Michelle Mone's "tough year of pain"

Michelle Mone liked to portray herself as a working-class heroine who worked her way to the top through grit and determination. But her pedestal is built on sand.

Baroness Mone (centre) ahead of the State Opening of Parliament by Queen Elizabeth II, in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster in London. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 21, 2017. See PA story POLITICS Speech. Photo credit should read: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
(Image credit: Stefan Rousseau - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

In the summer of 2021, when a traumatised Britain was enduring a third wave of Covid infections, the Conservative peer Michelle Mone posted a photograph on Instagram of herself and her husband Douglas Barrowman in the Mediterranean on board their new luxury yacht, Lady M. She captioned it: “business isn’t easy, but it is rewarding”. 

She was right about that, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian – “provided you’re shameless and grasping enough” to “fast-track” your way into winning a £203m contract to supply masks and other PPE products to the NHS and clear at least £65m in profit, even though much of the kit was allegedly unusable.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.