Since Baroness Mone gave an interview to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, many questions have been asked. Why did scandal-hit Mone and her billionaire husband Doug Barrowman agree to the interview? Could it have gone any worse? And how much strain were the buttons on well-fed Barrowman’s shirt under?
One other key question is circulating relating to the investigation into Mone and Barrowman’s highly profitable contract to supply PPE. It is this: why was Mone appointed to the House of Lords in the first place?
The hunt is on for the identity of the bright spark who suggested it to the then Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015. Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, as they say. In that vein, no-one wants to take credit for the appointment.
Mone took part in a Downing Street event and it is said she impressed the Tory leadership by saying in robust terms that she thought they were ace.
The finger of blame for the peerage suggestion has been pointed by senior Scottish Tories at one of David Cameron’s advisers at the time, Ramsay Jones. According to friends, the PR man denies it completely. The first he knew was when it was formally announced, they say, in August 2015.
Others claim it was down to David Cameron and the then Chancellor George Osborne being charmed by the idea of a working class and famous Scottish businesswoman coming out as a Tory.
“They didn’t stop to ask questions. They thought it was a great idea,” says a leading Scottish Tory who was not consulted. “If asked I would have told them that it was not sensible.”
Flying high in summer 2015 – after victory in the 2014 Scottish referendum and then the UK general election the following May – Cameron and Osborne were at the peak of their powers. The Brexit referendum was still ten months away.
On 10 August Mone was announced by the government as the chair of a review of entrepreneurship and the obstacles involved in setting up a business in deprived areas. On 27 August, her peerage was gazetted.
When it became public there was astonishment in the upper echelons of the Scottish Conservative party, to say nothing of the response from critics in the country, especially those in Scotland who had been subjected to a couple of decades of Mone hype in the tabloids.
In 2015, Douglas Anderson of the Edinburgh plant hire company Gap Group criticised the peerage and a “small-time businesswoman with PR exposure far in excess of any success”. Anderson went on: “This is not good for the country, this is not good for the Union, this is not good for business and this is not good for the House of Lords. The only person that I can think that this is good for is Michelle Mone.”
Several members of the then cabinet attempted to block it, but it was too late.
“We tried. Because it had been announced it couldn’t be undone. Not the party’s finest hour,” says a former aide.
Last weekend, Baroness Mone admitted her husband ran Medpro and she stood to benefit from the £60 million profit from the government contract, but she also told Kuenssberg that she fails to see what she’s done wrong. Previously, she had denied it and used top London law firms to issue threatening orders to journalists who wrote about her connection to the company.
Mone is currently on a leave of absence from the Lords to “clear her name” and she and her husband Barrowman are under investigation.
Michelle Georgina Allan grew up in the East End of Glasgow and left school at the age of 15 with no qualifications. In the late 90s, she started MJM with her then-husband Michael Mone and launched the Ultimo lingerie brand. The rapid success of the company catapulted her to a life of yachts in Monaco and dinner with the Clintons. By the time her marriage broke down in 2013, she had built an international underwear empire which was somewhat coming undone: MJM International suffered losses of £780,000 in that fiscal year and the Ultimo brand ended up with Sri Lankan owners.
Two years later, in 2015, she was put in the House of Lords. In 2020, Mone married billionaire Barrowman.
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