'Baroness Bra' and the myth behind her padded fortune

As Michelle Mone's firm is ordered to pay back over £100m, Guy Walters takes a close look at the books to see whether the lingerie tycoon was ever as successful as she made out

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This week has been an emphatically bad one for Baroness Mone of Mayfair in the City of London. On Wednesday, a High Court judge ordered that PPE MedPro, a firm controlled by her and her husband Doug Barrowman, should repay at least £122m for supplying 25 million surgical gowns that did not meet rules on producing sterile equipment.

Baroness Mone is, of course, Michelle Mone, probably best known by her tabloid sobriquet, “Baroness Bra”, because of her former career as a lingerie tycoon, in which she apparently netted millions from her supposedly massively successful Ultimo range of lingerie.

But then, Mone is used to having bad weeks: along with Barrowman and companies and charities associated with the couple, she has been, or is currently being, investigated by HMRC, the National Crime Agency, the Charity Commission, and the commissioner for standards of the House of Lords, from where the life peer announced she “will be taking a leave of absence [...] in order to clear her name of the allegations that have been unjustly levelled against her” concerning her alleged links to PPE MedPro, which was awarded £200m of PPE contracts.

In addition, it recently emerged that Mone had to sell her luxury yacht for a reported £10.25m, as well as her house in Belgravia for £20m.

Although Mone has not yet completely fallen from grace, it does seem timely to wonder just how successful Ultimo really was, and thereby to establish just how brilliant a businesswoman she really was. Let’s not forget that Lady Mone was awarded an OBE in the 2010 new year honours list for “services to the Lingerie Industry”, and her peerage was granted in September 2015 because she was “one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs”.