The moment she strode into the bar at the Dorchester, I knew it was going to be a great — great — interview. The long, tumbling margarine curls, the dark blue claws, the quavering, edgy sense that she might say or do something completely wild. At one point, after she had cried loudly over her divorce from her husband, she turned beseechingly to me to wail: “Why did I want to be Michelle Mone?”
Why did she want to “start all these businesses”? “Why can I never be satisfied with what I’ve got?”
Why couldn’t she simply be happy, when she’d lost six stone and invented “the frontless bra, the backless bra, the frontless, backless bra”, she moaned.
A random man came up to tell her she was beautiful and that “if you have any marriage hiccups, I’m always here”. But it didn’t seem to help. Later, almost absent-mindedly, she sat in his lap and the lap of his friend and accepted kisses from both of them, before taking me to see her new collection, where she singled out a long, lacy red sex sheath at the entrance to the Dorchester’s Crystal Room and whispered, “I’ve got no one to wear this for any more.”
I remember thinking: are you for real? She was the most chaotic person I’d ever met.
You occasionally come across people like Mone in interviews. They’re narcissists, obviously — ambitious, flinty, flamboyant. But there’s something else: a nasty whiff, a flicker of anger, a sense that this person might lamp you or knife your Porsche or threaten to “punch in” a group of models. A former member of staff said that while she was working for her, Mone had rounded on some girls who refused to wear thongs. As she said to me: “I am very, very demanding. I am a nightmare. I’ve got OCD. Everything has to be perfect.” The madness, the crystals, the cowering staff — for some reason politicians dig this. Is it because they feel they, by contrast, are poor and therefore boring? But it isn’t long before a huge scandal engulfs them.
If, like me, you are inclined to glaze over at the words “PPE” and “Covid contracts”, you may not have read the granular detail of the story about Mone that appeared in the papers last week. But it is shocking. With the help of her husband, an entrepreneur called Doug, Mone is said to have received £29 million from the profits of an opaque PPE business. To give you an idea of the scale of this — or to put it in blunt terms of Tory greed — Geoffrey Robinson could buy Peter Mandelson at least 77 houses with that amount of money. It is a lot of pasties.
The couple have always insisted they had nothing to do with the company PPE Medpro, but documents from their bank revealed last week that £65 million of profits from the company went to Doug, who then transferred a slice to a secret offshore account for Mone and her children.
The reason they’ve always said they had nothing to do with it is that Mone used her position in the House of Lords to help the company get the contract, telling Michael Gove, among other ministers, to consider it for the VIP fast track in May 2020 and that “my team in Hong Kong” could help. Never mind that PPE Medpro didn’t even exist until five days after she spoke to the government; never mind that it had no accounts, no profile, nothing to show for its expertise but the contact for a factory in China. She took advantage of the chaos of Covid and it ended up with £200 million.
She has continued to deny any connection, even though her actual mansion on the Isle of Man is linked to the PPE business and there are WhatsApp messages to its staff in which “Lady Michelle” advised them about making the gowns from a private jet. I don’t know what was wrong with the surgical garments it produced — too many rhinestones, maybe — but they were unusable, and now the government is seeking to recoup money from the company. She is now the subject of a formal inquiry by the Lords for not declaring her interest in the firm and lobbying for it. The police are also said to be investigating.
What is a woman like this doing in the House of Lords? She makes every single other grasping, lazy peer scoffing its cheap foie gras look like an angel. How did it happen? If I could see, within minutes, that she was trouble, why couldn’t David Cameron?
What was it about this weeping tower of crystal-encrusted Glaswegian cray that made him think in 2015, oooh, let’s put it in the House of Lords? Vanity, I suppose — and his desperation to solve his “woman problem”. Which extended, I think, to underestimating this knicker totty from Glasgow. He probably thought she was too thick or too sexy to do any real damage — people make the same mistake with Angela Rayner.
Mone is typical of a new breed of Tory “lifestyle peers” who have flooded the Upper House in the past decade. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they have done, as long as they’re loaded and serve some minion-like purpose to whichever bored Tory prime minister has put them there. Offering up private jets or hotels, or simply a few vague lols — Mone was basically told to cover up her breasts by the Lords.
Along with Mone there is, of course, Evgeny Lebedev, who is so dedicated to democracy he has not even picked up the briefcase containing his letters patent — the official document granting his peerage — from the Lords cloakroom.
