Debt, lies and videotape: The rise and fall of Michelle Mone

A new two-part BBC documentary lifts the lid on a failed business and its fallen empress, Michelle Mone.

It reveals the toxic experiences of those who knew the entrepreneur, worked with her and called her a friend.

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The rise

Her story should have been a rags-to-riches fairy tale where everyone lives happily ever after.

For Michelle Mone, once lauded as the successful businesswoman every girl should aspire to be, the fairy tale has soured dramatically.

She might still have her prince in billionaire Doug Barrowman and their impressive Isle of Man castle, while a National Crime Agency investigation rages over controversial PPE deals.

But as someone who lives and breathes public adulation, according to her personal guru Dr Ted Anders, what will hurt the most is her plummeting popularity over claims she cashed in on the pandemic while hundreds of thousands of people died.

© BBC/Rogan Productions/Wattie Cheung

In a searing new documentary, The Rise And Fall of Michelle Mone, the PPE Medpro deal was the one business transaction Baroness Mone was not falling over herself to boast about.

Keir Starmer questioned the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over a controversial VIP lane which allowed some to make a fortune providing PPE during the Covid pandemic: “How did Baroness Mone end up with nearly £30 million of taxpayers money in her bank account?”

How indeed?

This two-part film examines in excoriating detail just how a working-class girl from Dennistoun in Glasgow, who left school without any qualifications, clawed her way up the ladder to become Baroness Mayfair.

For the first time, her closest advisers reveal what they really thought of Mone, and how she managed to fool so many people into believing she was heading one of the most successful multi-million-pound lingerie companies while bra firm MJM was haemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Appearing on one programme which described her firm being worth £43 million, Mone corrected them, so they upped it to £55m.

Asked to describe Mone in three words, Financial Times journalist Jemima Kelly was brutal, choosing “self-promoting grifter.”

Still, as Mone herself puts it, she has had to be tough.

She said: “My dad mixed ink in a printer’s shop. My mum was a home help. My grandfather was a roofer. None of them ever had their own business. Basically, I was determined to make something of myself.”

Mone reveals that when she was 15, her dad was “confined to a wheelchair”.

She said: “My mum and dad didn’t have much money. I’ve always worked. Since I was 10 years old, I was always earning money. Richard Branson was my hero, so I thought I’m going to be the female Richard Branson. I’m going to show people that someone from the East End who hasn’t done well at school can still make something of their lives.”

She might not have had exam results, but Michelle used what talents she did have as one of the glamour girls who walked around boxing rings announcing the rounds, later becoming a fashion model

Mone said: “I thought, well, I’m five foot 10. I’m no Cindy Crawford or Kate Moss, so my first job was being a fashion model.” She later told pals of her early beginnings “you have to do what you have to do”.

It was not long before 18-year-old Michelle met and married first husband Michael Mone who worked in pensions. She became a mum at 20.

On a family holiday to America a few years later, Michelle hit on the idea that was to change their lives – gel-filled pouches to discreetly place inside women’s bras. They sold like hotcakes.

Persuading her husband to invest, Michelle spent two years designing her own bra with gel pouches already sewn inside. The Ultimo was born.

With one killer idea, a brass neck and buckets of chutzpah, Mone was soon being lauded as one of the country’s most successful millionaire entrepreneurs as she went up against the giants of the lingerie industry.

In 1999, heavily pregnant with her third child and touting her signature bras which gave flat chested women an out-front advantage, Michelle took herself to London and the fragrant world of Selfridges where she managed to charm the buyers to take a chance on her.

Mone said: “I was £70,000 in credit card debt and I was remortgaging the house. I realised if I didn’t do it then, I was never going to do it. I think when you grow up with nothing, I thought well, I’ve got nothing anyway.”

© Anita Russo/Shutterstock

Selfridges buyer Virginia Marcolin said: “All salespeople can be pushy, but Michelle just slammed it in your face. A lot of people have vision, but not everyone has the drive to make that vision happen. I can’t say I was surprised at her success. She really knew how to take opportunities and make them work for her.”

Getting her product into Selfridges up against the world’s biggest brands set Michelle on the road to unimaginable success while ultimately pulling the couple apart.

Goddard and Wonderbra had marketing budgets of millions and their 1994 “Hello Boys” campaign with supermodel Eva Herzigova is still rated as one of the most iconic ads of all time.

Mone had product but no advertising budget. She staged a pavement catwalk, parading her shivering models outside Selfridges. Mone had identical twins, one wearing a cleavage enhancing Ultimo the other wearing a rather flatter glamour bra, passers-by were asked to compare the two. Selfridges sold a month’s supply in just one day.

Michelle announced her next step would be a whole new range of Ultimo items, sports bras, maternity bras, bigger bras with gel and without gel, Ultimo everything!

As her former public relations man Jack Irvine admitted: “Michelle had two driving forces, one was to be very rich the other was to be very famous.”

Michelle says: “What keeps my feet firmly on the ground is that I have at the back of my mind that I could lose it all tomorrow, and you know, you should never get too big for your boots.”

Wise words. However, sudden success heaped stress on the fledging business, leading to a slew of industrial tribunals and staff leaving amid claims of offices being bugged, bullying and an unhappy working environment.

