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Scotsman
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
How we all played a part in the creation of Michelle Mone
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Sometimes the past comes back to haunt you. I was about 20 minutes into watching the BBC's new Michelle Mone documentary when a familiar figure appeared on screen. More than 20 years ago I presented a series called 'The Talent' focussing on prominent Scots. Each episode followed an individual at home and work to try to understand the secrets of their success. The cast included chef Gordon Ramsay, actor Brian Cox, yachtswoman Shirley Robertson and a young entrepreneur from the East End of Glasgow. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This was still the early stage of the Michelle Mone story. The business was growing fast but had not yet become international or controversial. Michelle Mone shows off her OBE, awarded at an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 2010 (Picture: Dominic Lipinski/WPA pool) | Getty Images Button to summon butler I remember filming in cramped offices in a back street in Glasgow where boxes of Ultimo bras were piled high. Michelle was friendly and upbeat. Wearing her own product, she prodded her chest. 'It feels just like breast tissue. Have a feel if you want?' I declined the invitation. We were keen to film with her at home, to try to understand how she balanced raising a young family and working alongside her husband in the business, but that territory was firmly off limits. Instead we were offered the chance to catch up at Claridge's in London where Michelle was picking up an award. In her suite upstairs, she talked about her pride in moving from humble beginnings in Dennistoun to the plush surroundings of a luxury West End hotel. I recall her excitedly showing me a button on the wall that allowed her to summon her own butler. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Back then, there were no difficult questions to ask. The story was what it was. More than 20 years on, things are very different. The bra business has been sold, the old husband has been replaced by a billionaire and Michelle from Dennistoun is now Lady Mone of Mayfair. PPE Medpro, a company she is linked to, is also the subject of a National Crime Agency investigation over the supply of PPE during the pandemic. She denies doing anything wrong. A girl-power narrative Hindsight's a wonderful thing but there is no doubt Michelle Mone's rise to fame should have had tougher scrutiny at the time, but her apparent success was taken at face value. I suspect the problem was that many people wanted to believe the story. At a time when business was still driven by middle-aged men in suits, here was a young woman who possessed few qualifications but did have a seemingly endless supply of drive, determination and ambition. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad She wanted to build a good life for herself and her family and to be the woman to make a better product for women than the one currently being designed and marketed by men. What's not to like about that? She also emerged at a time when Page 3 was in decline and newspapers were under pressure to reduce their use of salacious photos of the female form. Then along came a female entrepreneur actively pushing images of women in underwear as part of a girl-power narrative. The whole thing was a gift.
Daily Mail
29-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Penny Lancaster swipes 'karma gets you' about new doc on the 'fall' of Michelle Mone - two decades after their dispute
Penny Lancaster swiped 'karma gets you' about the new BBC documentary on lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone. Thursday's instalment of ITV 's Loose Women saw panellists Kaye Adams, Nadia Sawalha, Penny Lancaster and Brenda Edwards sit down and discuss the day's hot topics. During the show, Kaye brought up the BBC One documentary titled The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone. The two-part series delves into the story of the high-profile businesswoman who founded lingerie brand Ultimo. Her husband's, Doug Barrowman, company PPE Medpro has come under scrutiny after it was awarded contracts worth more than £200million to provide equipment during the pandemic upon Baroness Mone's recommendation. Any wrongdoing has been denied. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Penny Lancaster swiped 'karma gets you' about the new BBC documentary on lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone as she appeared on Thursday's instalment of Loose Women Penny, who married Rod Stewart in 2007, modelled lingerie for Michelle's underwear company, Ultimo in 2002 but was axed after two years (Michelle pictured in 2019) Penny, who married Rod Stewart in 2007, modelled lingerie for Michelle's underwear company, Ultimo in 2002 but was axed after two years, the Express reported. 'So she asked you to come and model her lingerie very early on didn't she?' Kaye asked. 'And then she, without telling you, replaced you with Rachel Hunter who was Rod's wife,' Kaye added. Penny silently nodded and admitted: 'I wasn't informed of the documentary, someone told me it was coming out. 'It didn't surprise me because karma gets you, I guess, but as far as any details I'm prepared to talk about. 'It would have to be the right time and place for that and I've put it behind me for the time being.' Kaye probed, 'I get that and I totally respect it, but it must have been a difficult period of your life I presume?' Penny nodded and agreed, 'It was a very difficult time, yeah, but you know.' During the discussion, Kaye read out a quote from Rod Stewart that he said 20 years ago about the lingerie situation. She read: 'Michelle really needs to be put in her place and if this is revenge, so be it, I'm sticking up for my old lady. 