Who is Michelle Mone? Ex Tory peer hits out at Rishi Sunak after interview admission

Baroness Michelle Mone has hit out at the prime minister after he said he was taking the scandal surrounding her involvement with a PPE firm “incredibly seriously”.

The former Conservative peer admitted in an interview on the Laura Kuenssburg show on Sunday that she had been untruthful when she denied a connection to Medpro.

However, on Monday, Baroness Mone tweeted in response to the PM’s claims, saying Rishi Sunak “knew all about” her involvement with the company and her connections.

Her husband, Doug Barrowman, has links to Medpro, which was awarded contracts worth £203 million in May and June 2020.

In the lead-up to this, Baroness Mone approached ministers, including Michael Gove, to promote the company while Mr Barrowman made a £170,000 donation to the Tories.

She later denied the connection, but a resulting scandal led to her leaving the Conservative Party and she has taken a leave of absence from the Lords - where she has been a member since 2015.

Medpro is currently being investigated by the National Crime Agency (NCA), while the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has since issued breach of contract proceedings over a 2020 deal on the supply of gowns.

Baroness Mone told Ms Kuenssberg: “We’ve done a lot of good but if we were to say anything that we have done that we are sorry for, and that’s… we should have told the press straight up, straight away, nothing to hide.

“I was just protecting my family. And again, I’m sorry for that, but I wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”

On Monday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Lord Callanan both said that she should not return to the Lords.

Shadow cabinet office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds has now called on Mr Gove to answer questions following her claim.

Mr Sunak said: "The government takes these things incredibly seriously, which is why we're pursuing legal action against the company concerned in these matters. That's how seriously I take it and the government takes it.

"But it is also subject to an ongoing criminal investigation. And because of that, there's not much further that I can add."

Baroness Mone said in response: “What is Rishi Sunak talking about? “I was honest with the Cabinet Office, the Government and the NHS in my dealings with them.

“They all knew about my involvement from the very beginning.”

The investigation continues.

Early life and first marriage to Michael Mone

Born in 1971 to a working-class family in Glasgow’s East End, in an interview with the Guardian in 2010, Michelle Mone described growing up in a tenement flat with no inside bathroom.

After the death of her brother aged eight, and her father’s cancer and subsequent paralysis, Mone left school at age 15 with no qualifications to pursue a modelling career.

At age 17, she met her future husband, entrepreneur Michael Mone, and by 18 years old, she was pregnant with their first child.

The couple had three children. On December 27, 2011, lawyers announced the couple’s formal separation after 20 years of marriage.

Push-up bras and tax avoidance: entry into business career

Mone’s first foray into the world of business was a marketing job with the Labatt brewing company. Within two years, she had become its head of marketing in Scotland, but was then made redundant, prompting her to set up her own business.

She has since admitted that she lied to get the job by making up qualifications on her CV.

In November 1996, she founded MJM International with her then-husband Michael, using a redundancy payout from Labatt.

Three years later, Mone launched the Ultimo lingerie brand at Selfridges. She came up with the idea for the Ultimo bra, the brand’s first product, when she was wearing an uncomfortable push-up bra one day and believed she could create a more comfortable version.

Mone has claimed that an Ultimo bra was worn by Julia Roberts in the Hollywood film Erin Brockovich but this has since been denied by the film’s creators.

After initial success, 2014 saw the first signs of Mone running into trouble.

In that year, a former operations director for MJM won a claim for unfair dismissal from her company after discovering that Mone had authorised electronic bugging of his office.

The following year, Mone also threatened to sue her critics when it was revealed MJM International had paid a substantial sum of money into a controversial tax-avoidance scheme, criticised by Chancellor George Osborne as “morally repugnant” and later made illegal.

Diet pills and cryptocurrency

In 2006, MJM bought half of TrimSecrets, a company selling weight-loss pills developed by Scottish-based Dutch naturopath Jan de Vries.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2010, Mone claimed that exercise and reduced caloric intake had no effect on her weight, and instead credited TrimSecrets pills with her weight loss.

In the same interview, Mone also claimed the products had been tested in clinical trials but, when questioned further, it transpired that 63 users had completed a questionnaire from which she was unable to produce results.

Mone’s business career took a further hit in 2018, when she launched a cryptocurrency with her partner Doug Barrowman called Equi. She claimed it aimed to raise $800m which would be used to fund startup companies. Calling herself “one of the biggest experts in cryptocurrency and Blockchain”, she also touted Equi as the “blockchain of Britain”.

The company recruited 1,000 people to promote the cryptocurrency through social media, but they only raised £1,600. By August 2018, The Sunday Times reported that the project had “flopped” and all investors had been refunded. The Financial Times reported that it had “ended in a fiasco that exposes the total absence of oversight in the ICO market”.

‘Waste of a white man’s skin’: racism allegation

In December 2021, Mone was accused of sending a racist text message to a man of Indian heritage after the two were involved in a fatal yacht collision in Monaco in 2019.

Richard Lynton-Jones, a wealth manager, claimed that Mone had called him a “waste of a white man’s skin” over WhatsApp.

A spokesperson for Mone said she was not racist because “Baroness Mone and her husband have built over 15 schools in Africa in the past three years”. This was followed by a message from her lawyers, who said that Mone could not access her messages and had no “detailed memory of them”.

The allegations of racism were referred to the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards, but commissioners did not investigate the matter as Mone’s comments were said in a personal capacity and not in her capacity as a member of the House of Lords.

In January 2022, the Metropolitan Police announced they were investigating the incident.

‘Layabout Lady of Mayfair’: poor attendance in the House of Lords

In her maiden speech in the House of Lords, Mone stated: “I look forward to playing a full and active role in your lordships’ house.”

However, The Times reported in 2018 that, in the previous year, Mone had only attended the House of Lords on 12 per cent of the days in which it was sitting, missing important debates, including on the Brexit bill.

Her poor attendance led MSP Rona Mackay to label her the “Layabout Lady of Mayfair” and businessman Douglas Anderson, who had criticised her original appointment, called for her to resign.

By January 2022, Mone had made only five speeches in the House of Lords and asked 22 written questions.