It was an uplifting story in more ways than one: the woman who rose from poverty to become one of Scotland’s leading female entrepreneurs through her invention and promotion of cleavage-enhancing lingerie. For services to boosting bosoms, as well her political support of the government, Michelle Mone was rewarded with a seat in the upper chamber of Britain’s Parliament, making her the most glamorous member of the House of Lords. Certainly the one with the best hair.
Yet today “Baroness Bra,” as Mone was mockingly called by some when then prime minister David Cameron gave her a peerage in 2015, faces the loss of her wealth, her reputation, and potentially her title, thanks to a National Crime Agency investigation into a deal to supply personal protective equipment (P.P.E.) during the coronavirus pandemic that was found to be defective. For Scotland’s bra queen, fortunes may end up going bust.
A firm connected to Mone, 52, and her second husband, Doug Barrowman, 58, a millionaire businessman who grew up a few miles from her in Glasgow, is being sued by the British government for $156 million plus costs for “a breach of contract and unjust enrichment.” The pair have denied the allegations, which relate to the company, PPE Medpro, that was incorporated in May 2020, five days after it is claimed that Mone had begun to lobby contacts in government to award it two contracts totaling about $250 million to supply 210 million face masks and 25 million sterile surgical gowns. The contractors were arranged without competitive tenders under pandemic emergency regulations by the government.
For three years, she and Barrowman “emphatically” denied any involvement with PPE Medpro, though Freedom of Information Act disclosures revealed that she had personally recommended the company to Lord Agnew of Oulton, the minister responsible for procurement, and Michael Gove, a senior Cabinet member and chairman of the COVID-19 Operations Committee. It was awarded the deal via a “high-priority lane” set up to favor companies with political connections.
In November 2022, The Guardian reported that leaked documents suggested that Barrowman had been paid at least $82 million from PPE Medpro’s profits, of which $37 million was directed to an offshore trust that listed Mone and her three adult children as beneficiaries. A year later, the P.R. pushback began. After a representative for the couple admitted that Mone and her husband were involved with PPE Medpro, the pair set out their side of the story in a 72-minute, lavishly produced “documentary,” published on YouTube and funded by the company. Then Mone acknowledged in what has been called a “train-wreck” interview with the BBC that she and her husband had originally lied to the press “to protect my family” and that doing so was “not a crime.”
Barely had 2024 dawned than Barrowman was on the attack again. In a statement issued at nine a.m. on New Year’s Day, Mone’s husband said they had been “treated as a punchbag by the media” and claimed that they had won the contract in a transparent process and with a price that was so competitive they had potentially saved the government “at least £100 million,” or around $126 million.
He said it was “curious” that the government was not suing other companies that had disputed contracts and suggested it was politically motivated. “Michelle and I are being hung out to dry to distract attention from government incompetence in how it handled PPE procurement,” he said. Barrowman added that it was “unacceptable” that the independent coronavirus inquiry will not review procurement decisions until 2025, after the next general election. This will run and run.
“The Greatest Love of All”
Whitney Houston is seldom quoted in the mother of parliaments. Yet when the newly minted Baroness Mone sought to explain her political mission in her maiden speech to the House of Lords almost eight years ago, she reached for her karaoke favorite, though on the advice of the doorkeepers she did not sing.
“I believe the children are our future,” Mone said. “Teach them well and let them lead the way.” The words, from Houston’s 1986 hit “The Greatest Love of All,” had been her inspiration during a childhood of deep poverty and family tragedy, and she vowed that it would continue to drive her as she advised the government on how to encourage start-up businesses in deprived areas.
Michelle Allan, as she was born in 1971, grew up in a small tenement apartment in the east end of Glasgow that had no bath or shower. The family had to visit a local swimming pool to wash. Her brother died in childhood of spina bifida, and her father, an ink mixer, had cancer and lost the use of his legs at the age of 38. His daughter, who showed enterprise by taking a newspaper-delivery route at the age of 10 and having 17 teenagers working for her a year later, left school at 15 without qualifications. “I had nothing except passion, determination and a can-do attitude,” she said in her maiden speech.
At 17, she met her future first husband, Michael Mone, and was pregnant a year later. When they married, she converted from Protestantism to his family’s Catholic faith, making her a rare Glaswegian who claimed to support both Celtic and Rangers, the city’s leading soccer teams, who have a strong sectarian rivalry. Stuck at home with little money, she invented qualifications to get a job at Labatt, the brewing company, and was head of marketing for Scotland within two years. “I worked my arse off,” she said in a 2010 interview. Then they laid her off.
Seeking a new venture, and still aged only 24, Mone read on holiday in Florida about a new silicone product that could be used in bras to lift breasts. With a grant from the Prince’s Trust, a charity set up by the future King, she won the European license to make bras with what were known in the business as “chicken fillets.” They became a huge success, but her true talent was for self-promotion. It was a skill that she shared with the man whose poster she had on the wall above her bed as a child: the press-loving Virgin Group founder and entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.
Ultimo, her rival to Wonderbra, was launched at London’s Selfridges in 1999. Within 24 hours, six weeks’ worth of stock had been sold, helped by Mone’s hiring of a group of actors to picket the department store pretending to be plastic surgeons who feared losing their livelihoods because of the bra. The stunt earned her acres of news coverage since British tabloid newspapers appreciate few things more than an excuse to print photographs of young women in their underwear. As Mone later said, she wouldn’t have had such attention or flak if she had invented a new kind of pen.