'Penny doesn't want to admit it but she has been hurt by all of this, she's been in tears, Penny is a beautiful girl, I love her and I hate to see her hurt in this way. 'She did nothing wrong, put yourself in her place. How do you think she feels to be told she's being replaced by Rod's ex-wife.' Penny explained that she prefers to 'rise above it and be the better one'. A spokesperson for Michelle Mone told MailOnline: 'I am deeply disappointed by the BBC's decision to broadcast a programme using misleading and one-sided accounts of my life and career. 'I hope that the programme does not discourage young women from pursuing their ambitions. The allegations relating to my husband's company, PPE Medpro, will be defended in court.'
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone review – a thrilling dive into a life of money, models and political scandal
In the 1990s, Michelle Mone saw an opportunity. She was in her late 20s, so the story goes, on holiday with her young family in Florida, and flicking through a magazine, when she saw an advert for the 'Monique': a breast-enhancing bra insert, or what we'd now call a chicken fillet. It sounds like the unlikely start of a business empire, but what began there would ultimately grow into Ultimo, the lingerie brand established by Mone and her first husband, Michael. For a time it looked set to compete with the big guns of the underwear world. The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone is a gripping two-part documentary, which first examines how Mone rose to fame and entered the heart of the political establishment, before moving on to look at her more recent nosedive into scandal and a different sort of notoriety, in next week's episode. As Mone built her brand of bras out of a small warehouse in Glasgow, she also constructed her own legend. This is a tale of tits and assets, then, but in the way that all great BBC documentaries can be, it is also a story of culture and politics, and a broad portrait of an era, as well as a focused portrait of a person. Mone found success and fame during the late 90s, at the tail-end of Cool Britannia, in a decade still flashing the Vs of girl power, its cleavage squeezed in, up and out. By all accounts, Mone knew how to spin a yarn and put that talent to good use. Ultimo was pitched as the plucky Scottish David to the big lingerie Goliaths such as Gossard and Playtex. The documentary reports she liked to claim that Julia Roberts wore an Ultimo bra in the movie Erin Brockovich, a tale which passed into myth. The costume designer on the film denied this. Publicly, she was seen as a tough, tenacious girl-done-good in the largely male world of big business. On the surface, this is a retelling of the Michelle Mone fairytale. She grew up in poverty in Glasgow's East End and left school at 15 with no qualifications. She grafted her way into the business world, working her way up from selling fruit and veg, via a modelling career and eventually landing on lingerie. The documentary is detailed enough that it tracks down a childhood friend and a modelling colleague, as well as talking to former contacts and advisers. It even interviews Selfridges' lingerie buyer in the late 90s, Virginia Marcolin, who gives a convincing account of the persistent woman she met back then, who was determined to get her product into one of the biggest department stores in the UK. You can see what people saw in Mone. Quite literally, in fact. There is lots of footage from that time, as she was keen on having cameras around to document her rags to riches story, and to keep the brand, and herself, in the public eye. There are ample clips of her launching the Ultimo bra, trying to expand into Australia, and her then-new house, in which her first marriage was beginning to show signs of trouble. She talked about that, too, on TV, on chatshows, on panels. She became a celebrity, and in Ultimo's careful choice of models, sometimes famous themselves, the brand fed the celebrity machine. It was a successful ecosystem of notoriety, but whether it was as successful a business as it appeared is one of the many questions asked here. In some ways, this is a parable of fame. Mone courted it and won it, but eventually learned that once you turn on the faucet of public attention, trying to turn it off again is a sisyphean task. Even as the Ultimo launch succeeds, there are hints of choppy waters under the smooth public image. The documentary makers question Mone's relationship with the truth and say that of the more than 50 people who worked for Ultimo they approached, none would speak on camera, and those who did, gave less-than-flattering accounts of the workplace and asked for their identities to be hidden. Now, Mone is perhaps less famous for her business acumen than she is for her involvement in the lucrative 'VIP lane' PPE scandal with her husband, Doug Barrowman, which was brought to public attention by a Guardian investigation (both deny any wrongdoing and have never been arrested or charged, though do stay for the legal notes at the end of episode two, which are unusually entertaining). It builds towards their notorious interview with Laura Kuenssberg, at the end of 2023, and the second episode is a great success as an investigative thriller, carefully laying out the claims that have been made against them. But this also works as a cultural artefact, and surely Mone, of all people, would appreciate that the story makes very good television. The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.
