Michelle Mone’s spectacular fall from celebrated 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.

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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.