If you look at Mone’s track record now, it is appalling. It is not just the PPE contracts; it is the allegedly racist message she sent in 2019, in which she told a man of Indian heritage he was “a waste of a white man’s skin”. Then there was the cryptocurrency business she set up, intending to raise £80 million — it scraped together £1,600 after hiring 1,000 people to promote it. She described herself, comically, as “one of the biggest experts in cryptocurrency and blockchain”. There was the Dubai development that cratered. And let’s never forget the reason “I’m a Baroness for life” left Labour in the first place: greed, obviously — she didn’t like its 50 per cent top rate of tax.
How does someone like this end up in power? A measly criminal inquiry does not seem enough.
Yes, The Times, how does someone like this end up in a position of power?
What I would like to know is what happened to the guy who died on her boat, details are sketchy, from what I can tell there was a row with another multi-millionaire on another yacht, she was accused of being racist, the two yachts banged into eachother and somehow this guy died and there doesn’t seem to have been any investigation at all, I mean did she literally just rock up in Southampton & hand over his body to the manager of the marina with a quick… ‘oh yeah, this guy died at some point, can you sort it out for me?’
An ang**el** that peddles weight loss pills and fake tan? A woman who’s company paid substantial sums of money into a controversial tax avoidance scheme, someone who even George Osborne called “morally repugnant”? This is without even mentioning the corrupt PPE scandal where she advised the government to give PPE Medpro £200m in government contracts whilst she received £29 million in payments from PPE Medpro to a secret offshore HSBC trust fund.
Sorry, but she isn’t an ang**el**. She is a corrupt, abhorrent and utterly repugnant human being. For once I agree on the Times’s editorial but I guess the Telegraph will lord her imaginary virtue in their Tory world.
Edit. There, I fixed it!!
One of the points of democracy, good societal governance and mature politics is to keep people of this type away from power.
In human social groups the greedy, the amoral and the narcissistic can rise to the top and damage the people they took advantage of to get there.
Her rise is indicative of a failed political system where corruption is entrenched.
You can take the girl out of the east end of Glasgow but never the east end of Glasgow from the girl.
So basically this corrupt piece of shit got into power and used her links to force Her Majesty’s government to sign a contract to produce substandard PPE which is worse than an apron stitched together by brain dead personnel.
So basically she ~~used~~ climbed up in marketing ladder and sold fake pills and other nonsense to become rich. Tories, with their standards firmly set on how much money they make admitted her as a Peer. What a cunning stunt!
Lol nothing will happen, the rich parasites will keep getting away with it while they set us on eachother, set the ignorant masses on the immigrants who dare come here, the teachers, nurses and so on who dare strike for a better life while there bosses get rich off their hard work and hide the money via virgin islands, while a 3rd of our paycheck goes on taxes! sickening! I honestly wish it was easier for me to leave this godforesaken mess of a country, so corrupt. What is the point of trying to life a good honest life when all around you criminals get rewarded for making our lives worse?
Camilla Long comes across as a cunt and a hack with it.
A waste of an article which should have been a slam dunk on Mone.
> What was it about this weeping tower of crystal-encrusted Glaswegian cray that made him think in 2015, oooh, let’s put it in the House of Lords?
Because she’d been a prominent fundraiser and donor for *Better Together*. It’s always favours and rewards. Always.
>What was it about this weeping tower of crystal-encrusted Glaswegian cray that made him think in 2015, oooh, let’s put it in the House of Lords?
Worthy of r/rareinsults I think…
What an absolute thundercunt! This country is beyond fucked.
So which peers in particular are the grasping lazy ones?
Read her/husbands wiki pages. They are scum and grifters who scammed their way to wealth and positions
“He probably thought she was too thick or too sexy to do any real damage — people make the same mistake with Angela Rayner.”
That is a wholly unnecessarily nasty dig at Rayner; who is no comparison to this tory lowlife. The implicit assumption of this lazy cretin of a journalist is that working class women in positions of power are all the same.
so how much this sweetheart “baroness” spent to became peer for life?
what a lovely example to all that in this boutique designed circus by the the top the road to success is honesty and hard work
Thank good for the unelected house of lords so we can have finger appointed people like her keeping politicians accountable
They say you need for graft, but they show you need more grift.
I was with this article until she made the cheap shots about her being Glaswegian. It smacked of the same old nastiness about Scotland and the North and old classisms that just didn’t sit well with me, and usually it doesn’t tend to bother me. Mone is a repugnant horror of a woman that should be in jail, but her being from here has nothing to do with that.
Edit: typos
Canola long is horrible. Hates every outside of her narrow Tory bubble. Poor people are stupid, all tv is woke etc. she’s a waste of space posing as a journalist.
Comments turned off on this article just like they are for all the FT coverage too.
