Michelle Mone: inside the extraordinary rise and catastrophic fall of the 'lying baroness'
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, buried amongst a well-manicured mosaic 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, a couple of her go-to aspirational hashtags #staygrounded #neversettle thrown in, 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 the Glasgow-born mother-of-three and multi-millionaire businesswoman, 52 — nicknamed Baroness Bra for her role as the boss of the now-folded celebrity lingerie brand Ultimo — faces fresh calls to be barred from the House of Lords over allegations of fraud and bribery, which she denies, in relation to her involvement with the government's lucrative PPE contract during the Covid pandemic.
"Why was she made a peer in the first place," was the question asked this week by former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who quit as an MP in protect at her own failure to secure a peerage, as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Tory minister Lord Callanan joined a growing number of high-profile figures calling on Mone to quit or be barred from the Lords. After years of being accused of lying and "shameful" lobbying tactics, could this week be Baroness Bra's final undoing?
It certainly looks increasingly likely, if latest reports are to be believed. The Baroness' involvement in the government's PPE contracts was first reported three years ago — a year before she married Barrowman and posted that now-prophetic Instagram — when The Guardian revealed that Barrowman's company, PPE Medpro, had received special access to the government's "VIP lane", which fast-tracked offers of PPE from companies introduced by individuals with connections to the government. (The company was later found to have been awarded more than £200 million in government contracts in June 2020).
Mone and Barrowman, 58, denied that they'd been involved in the fast-tracking at the time, saying “any suggestion of an association” between Mone and PPE Medpro