Daily Mirror
28-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mirror
Michelle Mone's spectacular fall from bra baroness to most hated businesswoman
Baroness Mone of Mayfair has an inspiring rags to riches story, but the self-made millionaire was also the architect of her own demise which left her reputation in tatters and her empire in ruins She was once hailed as a working-class heroine who built an underwear empire from scratch to become a self-made millionaire. But how times have changed. Once hailed as Britain's most successful businesswoman, whose rags-to-riches story even won her a peerage, she is now a pariah who is placed among the ranks of the country's most hated women. With her reputation in tatters, Baroness Mone of Mayfair has lost the Tory whip, is on leave from the House of Lords, and a business connected to her is under investigation by the National Crime Agency. Once the subject of gushing TV reports and newspaper stories, she is now the subject of a BBC documentary on her downfall, which concluded tonight. So, where did it all go wrong? It's a dizzying fall from grace for the self-styled entrepreneur from Glasgow's East End who smashed every glass ceiling and rose to be worth an estimated £20 million. Many, however, would say her demise is as much her own making as her success was. Born in 1971 and raised in a two-bedroom flat, Mone left school at 15 to support her family. She worked as a model and in marketing before launching what would become her multimillion-pound lingerie brand: Ultimo. She and husband Michael remortgaged their house and went £70,000 into debt to develop the idea to create a cleavage-enhancing bra that was both sexy and supportive - but it paid off. The bra captured the imagination of shoppers and the headlines alike. By the early 2000s, Mone was a regular fixture on TV and in newspapers. Jack Irvine, former newspaper editor, remembers how keen she was for the limelight. 'She had two driving forces. One was to be very rich and one was to be very famous,' he said. Media savvy Mone knew how to create headlines. One story was that her bra was used in the film Erin Brockovich, and that she had given star Julia Roberts cleavage. Another newspaper editor, Magnus Llewellin, said: "If you actually bother to check, somebody involved in the actual making of the film came out and said an Ultimo bra wasn't used in the production." But behind the scenes, cracks were already showing. Reports of toxic working environments and public spats with former staff began to surface, and there were a number of employment tribunals, including one high-profile case in which a member of staff found a recording device in his office. Ultimo had also been struggling and in 2014, Mone sold her majority stake and severed ties with the company altogether two years later. Then came the move into politics. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron made her his government's "entrepreneurship tsar' and weeks later it was announced she was to become a Conservative peer, as Baroness Mone of Mayfair - a title as glossy as her public image. The Covid pandemic, however, would embroil her in a scandal from which she couldn't redeem herself. As PPE contracts were handed out by the Tory government, Baroness Mone was revealed to have secretly lobbied ministers on behalf of PPE Medpro, a company that made it onto the VIP list and secured over £200 million in government contracts to supply medical equipment. Initially, Mone denied any involvement. But in late 2022, the truth began to unravel. The BBC and The Guardian reported she and her children had secretly received tens of millions in profits from the PPE contracts. The House of Lords website was quietly scrubbed of her name, and Mone took a leave of absence from her role. Then, in 2023, came the dramatic confession. In a jaw-dropping TV interview, she admitted she had lied about her role in PPE Medpro, claiming she did it to protect her family. 'I made a mistake,' she said. 'I was just trying to help during a crisis.' But by then, public opinion had turned. The woman once seen as a self-made success story was now viewed as emblematic of cronyism and privilege at its most shameless. While legal proceedings are ongoing and no charges have been brought, the damage to Mone's public image is hard to undo. She now faces a civil recovery claim from the government, and questions remain over how deeply she and her husband were involved. Today, Michelle Mone is a peer in name only - absent from the red benches and persona non grata among her former allies. Her empire is gone, her honour is in question, and - like her famous lingerie - there's little support left.
Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone, review: a portrait of how far shamelessness will get you
Depending on your point of view, The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone (BBC Two) was either delicious schadenfreude or a vicious character assassination. Erica Jenkin's two-part documentary series was clear on where it fell on the lingerie entrepreneur turned Conservative peer – that Baroness Mone of Mayfair is a chancer, a Wonderbra Walter Mitty, a vainglorious cad whose success and morality is like the product that made her famous, all front. Yet Mone's supporters – and following the PPE scandal there can't be too many of those left – would suggest that the programme exaggerates its own assets. The first episode does a nice job of explaining where Mone came from – the girl from the unforgiving East End of Glasgow, forced to earn money for her family from the age of 10, who dropped out of school at 15 and was written off by her teachers. It is impossible not to be impressed by Mone, in her 20s and heavily pregnant with her third child, turning up at Selfridges in London and demanding that they stock her underwear. She'd convinced her husband to remortgage. 'I was either going to lose my house today or keep my house,' she said at the time. It was a shot at the moon. Nobody could fail to warm to this plain-speaking young woman from Glasgow, grasping the lads' mag/girl power energy of the 1990s and wedging herself into a male-dominated industry. A knack for PR – learnt from her days as a model and ring girl – helped to supply a steady stream of publicity for her company, Ultimo, and its enhancing bras. Yet the film dropped tantalising breadcrumbs – the brusque way she dealt with employees, the over-eagerness for publicity, the do-anything attitude. Perhaps too much was made of the Erin Brockovich lie – Mone repeatedly and falsely claimed that Julia Roberts's eye-catching cleavage in the Oscar-winning movie was thanks to Ultimo – but it showed Mone's devil's-bargain with the truth. Whatever it took, she'd succeed. Just watching Mone's physical appearance change as she grew more successful is fascinating – with every passing year, she appears more lacquered. By the second episode and Mone's PPE untruths – along with her husband Doug Barrowman, that she had nothing to do with Medpro PPE Ltd – it's clear the series has her pegged as a rogue. On this evidence, who could argue? Some of the accusations may not be slam-dunks, but they paint an unpleasant picture – the employment tribunals, the aggressive hounding of any journalist who asked questions, the obfuscation around PPE and the 'VIP lanes'. Others, however, feel mean-spirited. So what if she gilded her youthful admiration of Steve Wozniak when the Apple founder joined her cryptocurrency venture? The programme, smirking, points out that her autobiography never mentions Wozniak, but does mention Sylvester Stallone four times. Most damning, however, is the brouhaha that occurred when David Cameron made Mone a peer. 'She is a small-time businesswoman with a PR exposure far in excess of any actual success,' said businessman Douglas Anderson. Ultimo's accounts around 2011-2012, when Mone was constantly touted in the media as 'Britain's most successful female entrepreneur', back up Anderson's statement. Her success, if not a mirage, was vastly inflated. 'She is completely shameless,' said another contributor, 'and if you have no shame, you can get quite far.' The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone is available now on BBC iPlayer and airs on BBC Two at 9pm on Wednesday 28 May
