The rise and fall of Michelle Mone: A self-created fairy story

Michelle Mone spent 25 years building her business empire and public profile through the British media.

A brilliant self-publicist, she was regularly described as one of the UK’s most successful businesswomen.

She was the plucky underdog who, through sheer grit and a knack for a good headline, pushed her Ultimo bra concept onto the marketplace and into the high street’s biggest shops.

She even claimed to have given Hollywood star Julia Roberts a cleavage.

The story she told time and time again to a grateful media brought her fame, riches, and even a peerage.

But Baroness Mone of Mayfair has now been stripped of the Conservative whip, is on leave from the House of Lords and a business connected to her is under investigation by the National Crime Agency.

How did it come to that?

That’s the question a new two-part BBC Scotland documentary seeks to answer.

The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone begins in 1999 as the then 28-year-old talks her way into Selfridges in London, and a deal to sell her gel-filled Ultimo bra.

Born in her own words “into nothing”, Mone was raised in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow. She left school at 15 with no qualifications but a determination “to make something of myself”.

Friends from the time describe her hard work ethic, energy and “bubbly” nature. “No matter where you’re from, look at me, you can do it,” she would later say.

She worked as a model and “ring girl” at boxing matches and moved into promotions and sales before setting up MJM International with husband Michael.

They re-mortgaged their house and went £70,000 into debt developing the Ultimo Bra, which is when Mone turned up unannounced at Selfridges.

Virginia Marcolin was the shop’s lingerie buyer, and the person Mone had travelled to London to see.

“I thought: ‘This girl is not what I’m used to dealing with’. She was kind of country bumpkin and a little bit like not overly refined, just very authentic. And this was just such a fresh, new product,” she says.

“That was the start of it. It was her persistence.”

Mone’s natural knack for promotion got them the deal but the cash-poor company needed funds to fulfil the order. They found an investor in Tom Hunter, who in 1998 had just sold his sportswear company JJB Sports for £280m.

The man who made that introduction was Jack Irvine, former newspaper editor turned successful PR executive. He became a key figure in building Mone’s early media profile.

The newspapers and broadcasters were hungry for stories about her, and she was very happy to help.

“She had two driving forces,” Irvine says. “One was to be very rich and one was to be very famous.”

Coverage from that time stressed her humble roots, battle to succeed, new-found wealth, and the global success of her bra.

Magnus Llewellin, now editor of the Times newspapers in Scotland, remembers one infamous story from the time.

“Stories would circulate around Michelle Mone. One of those was that her bra was used in the film Erin Brockovich, that Julia Roberts wore one of her bras,” he says.

“If you actually bother to check, somebody involved in the actual making of the film came out and said an Ultimo bra wasn’t used in the production.”

The truth is that the media, especially the Scottish media, helped create the Michelle Mone myth. And she had a gift for using that.

“The story was almost too good to debunk. A young woman fighting in a male-dominated business world, making a way for herself. That was a great story to tell,” Llewellin says.

After more than 20 years together as a couple and more than a decade in business, the Mones very publicly separated, divorcing in 2011.

Michelle bought Michael out of the business and became the face and body of the brand, modelling her own lingerie.

Behind the scenes at the company there were a number of employment tribunals, including one high-profile case in which a member of staff found a recording device in his office.

Despite her legal challenges, Mone remained in the public eye, a regular feature on television programmes. And her knack for publicity led to her next move – into the world of politics.

She had been a Labour supporter but defected to the Conservatives in 2010. Four years later she was a prominent voice in favour of the union during the independence referendum, going so far as to say she would leave Scotland in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote.

In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron made her his government’s “entrepreneurship tsar”. Within weeks it was announced she was to become a Conservative peer, as Baroness Mone of Mayfair.

By then she had sold her interests in the company she had built. But her new roles brought increased scrutiny over her business record.

Magnus Llewellin points out that MJM International never turned over more than £10.1m a year, and in 2012 lost more than half a million pounds.

“By that time the company was in real trouble,” he says.

