28-05-2025
The revealing inside account of how Baroness Bra came undone: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone
The Rise And Fall Of Michelle Mone (BBC2)
Baroness Mone scares people. Nobody says as much, no one turns white at the mention of her name and scuttles away from the camera. But they don't have to.
Michelle Mone is known as Baroness Bra, after building a lingerie business whose biggest product was a brassiere filled with bust-enhancing gel. She was elevated to the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2015.
But it was telling that, during the two-part investigation into her life, The Rise And Fall Of Michelle Mone, not one friend or family member appears in her defence. Neither her current husband Doug Barrowman nor her former husband Michael Mone agrees to be interviewed.
Even former employees insist on anonymity, with their voices disguised. The only person willing to speak up for her Ladyship was her American therapist, Dr Ted Anders, a smooth-skinned man with more teeth than is strictly necessary.
Director Erika Jenkin's documentary builds to an infamous confrontation with the BBC 's Laura Kuenssberg, with the Glasgow businesswoman squirming under questions about the PPE scandal — one stone-faced Scottish blonde charging another with helping herself to an inordinately large slice of the public finances.
Barrowman's company PPE Medpro, which was awarded contracts for medical equipment worth £200 million during the pandemic, has been accused of providing unusable materials, with his wife Baroness Mone and her children standing to benefit from a £29m trust fund.
Despite this, the two-hour programme — both episodes now available on iPlayer — is not an all-out hatchet job.
It stops well short of accusing her of any crime (unless you count 'lying to the media', which Baroness Mone reminds us is perfectly fine).
But she comes across as a thoroughly unpleasant woman: dishonest, bullying, self-obsessed, manipulative and lacking much talent for either business or innovation.
In real life, she might be a lot worse than that, of course. Her former PR man Jack Irvine accuses her of 'massive deluded self-confidence,' and says: 'She had a strange relationship with the truth. It's difficult to work with people who can't be honest.'
That said, I can't help feeling she draws a lot of criticism for a business style that would be more admired if she was a man, particularly a man who went to public school.
Her ambition as a teenager, when she worked as a bikini model, was to be 'the female Richard Branson' — and it's Branson's brash self-confidence that makes him both charismatic and unsinkable.
Mone is roundly criticised for spreading stories that Julia Roberts wore her Ultimo bras, in the film Erin Brockovich. The claim was as fake as an Ultimo cleavage, but so what?
There's a fair bit of snobbery and chauvinism among her critics. But she invites this, by constantly harping on her upbringing in 'Glasgow's East End' and by posing in her own products. All very tacky.
