In January 2014, David Cameron hosted a lunch at 10 Downing Street for 15 Scottish executives to discuss the forthcoming referendum. He might not have said so explicitly, but the prime minister wanted their backing for the No vote. Michelle Mone, the founder of Ultimo lingerie, whose parent company claims to employ 63,000 people, was one of those in attendance and she remembers the occasion in her recent autobiography, My Fight to the Top. “I was listening to them all thinking, ‘You arse-lickers. Tell him how it really is,’” she wrote. Mone proceeded to do exactly that, announcing to the room: “Your Better Together campaign is rubbish.”
This forthright display seems to have had an impact on Cameron. Or perhaps he appreciated Mone’s support: the 43-year-old entrepreneur became an outspoken advocate for the union, making that classic threat to leave Scotland in the event of a Yes vote and take her business with her.
Either way, Mone was unveiled last week as the government’s new tsar with a remit to encourage business startups in disadvantaged areas. Hints have also been dropped that she will be elevated, perhaps as soon as this week, to the House of Lords as a Tory life peer.
“There’s no one I can think of that’s better qualified to help young entrepreneurs from deprived backgrounds to turn a good idea into a flourishing business,” said Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, announcing the appointment. Mone starts in September, with a team of 20, and has been charged with producing recommendations to the cabinet in 10 months.
It’s not hard to see why Duncan Smith would make that claim, as Mone’s personal story is indeed an extraordinary one. She grew up in the East End of Glasgow, in a one-bed tenement flat that had no bathroom (she would wash at the swimming baths). Her brother died when he was eight from spina bifida; her father had cancer and woke up one morning, aged 38, paralysed.
Yet, after leaving school without qualifications as a 15-year-old, Mone has become one of Britain’s most visible entrepreneurs. Ultimo, which not long ago she sold an 80% stake in, has been valued as a £50m business.
Mone believes that her background gives her a rare insight into the pressures that startups face. “I do believe it’s a confidence thing,” she told the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC 2 last week. Naga Munchetty, standing in for Derbyshire, challenged her that, in the current economic climate, with businesses of all sizes failing, it might take a little more than mere chutzpah. “But it was hard when I was starting up as well, 20 years ago,” Mone replied. “Four times I put my house to the bank, so I know what the issues are.”
Not everyone, however, agreed with Duncan Smith that Mone was the most qualified person for the job. Douglas Anderson, a director of the Glasgow-based GAP Group, a tool and plant hire company that employs 1,300 people and last year returned a 61% increase in annual profits, wrote to the prime minister personally to complain. He described Mone as a “small-time businesswoman” and her enterprises as “excessively over-promoted PR minnows”. Recent figures, at least, back Anderson: in 2013, Mone’s company, MJM International, experienced a loss of £780,000; Ultimo, unlike Elle Macpherson and Stella McCartney,does not feature in the list of the top 10 lingerie brands compiled last year by EDITD, a retail technology company.
There have also been accusations of her company using “morally repugnant” tax avoidance schemes, though Mone took to Twitter at the end of last week to state that all her businesses’ tax affairs were in “full compliance with the law”, adding: “My legal team are watching.”
Other commentators went even further. According to Melissa Kite in the Daily Mail, Mone joined a long line of “glamorous advisers” who had momentarily turned Cameron’s head. A partial list: “maths tsar” Carol Vorderman, the former Countdown presenter; “global trade ambassador” Tamara Mellon, co-founder of Jimmy Choo; another “trade ambassador” Anya Hindmarch, the accessories designer; meanwhile Karren Brady has advised on small businesses and Mary Portas was set the task of reinvigorating the British high street.
Their announcements made headlines – welcome for a prime minister who rated poorly with female voters and presided over a cabinet mostly devoid (Theresa May, the home secretary, aside) of high-profile women – but their eventual findings rarely did.
So was Mone really the best person for an important job? Or was Cameron just giving newspapers the opportunity to dust off photographs of Mone in a push-up bra to accompany an otherwise boring business story?
No one can deny that Mone has a knack for publicity. She herself estimates that her stunts have, over the near-20 years since she founded Ultimo, brought the equivalent of a £1bn PR and marketing spend. When she first came up with the idea for the company, friends tried to talk her out of it. “They said, ‘You know nothing about bras,’” Mone recalled earlier this year. “‘You haven’t been to college or uni... You can’t even sew a button on your husband’s shirt.’ And I says, ‘Well, I’ve got a pair of boobs and I’ll work it out.’”