20 comments
[Accessible link for text](https://archive.ph/WKjfd).
The moment she strode into the bar at the Dorchester, I knew it was going to be a great — great — interview. The long, tumbling margarine curls, the dark blue claws, the quavering, edgy sense that she might say or do something completely wild. At one point, after she had cried loudly over her divorce from her husband, she turned beseechingly to me to wail: “Why did I want to be Michelle Mone?”
Why did she want to “start all these businesses”? “Why can I never be satisfied with what I’ve got?”
Why couldn’t she simply be happy, when she’d lost six stone and invented “the frontless bra, the backless bra, the frontless, backless bra”, she moaned.
A random man came up to tell her she was beautiful and that “if you have any marriage hiccups, I’m always here”. But it didn’t seem to help. Later, almost absent-mindedly, she sat in his lap and the lap of his friend and accepted kisses from both of them, before taking me to see her new collection, where she singled out a long, lacy red sex sheath at the entrance to the Dorchester’s Crystal Room and whispered, “I’ve got no one to wear this for any more.”
I remember thinking: are you for real? She was the most chaotic person I’d ever met.
You occasionally come across people like Mone in interviews. They’re narcissists, obviously — ambitious, flinty, flamboyant. But there’s something else: a nasty whiff, a flicker of anger, a sense that this person might lamp you or knife your Porsche or threaten to “punch in” a group of models. A former member of staff said that while she was working for her, Mone had rounded on some girls who refused to wear thongs. As she said to me: “I am very, very demanding. I am a nightmare. I’ve got OCD. Everything has to be perfect.” The madness, the crystals, the cowering staff — for some reason politicians dig this. Is it because they feel they, by contrast, are poor and therefore boring? But it isn’t long before a huge scandal engulfs them.
If, like me, you are inclined to glaze over at the words “PPE” and “Covid contracts”, you may not have read the granular detail of the story about Mone that appeared in the papers last week. But it is shocking. With the help of her husband, an entrepreneur called Doug, Mone is said to have received £29 million from the profits of an opaque PPE business. To give you an idea of the scale of this — or to put it in blunt terms of Tory greed — Geoffrey Robinson could buy Peter Mandelson at least 77 houses with that amount of money. It is a lot of pasties.
The couple have always insisted they had nothing to do with the company PPE Medpro, but documents from their bank revealed last week that £65 million of profits from the company went to Doug, who then transferred a slice to a secret offshore account for Mone and her children.
The reason they’ve always said they had nothing to do with it is that Mone used her position in the House of Lords to help the company get the contract, telling Michael Gove, among other ministers, to consider it for the VIP fast track in May 2020 and that “my team in Hong Kong” could help. Never mind that PPE Medpro didn’t even exist until five days after she spoke to the government; never mind that it had no accounts, no profile, nothing to show for its expertise but the contact for a factory in China. She took advantage of the chaos of Covid and it ended up with £200 million.
She has continued to deny any connection, even though her actual mansion on the Isle of Man is linked to the PPE business and there are WhatsApp messages to its staff in which “Lady Michelle” advised them about making the gowns from a private jet. I don’t know what was wrong with the surgical garments it produced — too many rhinestones, maybe — but they were unusable, and now the government is seeking to recoup money from the company. She is now the subject of a formal inquiry by the Lords for not declaring her interest in the firm and lobbying for it. The police are also said to be investigating.
What is a woman like this doing in the House of Lords? She makes every single other grasping, lazy peer scoffing its cheap foie gras look like an angel. How did it happen? If I could see, within minutes, that she was trouble, why couldn’t David Cameron?
What was it about this weeping tower of crystal-encrusted Glaswegian cray that made him think in 2015, oooh, let’s put it in the House of Lords? Vanity, I suppose — and his desperation to solve his “woman problem”. Which extended, I think, to underestimating this knicker totty from Glasgow. He probably thought she was too thick or too sexy to do any real damage — people make the same mistake with Angela Rayner.
Mone is typical of a new breed of Tory “lifestyle peers” who have flooded the Upper House in the past decade. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they have done, as long as they’re loaded and serve some minion-like purpose to whichever bored Tory prime minister has put them there. Offering up private jets or hotels, or simply a few vague lols — Mone was basically told to cover up her breasts by the Lords.
Along with Mone there is, of course, Evgeny Lebedev, who is so dedicated to democracy he has not even picked up the briefcase containing his letters patent — the official document granting his peerage — from the Lords cloakroom.
