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.

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.
Mone, who made her first fortune via the lingerie company Ultimo, lied repeatedly for years about her role as a “plague profiteer” and threatened to sue journalists who pursued the allegation, before outing herself just before Christmas in an “absolute disaster class of an interview” with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
What jarred most was her claim that she was the victim. It was pure panto, says The Sunday Times. Mone “stepped into the role” of villain “with the kind of aplomb that comes from spending much of your career posing in your underwear”. By Christmas Eve, she was comparing her plight to that of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar after the National Crime Agency froze her bank accounts.
With civil suits also pending from the Department of Health, and several newspapers demanding the repayment of legal fees, Mone is feeling the heat in her Isle of Man hideaway – chosen, her husband told Kuenssberg, because “I don’t want anyone in the press to know of any business activity or anything I get engaged in”.
The government is feeling the heat, too. Although stripped of the Conservative House of Lords’ whip last year, there are now demands for Mone’s complete removal, along with troubling questions about how she got there in the first place. “It’s been an extremely tough year of pain,” says Mone, 52. But then she is also, in her own words, “a tough cookie” who, in a “fairy-tale” rise, battled her way out of “the mean streets of Glasgow”, says the London Evening Standard.
In her 2015 autobiography, My Fight to The Top – penned at the height of her “working-class heroine” phase – Mone details growing up in a home with no bath and an outside loo. Her father was wheelchair-bound; her brother died in childhood of spina bifida. Mone left school at 15 with no qualifications but claims to have been a best-selling Avon rep by the age of 13, acting on behalf of her mother.
Certainly, by her early 20s (by which time she was married and already a mother), Mone’s business smarts seemed self-evident, says The Sunday Times. She landed a job with brewer Labatt and was swiftly promoted to head of marketing.
In time-honoured fashion, the setback of being made redundant at 24 proved Mone’s great opportunity. She launched Ultimo in 1999 on the back of a gel bra and “burst into public consciousness” when she featured on the BBC series Trouble at the Top, documenting the company’s many crises. Soon she was signing celebrities such as Penny Lancaster to model the underwear.
In 2004, she pulled off a coup by dumping Lancaster, Rod Stewart’s wife, for his ex-wife Rachel Hunter – prompting Stewart to call her a “manipulative cow”. At its peak, Ultimo was reportedly worth £50m, “although the whole gravity-defying business edifice always seemed as cantilevered as the gel-filled bras it sold”.
Nonetheless, Mone’s entrepreneurial credentials impressed David Cameron sufficiently to make her a life peer in 2015, and his “start-up tsar” to boot – even though her “rags-to-riches story” seemed to become “more fantastical with each telling”.
The same might be said of many of Mone’s other business claims, says the Standard – including her promotion of “quack weight-loss pills” and other hokey beauty products, and a later foray into a cryptocurrency scheme that went bust (not before Mone had comically declared herself “one of the biggest experts in cryptocurrency and blockchain”).
Indeed, when you peer beyond the soap opera, her overall record is appalling, says The Sunday Times, not least because of her “parsimonious” relationship with the truth.
“Mone is nothing if not a survivor”, but it will be hard to come back from this one.
This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.
Related articles
- Great frauds in history: how Joyti De-Laurey became “the Picasso of con artists”
- Great frauds in history: Wang Fengyou’s ant-breeding scam
- Trevor Milton: big dreamer wakes to a hard reality
Sign up for MoneyWeek's newsletters
Get the latest financial news, insights and expert analysis from our award-winning MoneyWeek team, to help you understand what really matters when it comes to your finances.
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.
-
Renewable investing: who is paying for the green revolution?
Investors in renewables have not been rewarded, says Bruce Packard. Will they fund the government’s plans?
By Bruce Packard Published
-
UK house prices rose 4.6% last year – where did property prices grow most?
House prices increased by 4.6% in 2024, giving an average property price of £268,000. Where did property prices grow the most and will they continue to rise this year?
By Ruth Emery Published
-
Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng: the maths whizz who shook Big Tech
Few people had heard of Liang Wenfeng until the launch of his DeepSeek AI chatbot wiped a trillion dollars off US technology stocks. His pivot to AI was of a piece with his past exploits.
By Jane Lewis Published
-
Donald Trump's tariffs spark a global game of thrones
We don’t know what Donald Trump intends or will do next. That is in itself damaging.
By Emily Hohler Published
-
RedNote: the rise of the new TikTok
RedNote, a Chinese rival to social-media app TikTok, has seen millions of US users flock to it in the wake of the US TikTok ban. That caught the company by surprise. What is RedNote and can its popularity last?
By Jane Lewis Published
-
Australian tycoon Andrew Forrest battles it out with oil giant ExxonMobil
Iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest made billions before committing himself to philanthropy. Now he is preparing for a showdown with ExxonMobil.
By Jane Lewis Published
-
Remembering Sir David McMurtry: Renishaw founder and Concorde engineer
Sir David McMurtry, co-founder of Renishaw, made a unique contribution to Britain. We look back at his legacy
By Jamie Ward Published
-
Low Tuck Kwong: the Indonesian mining billionaire who is benefitting from coal boom
Low Tuck Kwong’s coal business was in deep trouble a decade ago with no future. Now, he is riding the waves of a global coal boom
By Jane Lewis Published
-
David Montgomery's potential new ally as he seeks to buy The Telegraph
Veteran media mogul David Montgomery has seen off a bid for his media group National World. But he now has his eye on The Telegraph
By Jane Lewis Published
-
Elon Musk to Taylor Swift - the four key figures who moved markets in 2024
We look at the four most influential people in 2024 who moved markets – from Elon Musk reshaping US politics to Rachel Reeves struggling as Britain's chancellor
By Jane Lewis Published