The attention-grabbing began from day one: £480,000 in debt, Mone went with a bag of prototype bras to Selfridges. She had just £500 for marketing and she spent it on 12 actors to play plastic surgeons, who protested outside the store claiming that the new bra would make them redundant.
Mone has rarely been out of the headlines ever since. She boasted that Julia Roberts wore an Ultimo bra in her Oscar-winning performance in Erin Brockovich; the claim is contested by Jeffrey Kurland, the costume designer on the film. She was a pundit on The Apprentice: You’re Fired and had an on-air altercation with a then-unknown contestant Katie Hopkins. And, perhaps most famously, she hired Penny Lancaster, Rod Stewart’s wife, to model for Ultimo and, after her contract ran out, replaced her with Rachel Hunter, the singer’s ex-wife. Until that point, Mone and Stewart had been friends; he used to go to the football with her husband.
The breakdown of Mone’s marriage in 2011 led to more column inches. Mone, then Michelle Allan, met her future husband, Michael, when she was 17; a year later she was pregnant and the couple went on to have three children: Rebecca, now 22 and a sometime model for Ultimo, Declan, 19, and Bethany, 15. But Mone suspected her husband (and, by this point, business partner) was being unfaithful and hired a private investigator to find out. When it turned out that he was – with an Ultimo employee – she scratched his £100,000 Porsche and put laxatives in his coffee. Mone also started drinking up to two bottles of wine a night.
Mone admits that she has some obsessive, addictive tendencies. In her 20s and early 30s, she ate and drank heavily; she went up to a size 22 and had to buy her underwear from Marks & Spencer, because Ultimo only went up to size 18. But then she lost eight stone. At the time, she said that the reduction was achieved by taking herbal diet pills called TrimSecrets, a product she liked so much that she bought half the company. Now she exercises for an hour a day with Ruben Tabares, a personal trainer whose clients have included the singer Tinie Tempah and world champion boxer David Haye, and goes on regular juice cleanses; she still would like to shed another 16-18lbs, she says. She also works with an American life coach called Dr Ted Anders.
She sleeps for only four hours a night and seems incapable of taking time off: she went into labour with Bethany while she was chairing a board meeting and came back to finish it four days later; recently, she said that she hasn’t watched a film for more than 10 years.
She takes, she thinks, around 200 flights a year and owns more than 100 Montblanc pens, which she picks up at airports. One, a ballpoint, is particularly special as it has been used to seal her divorce and sell her shares in Ultimo. She carries it everywhere, along with a photograph of her children.
Even though the No vote triumphed, Mone recently left Scotland and moved into a penthouse flat overlooking Tower Bridge. It’s more convenient for her motivational speaking, which takes up much of her time now, and is just down the river from Westminster.
Other people might have already written off the idea of an “entrepreneurship tsar” but Mone at least is taking it very seriously, promising to commit the full force of her obsessive personality to offering some viable solutions. “I said to Iain Duncan Smith, ‘Look, I am not giving up my time for free – my time is valuable – for the report just to sit in your bottom drawer.’”
The evidence of Cameron’s recent glitzy appointments is against her, but Mone has made a lucrative career from defying expectations.
THE MONE FILE
Born Michelle Georgina Mone 8 October 1971. Her father was a printer and her mother was a home help. Michelle started a paper round aged 10 and soon had 17 teenagers working for her. Over her bed was a poster of Richard Branson: “Get that beardie off my wall!” her father would say. She has three children.
Best of times Developing the idea for Ultimo, aged 24. She spent three years working on a prototype, eventually hearing about a new silicone technology while on holiday in America and obtaining the European licence for it.
Worst of times Her very public separation from her partner of 20 years, Michael, in 2011. They continued to share the same house for months and, on one occasion, Mone poured a bucket of water over his side of the bed.
What she says “I can still hear my ex-husband’s voice, ‘You’re going to end up back in the ghetto where I rescued you from.’ And I think, ‘No, I’m not.’”
What others say “A devious, publicity-seeking son of a bitch.” Rod Stewart