The documentary team contacted and interviewed more than 50 of Mone’s ex-employees. None would appear on camera. One said off screen: “It was a ******* nightmare … we only got 10 minutes for lunch.” Another said: “People were wary of Michelle because she could turn so quickly.”

The cameras pan to Michelle bursting into the staff room while two hapless workers try and eat their lunch as she demands they get back to work. As cameras tried to capture the secret of the firm’s remarkable success, Michael looked increasingly uncomfortable in front of the lens. Meanwhile, Michelle blossomed under the gaze of public attention. The couple were captured bickering as success and fame took its toll on their relationship.

Described in the documentary by Michelle as an “American nutter”, business and relationship guru Dr Ted Anders, who was brought in to help the firm flourish, warned “success was stretching the business and its employees”.

Anders said: “One of the first things I saw in the middle of one of the workrooms was a huge stack of notebooks of all the press cuttings Michelle had generated. It was just remarkable. I think the press became a place of validation, as a professional, as an adult.”

Mone used friendships to keep media interest alive, providing newspapers with photographs and insights into her now-glamorous world. In one coup, Mone signed Rod Stewart’s wife Penny Lancaster as the face of Ultimo.

Flaunting pictures of the two couples on a night out, she revelled at how close they had become. But, almost as if she could not help hurting her new friend, Michelle controversially signed Rod’s ex, supermodel Rachel Hunter, dumping Penny after just two years.

Compounding it, Mone compared Rachel to footballing superhero Ronaldo and Penny to a Falkirk FC player, later slyly saying she “didn’t know anything about football”.

Rod Stewart flew to tearful Penny’s defence, calling Mone a “manipulative cow” and “a nasty piece of work” and “I hope she chokes on her profits” in a headline-grabbing spat that became known as the “Bra Wars.”

The documentary reveals many lies behind the apparent stratospheric success of Mone’s bras, including her untrue claim that Oscar-winning actress Julia Roberts wore an Ultimo to improve her cleavage in the film Erin Brockovich. And while television loved describing her as the successful entrepreneur behind a multi-million-pound firm, in reality MJM was losing almost £500,000 a year by 2012.

PR man Irvine reveals how he stopped working with her because he couldn’t trust her to tell him the truth.

He said: “Michelle had a very strange relationship with the truth. I told her I can’t work with clients who won’t tell the truth to me, so I’m out!”

The fall

MJM’s failings did not stop Michelle Mone being touted as a success, even bringing her to the attention of Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne.

Standing in the House of Lords draped in red velvet edged with ermine, pledging her allegiance should have been the crowning glory of Mone’s fairytale.

Imagine what a role model she would have been to all the aspiring young women from working-class backgrounds. She loved to tell those in awe of her success: “No matter where you are from … look at me … you can do it!”

Instead, as her former PR man Jack Irvine archly points out, by the time she became Baroness Mone in October 2015, Michelle had “erased” Dennistoun, choosing to replace it with Mayfair as more befitting the now upwardly mobile newest member of the Lords.

Irvine said: “Most Scottish peers will choose a kind of Scottish tone or a name. But no, it had to be Mayfair for her.

“She would have endeared herself to the Scottish public if she’d said she would like to be known as Baroness Mone of Denniston. They would have loved that back home. But no, she’d moved on from there.”

© BBC/Rogan Production

Irvine bluntly told Conservative friends that Cameron and Osborne had “lost the plot”.

The appointment incensed business titan Douglas Anderson, MD of the Gap Group, which has annual revenues of £150 million.

He tells the documentary he wrote to the Prime Minister telling him what a mistake he had made appointing Mone.

Anderson says: “In my opinion, business is 95% graft, 4% luck and 1% glamour, and I think she should stick to the glamour end of it.

“I’m a proud Scottish person and I don’t like anybody (but especially Scottish people) being less than truthful. If the only thing she achieved was self-publicity, I don’t think that’s a very good reason to put you in the House of Lords.

“If you follow that logic, the House of Lords will be full of influencers in the next 10 years!”

By that time, Mone had also moved on from her broken marriage to romancing billionaire financier Doug Barrowman, who she later married.

Michelle’s social media posts reveal opulent surroundings, garnering unkind comments.

The documentary shows Barrowman boasting about his “five homes around the world” and his gigantic yacht, saying: “Not bad for a rough-arsed Scots git from Glasgow!”

Barrowman has had his own controversial business dealings.

The Knox Group at one time supported schemes which were later found to be illegal by the tax man, resulting in HMRC recouping fortunes from those who used them.

And in an astonishing interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Mone and Barrowman describe themselves as “scapegoats” over the PPE scandal, vowing to clear themselves.

Mone insists telling journalists “lies” over hard questions on who benefitted from the controversial PPE Medpro deal was “not a crime”.

That remains to be seen.

Mone said of the documentary: “I am deeply disappointed by the BBC’s decision to broadcast a programme which appears to be relying on misleading and one-sided accounts of my life and career.

“I hope that the programme does not discourage young women from pursuing their ambitions. Without having seen the programme or the allegations in their full context, it would not be fair to respond to them individually.

“The allegations relating to my husband’s company, PPE Medpro, will be defended in court.”

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The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone starts tomorrow, May 26 on BBC Scotland, 10pm and Wednesday, May 28 BBC Two, 9pm. Both episodes are available on iPlayer from 6am tomorrow.