The upward thrust and fall of Michelle Mone: A self-created fairy tale

Michelle Mone spent 25 years construction her trade empire and public profile during the British media.

An excellent self-publicist, she was once ceaselessly described as one of the crucial UK’s maximum a success businesswomen.

She was once the plucky underdog who, thru sheer grit and a knack for a excellent headline, driven her Ultimo bra idea onto {the marketplace} and into the excessive boulevard’s largest stores.

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

The tale she advised time and time once more to a thankful media introduced her popularity, riches, or even a peerage.

But Baroness Mone of Mayfair has now been stripped of the Conservative whip, is on go away from the House of Lords and a trade hooked up to her is beneath investigation by means of the National Crime Agency.

How did it come to that?

That’s the query a brand new two-part BBC Scotland documentary seeks to reply to.

The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone starts in 1999 because the then 28-year-old talks her method into Selfridges in London, and a deal to promote her gel-filled Ultimo bra.

Born in her personal phrases “into nothing”, Mone was once raised within the Dennistoun house of Glasgow. She left faculty at 15 without a {qualifications} however a choice “to make something of myself”.

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

She labored as a type and “ring girl” at boxing suits and moved into promotions and gross sales ahead of putting in place MJM International with husband Michael.

They re-mortgaged their area and went £70,000 into debt growing the Ultimo Bra, which is when Mone grew to become up unannounced at Selfridges.

Virginia Marcolin was once the store’s undies purchaser, and the individual Mone had travelled to London to peer.

“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 herbal knack for promotion were given them the deal however the cash-poor corporate wanted finances to fulfil the order. They came upon an investor in Tom Hunter, who in 1998 had simply offered his sports clothing corporate JJB Sports for £280m.

The guy who made that creation was once Jack Irvine, former newspaper editor grew to become a success PR govt. He was a key determine in construction Mone’s early media profile.

The newspapers and broadcasters had been hungry for tales about her, and she or he was once more than happy to assist.

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

Coverage from that point wired her humble roots, fight to be successful, new-found wealth, and the worldwide good fortune of her bra.

Magnus Llewellin, now editor of the Times newspapers in Scotland, recollects one notorious tale 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 fact is that the media, particularly the Scottish media, helped create the Michelle Mone delusion. And she had a present for the usage of 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 greater than 20 years in combination as a pair and greater than a decade in trade, the Mones very publicly separated, divorcing in 2011.

Michelle purchased Michael out of the trade and was the face and frame of the logo, modelling her personal undies.

Behind the scenes on the corporate there have been numerous employment tribunals, together with one high-profile case through which a member of workforce came upon a recording tool in his workplace.

Despite her felony demanding situations, Mone remained within the public eye, an ordinary function on tv programmes. And her knack for exposure resulted in her subsequent transfer – into the sector of politics.

She were a Labour supporter however defected to the Conservatives in 2010. Four years later she was once a outstanding voice in favour of the union all over the independence referendum, going as far as to mention she would go away Scotland within the match of a ‘Yes’ vote.

In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron made her his executive’s “entrepreneurship tsar”. Within weeks it was once introduced she was once to develop into a Conservative peer, as Baroness Mone of Mayfair.

By then she had offered her pursuits within the corporate she had constructed. But her new roles introduced higher scrutiny over her trade file.

Magnus Llewellin issues out that MJM International by no means grew to become over greater than £10.1m a yr, and in 2012 misplaced greater than part one million kilos.

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

Businessman Donald Anderson runs the Gap Group, a plant rent corporate which in 2024 had a turnover of £302.3m, hired greater than 2,000 other people, and made a pre-tax benefit of £43.9m.

He wrote to the top minister on 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 introduced she was once in a brand new courting with Doug Barrowman, a billionaire businessman. They settled within the Isle of Man, and labored in combination within the booming crypto-currency sector.

In 2020, the Covid pandemic struck. As the loss of life toll rose, UK ministers sought out corporations to urgently provide Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), even putting in place a VIP lane to present precedence to a couple providers.

An organization referred to as PPE Medpro made it onto the VIP listing. This stuck the attention of campaigners who had been involved that corporations at the listing had been run by means of other people with connections to the Conservative Party.

It emerged that PPE Medpro was once managed by means of other people hooked up to Doug Barrowman.

Mone, a Conservative peer, time and again denied any involvement within the trade, the deal or the following income.

But the Guardian exposed a connection to executive 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 additionally were given some WhatsApp messages which Michelle Mone had despatched in regards to the PPE offers and she or he stated she was once sitting at the jet and it was once about to take off, which we assumed was once their jet, their non-public aircraft.”

Michelle Mone’s public existence was once a self-created fairy tale which many in trade, politics, and particularly the media, purchased into.

For Magnus Llewellin, there is a transparent ethical to this story.

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

“But if you step into the sector of politics, issues can get just a little 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 issues went fallacious for her and you’ll be able to’t flip that focus off.”

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