Michelle Mone exposes Lords' discredited system of peerages

If there’s one thing journalists don’t like to be told, it is that they are being manipulated, and you could have heard a pin drop. The speech revealed a measure of naivety and a lack of self-awareness that would become increasingly evident in the career of Baroness Mone, as we now must call her.

She was at it again this week, with her much hyped ‘fightback’ against separate investigations into her business dealings by the National Crime Agency and the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards.

While claiming to be a scapegoat for the Government’s Covid failings, the Conservative peer also happened to mention that, for the past two years, she has been lying to the public about her involvement in a company that made a tidy £60m profit in PPE contracts during the pandemic, after she had recommended it to the minister responsible for awarding the contracts.

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Despite her husband being, at least, a part owner of the company, and half of the bonanza being placed in a trust from which she and her children stand to benefit, she thought it not worth bothering the Lords’ register of interests. She has also repeatedly insisted, through statements issued by solicitors, that she had no personal or business connection to the company, which we now know not to be the case.

In the self-obsessed, looking glass world of Baroness Mone, there is nothing remotely contradictory about these statements. They are, in modern parlance, her truths, and if one of them happens to be an admission of repeatedly lying, that is someone else’s problem, not hers.

She is, in large part, a construct of her creative relationship with the truth. Her business ‘success’, has owed more to an undoubted flair for PR rather than any conspicuous financial acumen.

She first came to public attention almost a quarter of a century ago, after claiming that her innovative, cleavage-enhancing Ultimo bra had been worn by Julia Roberts in the film Erin Brockovich.

There is no evidence that is true and the claim was later disputed by the film's costume designer, who said the bra worn by the actress was made in the US and had been bought from an LA boutique.

But that didn’t matter to newspaper editors who had a new, ready-made source of photographs of well-proportioned ladies dressed in erotic underwear with which to pepper the pages of their publications.

A symbiotic relationship forged in tabloid heaven was born and journalists didn’t probe too deeply into Baroness Mone’s superlative claims, so long as she kept coming up with the goods, which she did in spades.

Michelle Mone appears on Australian TV (Image: free)

Liz Hurley, Kylie Minogue, Sarah Harding, Jennifer Ellison, Posh Spice – all were touted as being linked to the Ultimo brand – and there was investment from Sir Tom Hunter, Scotland’s richest man.

‘Bra wars’ – where she dropped Rod Stewart’s wife Penny Lancaster as the face (or body) of Ultimo in favour of his ex-wife Rachel Hunter – led to the singer calling her a ‘manipulative cow’.

Respectable newspapers got in on the act too, reporting on Mone’s rags-to-riches journey from Dennistoun tenement to global fame and wealth as the head of MJM International, a company on track to be worth £100m.

A relentless self-publicist, she would notoriously turn up to the opening of an envelope and she did the circuit of celebrity TV shows, including Pointless and The Apprentice.

But her business success was not all it seemed. The £100m was a fantasy – a forecast of future sales she had made at a time when her company’s income was £300,000.

In fact, the highest profit recorded by the company was less than £1million at its peak and, by 2012, it had suffered significant losses before it was sold to a Sri Lankan competitor. The company had also, for three years, used a tax avoidance scheme which, while legal, was described by former Tory Chancellor George Osborne as ‘morally repugnant’.

When David Cameron appointed Baroness Mone to the role of his government’s start-up business tsar, there was bemusement north of the border, with one businessman suggesting the Prime Minister had ‘lost his marbles’.

Douglas Anderson, of Glasgow-based tool and plant hire company GAP Group, described her as a "small-time businesswoman with PR exposure far in excess of any success", adding: "Because she is flogging bras and knickers she gets models, and she gets PR way ahead of anything she should get.”

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More troubling was her elevation to the Lords which remains an enduring mystery – no-one from the Scottish Conservatives was even consulted beforehand – as well as being emblematic of a broken and dysfunctional system.

Ever since Harold Wilson’s resignation honours nominations – the notorious ‘lavender list’ – when he stood down as Prime Minister in 1976, there has been suspicion and distaste for a process which, at best, legitimises cronyism and which at worst facilitates potential corruption.

The ability of prime ministers to bestow knighthoods and peerages upon friends and supporters should have ended following the 2006 cash-for-honours scandal when it was revealed that several men nominated by Tony Blair had loaned significant sums to the Labour Party at the suggestion of Labour fundraiser Lord Levy.

This raised suspicions of a quid pro quo, leading to complaints and a police investigation, damaging the government and Labour Party and forcing the repayment of loans.

The subsequent decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute cited a lack of direct evidence proving pre-agreement of peerages for loans, necessary for a successful prosecution.

Since then, the Conservatives have presided over a more-than-eightfold rise in the number of serving MPs being awarded knighthoods and damehoods.

While Gordon Brown and Theresa May opted not to produce a list of nominees when they resigned, the system was brought back into focus and disrepute with Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list that included more than 40 honours and peerages for his closest allies, several of whom were involved in the Partygate scandal.

Political aides Ross Kempsell and Charlotte Owen, both aged 30, were put nominated for peerages and are now two of the youngest members of the House of Lords.

Johnson also gave knighthoods to Ben Elliot, former chair of the Conservative Party, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, while his former home secretary, Priti Patel, received a damehood.

At the time of Baroness Mone’s ennoblement, the Scottish Conservatives made it known that, if they had been asked for their opinion by Cameron, they would have urged caution. Or, as one senior figure put it: "He'd have been told she's a nightmare." Doubtless Rishi Sunak now wishes that had been the case.