid in your pocket or a pound, whether you’re the Queen or the binman. I’ve instilled that in my kids, too,” she once said.
Travel snaps and wedding throwbacks are other common themes on Mone’s social media, as is the odd feelgood fitness shot in a nod to the active lifestyle she now apparently maintains after her dramatic weight loss in 2010 (she reportedly dropped from a size 20 to a 10).
“Those who know me, know I like to be as busy as I can!” she writes alongside one such snap, a picture of her running along a track with a race number pinned to her t-shirt. “Let me tell you why: it’s hard to stay motivated when you have little going on in your day-to-day. I’ve always found the less you do, the less you want to do.
“Whenever I find myself with too much time, I always try to get creative and add a task in my day or week to make sure I’m looking forward to something. Rather than coasting through the day, I can look forward to my 2-hour window of productivity and then enjoy the rest of the time off. Even the smallest tasks can make a day feel of so much more value. What task have you set yourself today?”
It was 2014 when Mone reportedly handed her self-tanning brand Utan, which was part of Ultimo, to her daughter Rebecca, then 26 and reportedly initially reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Rebecca had already modelled for her mother’s lingerie business by this point, making her debut in a series of new DD-G cup styles designed for fuller busted women.
The Utan brand was just a name back then, but Rebecca quickly went onto build it into a successful business, identifying a gap in the market for a product that could be misted on top of make-up without needing to wash your hands and developing a series of tanning gummies that are chewed and tan you “from the inside out”.
The gummies went onto viral success and Rebecca went on to win three awards in six months for the brand, which counted celebrities such as Made in Chelsea star Louise Thompson as fans. By 2019, she was on track to turn over £3 million from the business by the end of the year, just five years after being handed it.
“I saw the struggles and strain first hand and didn’t want to end up doing what they did – yet here I am,” she told the Daily Mail at the time. “I won an award in High School for getting the top mark in Scotland for Business higher exam, and it was clear from then I had a natural “flair. After school, I did the furthest thing from business I could find, before I finally gave in to my calling.
“I had always done bits for my parents’ business and, though I showed potential, I hated the bureaucracy of being told what to do — so I guess the signs were there that I would end up working for myself.”
By 2021, Rebecca, then 29, had spent £1.64 million on two homes in the Glasgow area, according to reports in the Scottish Sun. Meanwhile her brother Declan, then 25, reportedly shelled out £750,000 on a flat in the city in August 2020. According to his LinkedIn, he was educated at the prestigious Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun and now works as a senior account executive at Aston Currency Management in Mayfair.
Mone’s youngest daughter Bethany — then a former marketing assistant, Instagram vlogger and aspiring model living with her father in Glasgow — bought an £825,000 pad in the same city in October 2020, months after turning 21, but she is understood to have gone on to sell it for more than £900,000. Could her TV appearance the previous year have had something to do with that decision?
2019 saw Bethany — who has been called her mother’s lookalike — star in the Channel 4 reality show Born Famous, which billed itself as an experiment on social mobility and saw the teenage children of some of the UK’s most successful self-made celebrities thrown into the life they could have lived if their parents hadn’t become successful.
Gordon Ramsay’s son Jack and Mel B’s daughter Phoenix Chi were among the other contestants in the show, which saw Bethany travel to Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow, where her mother grew up. She was an Instagram vlogger sharing her lavish lifestyle with her 27,000 followers at the time, having been educated at Glasgow’s £11,000-a-year St Aloysius’ College and previously saying she would “live in hotel dressing gowns if [she] had the choice” and once ordered a pair of £770 Saint Laurent heels because “shoes are [her] best friend”.
The show, naturally, was quite the awakening for Bethany, seeing her staying with Jack, a 19-year-old unemployed trainee joiner, his disabled mother Violet and carer father Andy. “Who cares if you have all the money. What’s the point? What’s the good of it?” Bethany told cameras at the time, saying she finally understood why her mother had worked so hard to give her family a different life.
She called it “mind-blowing” and the “most life-changing experience” she’d ever had, adding: “I think this has given me a bit more motivation to go on and make this by myself.”
Mone also starred on the show, saying she’d been “dreaming of this day for a really long time” after feeling there had been a “real disconnect” between her and Bethany for “quite a long time”. “You have been angry for quite a number of years, and I couldn’t understand it,” she was seen telling her daughter. “I do everything for you, absolutely everything.”
Mone was billed an inspiration and a “working-class heroine” when she was first appointed to the House of Lords, which has only served to make her so-called fall from grace all the more shocking.
But the PPE scandal is by far from her first public controversy. In 2016, the lingerie businesswoman was criticised for admitting to her “most embarrassing moment” being a time she picked up what she thought was a “six-year-old” Vietnamese child to pose for a photo but in fact turned out to be a fully-grown 46-year-old married man.
Two years later, in 2018, she and Barrowman launched a cryptocurrency in a bid to raise $80 million, Mone describing herself as “one of the biggest experts in cryptocurrency and blockchain”. By August of that year, the project had “flopped” and all investors had been refunded, according to The Sunday Times.
Four years later, in August 2022, she paid out more than £50,000 to settle a lawsuit over racism claims after allegations that she called a man of Indian heritage a “waste of a white man’s skin” during a dispute following a fatal yacht collision in 2019. The man, Richard Lynton-Jones, whose mother is said to be of Indian heritage, complained to the police that Mone had sent the allegedly racist message during a WhatsApp exchange, claiming that he found it grossly offensive and felt harassed, alarmed and distressed by it.
Mone is also alleged to have described Lynton-Jones’ partner as a “mental loony” and a “nut case bird”, which he claimed had traumatised his partner. Mone repeatedly denied that she is racist, her lawyers claiming that she believed Lynton-Jones to be “100 per cent white and British”.
Mone’s husband has also made recent headlines after reportedly taking part in a £5.5 million “corporate tax swindle” in Spain, according to prosecutors earlier this year. In January, Barrowman was named among seven British businessmen facing trial in Spain for tax evasion and misappropriation in relation to a disputed invoice. He and his co-defenders pleaded innocent and deny the allegations. The verdict is unknown.
But the couple’s most public controversy has been the same one that has bubbled up again this week: the PPE scandal. And now that a verdict has been laid out, Mone’s fate as a peer hangs in the balance.