Businessman Donald Anderson runs the Gap Group, a plant hire company which in 2024 had a turnover of £302.3m, employed more than 2,000 people, and made a pre-tax profit of £43.9m.

He wrote to the prime minister at the time of Mone’s appointment.

“Miss Mone is not a successful entrepreneur, she is a small time businesswoman with a PR exposure far in excess of any actual success,” he wrote.

He now says: “If the only thing she achieved was self-publicity, I don’t think that’s a very good reason to put you into the House of Lords. If you follow that logic then the House of Lords will be full of influencers in the next 10 years.”

In 2016, Mone announced she was in a new relationship with Doug Barrowman, a billionaire businessman. They settled in the Isle of Man, and worked together in the booming crypto-currency sector.

In 2020, the Covid pandemic struck. As the death toll rose, UK ministers sought out firms to urgently supply Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), even setting up a VIP lane to give priority to some suppliers.

A company called PPE Medpro made it onto the VIP list. This caught the eye of campaigners who were concerned that firms on the list were run by people with connections to the Conservative Party.

It emerged that PPE Medpro was controlled by people connected to Doug Barrowman.

Mone, a Conservative peer, repeatedly denied any involvement in the business, the deal or the subsequent profits.

But the Guardian uncovered a connection to government ministers.

The paper’s David Conn says: “We did our own freedom of information request, and we got the emails that she’d sent to Michael Gove and Lord Agnew saying that she was offering to supply PPE through ‘my team in Hong Kong’ and that it had gone through the VIP lane.

“And we also got some WhatsApp messages which Michelle Mone had sent about the PPE deals and she said she was sitting on the jet and it was about to take off, which we assumed was their jet, their private plane.”

The National Crime Agency (NCA) launched an investigation into PPE Medpro. Several of the couple’s properties were raided.

Two years into his investigation, David Conn received a leaked document showing Barrowman made at least £65m from the deals, with £29m of this paid into a trust of which Mone and her three adult children are beneficiaries.

Throughout this time, Mone was uncharacteristically quiet.

But that changed at the end of 2023 when she and Barrowman – by then married – released a PPE Medpro-funded documentary in which she admitted being a “conduit” between the company and ministers.

They also agreed to appear on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme. On camera, Mone admitted she could one day benefit from the trust, and said they had done nothing wrong.

When asked about lying to the press, she replied: “That’s not a crime.

“Saying to the press I’m not involved, to protect my family, can I just make it clear, it’s not a crime.”

Laura Kuenssberg says: “That’s a phrase that will always stick with me.

“When she said that, I thought: ‘There’s a thing. There’s a headline’.”

Michelle Mone lost the Conservative whip and has taken a leave of absence from the House of Lords. She has made no further media appearances.

PPE Medpro is still under investigation by the NCA and the government is suing the company for £122m plus costs, claiming the medical gowns the company supplied “did not comply with the specification in the contract”.

The peer declined the offer to be interviewed for The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone.

In response to the programme, a statement said the couple had provided “full and detailed statements to the NCA and cooperated with the investigation throughout”.

It said they had never been arrested and no charges had been brought against them.

The statement also defended PPE Medpro’s delivery of PPE equipment to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

It continued: “Baroness Mone, along with the whole of the Mone/Barrowman family, were beneficiaries of trusts… never direct recipients of PPE Medpro profits.

“The DHSC was fully aware of their involvement from the outset. It was a mistake to have misled the press.”

Michelle Mone’s public life was a self-created fairy story which many in business, politics, and especially the media, bought into.

For Magnus Llewellin, there’s a clear moral to this tale.

“What it does tell us about modern Britain is, we still like fairy tales. We want to believe those rags to riches tales.

“But once you step into the world of politics, things can get a bit trickier.

“It’s a parable of excess, hubris, and then eventually nemesis.”

Laura Kuenssberg says: “For Michelle Mone, public attention, knowing how to grab public attention, is an ability that she obviously always had in spades during her business career.

“But things went wrong for her and you can’t turn that attention off.”

The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone is available on iPlayer and is on BBC Scotland at 22:00 on Monday 26 May and BBC Two at 21:00 on Wednesday 28 May.