Michelle
Mone told us ‘business isn’t easy’ during Covid. How are things now, your
ladyship?
Marina
Hyde
After a
company she was linked to was ordered to repay £122m it made from pandemic
deals, the baroness has embarked on a masterclass in victimhood
Fri 3 Oct
2025 10.01 EDT
By their
own accounts, there have been two Westminster-adjacent victims of inflammatory
language this week. One is the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, hurt to the
point of requiring smelling salts by some politically commonplace words spoken
by the prime minister. And the other is legally besieged bra baroness Michelle
Mone, who has always been performatively sensitive, with chaos as her rising
sign.
Alas, far
from their shared victimhood drawing our two snowflakes closer together, in
Michelle, we may have finally found the Tory from whom Nigel would not accept a
defection to Reform. Which really means something, considering Britain’s
would-be next prime minister currently has precisely zero peers in the House of
Lords. Like the PPE she provided during the pandemic, Michelle would be deemed
incredibly expensive and absolutely unusable.
Not that
you’d get that vibe from the letter she sent to Keir Starmer this week,
claiming that Rachel Reeves reportedly mentioning a “vendetta” against her
retaining her peerage was a security threat. This began, amazingly, with the
words: “I am writing to you … first as a wife, second as a mother, and lastly
as a baroness …”
Surely
writing at least second-and-a-halfly as a Range Rover driver? After all, in an
earlier statement this week, Michelle had battled to get the public on side
with a helpful analogy about the wrongness of the judge who had just ordered a
company to which she and her husband, Doug Barrowman, were linked to repay
£122m to the Department of Health for providing some defective surgical gowns.
“To use a simple analogy,” her ladyship began promisingly in a diatribe against
the “establishment”, “if a car looks, feels and drives like, say, a Range
Rover, then unless you can show how the car is assembled by the manufacturer,
it’s not a Range Rover.”
Nope,
I’ve read that 15 times and I’m still no clearer. Maybe we would be on safer
ground if we just pictured the specific Range Rover. I’m getting strong notes
of Overfinch L460, maybe customised with monogrammed quilted leather and
Swarovski crystal wheel caps. I also sense we peasants wouldn’t even be allowed
to touch it unless we were wearing protective clothing – obviously sourced from
a firm where it actually worked.
That
said, and partly because she can’t help herself, it does feel as though we
focus more on Michelle than Doug Barrowman, the person whose wife she’s firstly
speaking as. If you can’t immediately picture Doug, he’s a striking confection
of tweed and Turkey teeth, and it’s fairly difficult to get past the fact that
his house boasts a new-build amphitheatre. But then, the Mone-Barrowmans always
wanted to tell us how very, very rich they were, and how very, very well they
were doing. They gave their first joint interview to Hello! long before they
were engaged, pictured standing not just in front of their Isle of Man
McMansion, but in front of their Ferrari. “I feel like I’m in a fairytale,”
revealed Michelle, “a beautiful dream I don’t ever want to wake up from.”
Oh dear.
Flash forward to the last time the couple attempted a spirited defence of their
Covid antics, during an absolute helicopter crash of a BBC interview two years
ago, and we find Doug saying: “There’s a reason why I live in the Isle of Man.
I don’t want anyone in the press to know of any business activity or anything
that I get engaged in.” Again: oh dear.
So these
are testing times over at Hubris Towers. Whither the yacht Michelle posted a
picture of herself on during the pandemic? Caption: “Business isn’t easy. But
it is rewarding.” Apparently the good ship Lady M has now been sold, as Doug
has liquidated an estimated £80m of things like a private jet and a £41m
Caribbean villa. This reportedly happened shortly after a separate £75m of the
couple’s properties and accounts were frozen as part of a National Crime Agency
investigation (Mone and Barrowman deny any criminal wrongdoing). But don’t get
your hopes up – it feels unlikely lawyers will ever “pierce the corporate veil”
and get all the money back from such personal assets.
As for
the wider context, it’s strange. No one more than the Conservative government
of the day encouraged us to think of the pandemic as a war. You’d think the
possibility of mass viral death was a sufficiently horrifying novelty not to
require a metaphor to bring it home. But war they called it, and battle
language was everywhere. Unfortunately, instead of Winston Churchill, we had
Boris Johnson, and instead of remembering the revulsion towards profiteers in
the wake of the second world war, we had something called “the VIP lane” for
Covid contracts. This went … badly. If you haven’t watched ITV’s new
documentary on the Covid contracts, Follow the Money, I strongly recommend it
as a faultless roundup and exploration of what one contributor classes as “probably
the biggest misspending scandal in the UK of all time”, from PPE to Covid
tests, with particular emphasis on that VIP lane.
The
people who jostled their way into this lane for a grotesquely outsize cash
bonanza and then boasted about helping the nation were profiteering, plain and
simple – and there were a lot more of them than just Michelle Mone. She isn’t
being scapegoated, as she claims. But so many others have got away with it.
Michelle
doesn’t know where the profiteer bodies other than her own are buried, or she’d
be out there digging them up with her bare hands so she wouldn’t be the only
one in the limelight. But the people who did it do. How relieved they must be
that their misdeeds are buried in the Covid bad-memory hole, stuck in the
mind-wipe warehouse like the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. A
structure that, ironically, does not look like it would be remotely big enough
to hold all the useless stuff purchased – or all the money they fleeced off
this country.
Marina
Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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