It has become a regrettable trope of British life that, whenever a public figure finds himself in hot water over here, their first instinct is to hitch themselves to red-state America. Russell Brand did it, clinging to the evangelical right in Florida after he found himself accused of sexual impropriety. Liz Truss did it, too, hopping to the distant edges of the MAGA margins once her reputation was shredded by her disastrous six-week premiership. And now you’re getting Michelle Mone. As if you didn’t already have enough going on.
Engulfed in lawsuits, and with their fortune frozen amid an ongoing anti-corruption fraud investigation, Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, have spent the past few months conducting a fire sale of their U.K. properties. They are frantically ridding themselves of homes in Chelsea and Glasgow—even, God forbid, their yacht—with the aim of starting afresh in the humid anonymity of Florida.
It’s another ignoble installment to a story that for decades has been marked by endless drama. As the inventor of the Ultimo bra—a piece of underwear containing a cleavage-boosting gel insert—Mone found herself rocketed from unglamorous beginnings as a working-class Glasgow girl who left school at 15 all the way to the House of Lords, where in 2015 she was sworn in by Prime Minister David Cameron as Baroness Mone of Mayfair.
For a while it seemed too good to be true. From the start, Mone presented herself as the ultimate underdog, a one-woman operation, single-handedly taking on the might of brassiere leviathans like Gossard and Playtex. She was scrappy, intelligent, pretty enough to model her own goods, and the canniest of self-publicists. A camera crew never far from reach, she became her own reality show, marveling at the butler-summoning button in her Claridge’s suite and flirtatiously goading reporters to touch her chest. Even her personal life was fair game, detailing the breakdown of her first marriage in a series of uncomfortable talk-show appearances.
Sure, some of the details didn’t quite add up—especially her repeated (and disproved) claim that Julia Roberts used an Ultimo bra to boost her cleavage in Erin Brockovich—and the lightest of digging revealed that, for all her girlboss posturing, her business had actually started to lose money. But these were simply details to be brushed away, thanks to Mone’s ability to give the British press exactly what they wanted—lurid personal stories and an endless supply of women in their underwear.
But as the excellent recent BBC documentary The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone made uncomfortably clear, everything would soon come crashing down. After she left Ultimo, in 2015, Mone stumbled through various scammy-sounding second acts—she got heavily into crypto, and, employing 1,000 people to eventually turn a $2,200 profit, she became the face of a loss-making brand of diet pills that were disavowed by the British Dietetic Association—before eventually hitting pay dirt.
During the pandemic, the British government found itself in desperate need of P.P.E. for medical professionals. Consequently, it set up a so-called V.I.P. lane, fast-tracking suppliers with ministerial connections. In reality this meant that taxpayer money was funneled directly toward friends of the Conservative party. A former neighbor of the health minister who had no prior experience in medical supplies was given a $40 million government contract to produce coronavirus-test kits. And a company called PPE Medpro received $270 million for gowns and masks.
There were, to put it mildly, a few problems with this. The person who recommended PPE Medpro to the government was Mone. PPE Medpro didn’t legally exist until five days after Mone’s recommendation. None of the 25 million gowns it supplied could be used; the N.H.S. deemed them “unfit for purpose.” It was then reported that $88 million from PPE Medpro’s profits went to Barrowman, who then transferred $39 million of it to Mone. And then, sealing their fate (at least in the court of public opinion), Mone was caught lying about all of it.
The fall from grace was swift and dramatic. Mone and Barrowman are currently being sued by the government, to recover the $165 million it spent on PPE Medpro gowns. The details of the five-week High Court showdown are not being widely reported—perhaps due to its reliance on technical jargon about European certification standards and sterility-assurance levels—but it is being vigorously fought by both sides.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the lawsuit, assets of Mone and Barrowman totaling $100 million have been frozen. They find themselves subject to an investigation by the National Crime Agency, which has predicted a “realistic chance” of criminal charges being filed. In response to all this mess, the couple gave a BBC interview so catastrophic—Mone’s defense was that lying to the press is “not a crime”—that it permanently made her a Prince Andrew–level pariah.
And now she’s your problem. Shunned at home, with the law still closing in, Mone has been left with little option but to accept a new life in America’s Paraguay. She might be putting up the flimsiest of fights—every one of her Instagram posts since 2023 has been about the P.P.E. scandal—but she essentially now finds herself as Ray Liotta did at the end of Goodfellas, only with more bronzer and a life peerage. It is a chapter that she can never have anticipated. For someone who made a fortune selling bras, she’s going to need all the support she can get.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