If you look at Mone’s track record now, it is appalling. It is not just the PPE contracts; it is the allegedly racist message she sent in 2019, in which she told a man of Indian heritage he was “a waste of a white man’s skin”. Then there was the cryptocurrency business she set up, intending to raise £80 million — it scraped together £1,600 after hiring 1,000 people to promote it. She described herself, comically, as “one of the biggest experts in cryptocurrency and blockchain”. There was the Dubai development that cratered. And let’s never forget the reason “I’m a Baroness for life” left Labour in the first place: greed, obviously — she didn’t like its 50 per cent top rate of tax.
How does someone like this end up in power? A measly criminal inquiry does not seem enough.
Yes, The Times, how does someone like this end up in a position of power?
What I would like to know is what happened to the guy who died on her boat, details are sketchy, from what I can tell there was a row with another multi-millionaire on another yacht, she was accused of being racist, the two yachts banged into eachother and somehow this guy died and there doesn’t seem to have been any investigation at all, I mean did she literally just rock up in Southampton & hand over his body to the manager of the marina with a quick… ‘oh yeah, this guy died at some point, can you sort it out for me?’
An ang**el** that peddles weight loss pills and fake tan? A woman who’s company paid substantial sums of money into a controversial tax avoidance scheme, someone who even George Osborne called “morally repugnant”? This is without even mentioning the corrupt PPE scandal where she advised the government to give PPE Medpro £200m in government contracts whilst she received £29 million in payments from PPE Medpro to a secret offshore HSBC trust fund.
Sorry, but she isn’t an ang**el**. She is a corrupt, abhorrent and utterly repugnant human being. For once I agree on the Times’s editorial but I guess the Telegraph will lord her imaginary virtue in their Tory world.
Edit. There, I fixed it!!
One of the points of democracy, good societal governance and mature politics is to keep people of this type away from power.
In human social groups the greedy, the amoral and the narcissistic can rise to the top and damage the people they took advantage of to get there.
Her rise is indicative of a failed political system where corruption is entrenched.
You can take the girl out of the east end of Glasgow but never the east end of Glasgow from the girl.
So basically this corrupt piece of shit got into power and used her links to force Her Majesty’s government to sign a contract to produce substandard PPE which is worse than an apron stitched together by brain dead personnel.
So basically she ~~used~~ climbed up in marketing ladder and sold fake pills and other nonsense to become rich. Tories, with their standards firmly set on how much money they make admitted her as a Peer. What a cunning stunt!
Lol nothing will happen, the rich parasites will keep getting away with it while they set us on eachother, set the ignorant masses on the immigrants who dare come here, the teachers, nurses and so on who dare strike for a better life while there bosses get rich off their hard work and hide the money via virgin islands, while a 3rd of our paycheck goes on taxes! sickening! I honestly wish it was easier for me to leave this godforesaken mess of a country, so corrupt. What is the point of trying to life a good honest life when all around you criminals get rewarded for making our lives worse?
Camilla Long comes across as a cunt and a hack with it.
A waste of an article which should have been a slam dunk on Mone.
> What was it about this weeping tower of crystal-encrusted Glaswegian cray that made him think in 2015, oooh, let’s put it in the House of Lords?
Because she’d been a prominent fundraiser and donor for *Better Together*. It’s always favours and rewards. Always.
>What was it about this weeping tower of crystal-encrusted Glaswegian cray that made him think in 2015, oooh, let’s put it in the House of Lords?
Worthy of r/rareinsults I think…
What an absolute thundercunt! This country is beyond fucked.
So which peers in particular are the grasping lazy ones?
Read her/husbands wiki pages. They are scum and grifters who scammed their way to wealth and positions
“He probably thought she was too thick or too sexy to do any real damage — people make the same mistake with Angela Rayner.”
That is a wholly unnecessarily nasty dig at Rayner; who is no comparison to this tory lowlife. The implicit assumption of this lazy cretin of a journalist is that working class women in positions of power are all the same.
so how much this sweetheart “baroness” spent to became peer for life?
what a lovely example to all that in this boutique designed circus by the the top the road to success is honesty and hard work
Thank good for the unelected house of lords so we can have finger appointed people like her keeping politicians accountable
They say you need for graft, but they show you need more grift.
I was with this article until she made the cheap shots about her being Glaswegian. It smacked of the same old nastiness about Scotland and the North and old classisms that just didn’t sit well with me, and usually it doesn’t tend to bother me. Mone is a repugnant horror of a woman that should be in jail, but her being from here has nothing to do with that.
Edit: typos
Canola long is horrible. Hates every outside of her narrow Tory bubble. Poor people are stupid, all tv is woke etc. she’s a waste of space posing as a journalist.
Comments turned off on this article just like they are for all the FT coverage too.