She grabbed the attention again in 2004 by replacing Penny Lancaster, wife of the veteran rock singer Rod Stewart, as the primary model for Ultimo with Rachel Hunter, Stewart’s former wife. This inevitably led to more tabloid headlines. Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror at the time, told Mone it was the best P.R. coup he had seen. Stewart, who had been her friend, called Mone a “manipulative cow” and said he hoped she’d “choke on her profits.”
Mone staged another public-relations coup when she launched Ultimo in America, at Saks Fifth Avenue. A New York Post article suggested that Julia Roberts’s eye-catching cleavage in the film Erin Brockovich had been due to Ultimo. “Like Erin, I had to fight and learn not to take no for an answer,” Mone has said. It was later revealed that Roberts had not in fact actually worn an Ultimo bra in the film, though Mone said she had sent its costume designer plenty of samples. The story had likely been based on a press release that said merely that Ultimo could give you breasts like Julia Roberts’s. Not quite a lie, then, but an enthusiastically polished ambiguity. Such is P.R.
Within 24 hours, six weeks’ worth of stock had been sold, helped by Mone’s hiring of a group of actors to picket the department store pretending to be plastic surgeons who had lost their livelihoods because of the bra.
As a child, Mone had adored the 80s television show Dynasty, and she was soon living the Joan Collins lifestyle. She liked to conduct interviews at the Dorchester in Mayfair, which she would later take as the territorial designation of her peerage. A profile in The Observer in 2010 described her as “magnificent, her blonde hair expertly bouffed, her fingers sparkling with diamonds, her cleavage dusted with glittery powder.” She ostentatiously waved a flute of Laurent-Perrier, saying that she had sent back the “cheap stuff” that room service had offered. Mone was then just one terminal letter away from having the most apposite of surnames.
Two years later, she divorced her husband, boasting that she had trashed his Porsche and put laxatives in his coffee in revenge for his having an affair. Her weight ballooned with depression and drink, then crashed, which she attributed to diet pills that she was marketing—she’d become, in her words, “quite frumpy.” The glamour was back when she was invited by Cameron to join the House of Lords in 2015. Her enthusiastic support for the prime minister’s successful campaign to stop Scotland from voting for independence from Britain the previous year was seen as a key reason for her elevation.
Busting Up
That maiden speech, accompanied by Whitney Houston, was a hit with many peers, a humble and apparently sincere debut as a politician, and a gentle rebuttal to all those Baroness Bra sneers. Lord Fowler, the former health secretary who spoke next in the debate, described her speech as “by any standards quite outstanding.”
Yet despite her promise in her closing remarks to play a “full and active role” in the House of Lords, she has turned out to be a reluctant participant, speaking in only three more debates since 2016 and submitting fewer than two dozen written questions. Lord Fowler, who became Speaker of the House of Lords later that year, may have been thinking of her when he complained in 2019 about “peers who are eager enough for the honor of the title but do precious little when they arrive.”
Instead, Mone seemed more interested in traveling the world and pursuing new business ventures with Barrowman, a self-described “Scots git” who had become hugely wealthy through marketing tax-avoidance schemes and owned several houses, five Ferraris, and a couple of super-yachts. They were introduced at 5 Hertford Street, the exclusive club in London, in 2016 and were soon photographed together everywhere from the slopes of Courchevel to the beaches of the Caribbean. It was reported that Mone went on 12 holidays in 2018 alone. Many were captured on her Instagram account. They were engaged at Christmas that year and married in 2020.
Business success was becoming harder to come by, however. In 2018, the pair launched a crypto-currency called Equi that was billed as “the bitcoin of Britain.” They aimed to raise $75 million; a team of 1,000 people using social media to promote it were able to raise only $2,000 over the six months following Equi’s launch. A year later, it was reported that work on a luxury development they were building in Dubai, said to be the first where all the apartments would be sold in Bitcoin, had stalled.
“I wake up every single morning with the fear of failure,” Mone told the Belfast Telegraph in 2015. During her first marriage, she would imagine her husband whispering in her ear: “You’re going to end up back in the ghetto where I rescued you from.” It is a fear that had driven her to great success, but even the most glittering cleavages can lose their luster.
Mone took a leave of absence from the House of Lords in December 2022 as she sought to clear her name, but she has faced calls not to return, from politicians in her own party as well as from Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition. She could still retain her title, however, since, unlike lower honors such as knighthoods, a peerage can only be removed by an act of Parliament.
On January 3, the Daily Mirror reported that the couple were having a $100 million fire sale of some of their assets, including a Caribbean villa that had been rented to Beyoncé, a private jet, and a yacht. A spokesman for the pair said that this focus on “every tiny detail” was a distraction from their PR strategy. Of more pressing concern for her is whether the National Crime Agency’s investigation, which is ongoing, leads to criminal charges. The agency raided two of the couple’s homes in 2022 and has interviewed the pair on suspicion of fraud and bribery. They deny the allegations.
During the investigation, Mone and Barrowman have chosen to attack and threaten via lawyers’ letters those who have dared to dig into her dealings. Yet you cannot have fame without attention, something she acknowledged in an interview with The Times of London when she became a peer. “I’m not going to sit here and say ‘poor me,’” she said. “I’ve courted the media for many years.” Now she seems to be Mone by name, moaner by nature.
Perhaps she needs to return to her favorite Whitney Houston song. “If I fail, if I succeed, at least I’ll live as I believe,” Houston sang in “The Greatest Love of All.” “No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.”
Patrick Kidd is the editor of the Diary column at The Times of London. A collection of work from his time as a parliamentary sketch writer, The Weak Are a Long Time in Politics, was published in 2019