Michelle Mone has always been an awkward bundle of contradictions. She is a working-class girl from the rough end of Glasgow who grew up to become Baroness Mone of Mayfair. She is intelligent enough to make millions by inventing a revolutionary type of bra but needy enough to model it herself. More pressingly, she is a woman possessed of enough ego to write an autobiography titled My Fight to the Top but not quite enough foresight to realize how silly the title would look when it all came crashing down around her. And, God, has it come crashing down.
For Mone, or Baroness Bra as the tabloids would have it, currently finds herself at the center of a huge and grubby corruption scandal that could very well spell the end for her. We’ll get to the nitty-gritty of it soon enough, but in summary: Mone has been accused of lobbying the British government to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars on shoddy coronavirus P.P.E., from a company she did not disclose any financial interest in, only to secretly profit from the deal to the tune of $35 million.
