During the peak of the Covid pandemic, Michelle Mone paused from sharing Instagram glimpses of her lavish homes, exotic vacations, and designer outfit collections to discuss a subject dear to her heart.

She expressed gratitude on social media, saying, ‘I want to take a moment to thank the NHS,’ acknowledging the doctors, nurses, and cleaners for their courage and dedication on the front lines, and commended them for exemplifying the best in humanity.

The comment was a classic sweetened statement from the Scottish businesswoman, whose talent for bold self-promotion propelled her from a Glasgow apartment to a seat in the House of Lords, numerous magazine covers, television talk shows, and an OBE for her ‘services to the lingerie industry’ along her journey.

Officially known as Baroness Mone of Mayfair, she had recently been featured in Hello! magazine, sharing stories of her marriage to Doug Barrowman, a wealthy business mogul from the Isle of Man.

The wedding included a ‘lavish reception’ featuring dishes like lobster, sea-bass, and beef, accompanied by ‘fine wines and champagne’ along with a ‘magnificent seven-tier cake adorned with a gold D and M,’ reflective of the affluent pair who boasted assets such as six residences, 15 vehicles (including two Ferraris), a Cessna private plane, and a £10 million, 135ft yacht named the ‘Lady M’.

How grotesque such extravagance feels, now we have an idea how their outwardly glamorous lifestyle was funded.

However, Mone’s statements appreciating the ‘NHS heroes’ now seem deeply insincere in light of the shocking revelations in Mrs. Justice Cockerill’s 87-page High Court judgment released yesterday morning.

It finds that the 53-year-old Tory peer served as the ‘big gun’, who was wheeled out by her husband’s firm PPE Medpro when it needed to harangue government officials to sign off a £122million order for surgical gowns that it intended to source from China.

Those products were supposed to be completely sterile, rendering them safe to use in the life-and-death context of a pandemic-era hospital.

Yet when civil servants raised concerns that they lacked adequate certification, it was Mone who ‘took up the fight’ on PPE Medpro’s behalf, the judgment reveals.

She used a phone call with a senior mandarin to argue that the Department for Health and Social Care had ‘a legal moral obligation’ to go through with the deal, ‘threatening further escalation’ if she didn’t get her way.

As we now know, the gowns would turn out to be utterly unfit for purpose. Indeed, when a sample of 140 were later tested for sterility, 103 failed. 

‘They were not, contractually speaking, sterile, or properly validated as being sterile’ was how Mrs Justice Cockerill put it. ‘That means that they could not be used as sterile gowns in the NHS or elsewhere.’ 

It follows that Mone was using status and connections to hawk equipment that would turn out to be dodgy (though there is no suggestion she knew this at the time) on behalf of a company controlled by her husband. The same company would later hand her tens of millions of pounds in profit.

On the other side of this ill-fated deal was the Great British Taxpayer. Or to put things another way: you and me.

Did the Baroness ever stop to ask herself, as the recent £122million contract dispute wended its way through the High Court, what might have happened to ‘levels of hygiene’ in NHS hospitals if PPE Medpro’s gowns had actually ended up being used in a clinical setting?

Did she ever ponder, as she counted the ill-gotten financial gains, the risk her slapdash business venture posed to public health? Or how using unsterile gowns might have affected the safety of those ‘brave’ NHS workers who’d featured in her self-righteous Instagram post?

It would seem unlikely. For Lady Mone’s response to this grubby affair finding its way into the public domain has been characterised by a brand of shameless dishonesty that is virtually unsurpassed in public life. 

When reporters began to sniff around PPE Medpro, she hired not one, not two, but three separate law firms to intimidate news outlets wishing to report her involvement in the shabby affair.

Letters falsely insisted that she had ‘no involvement’ in the firm, and that suggesting as much in print would ‘leave you vulnerable to legal action’.

Among her most voracious attack dogs was Jonathan Coad, a supporter of the pressure group Hacked Off, which (ironically) accuses the popular Press of putting lies into the public domain.

His threatening missives insisted that the Tory peer was ‘not connected in any way with PPE Medpro’, adding that ‘any suggestion of an association’ would be ‘both inaccurate and misleading’ and ‘defamatory’.

That, of course, was completely untrue. Or to put things another way, Lady Mone was lying.

Among those who now accept this fact is Coad himself. While it should be stressed that lawyers always act on the instruction of clients, so are not personally to blame if those clients later turn out to be fibbing, Coad has since offered an ‘unqualified apology’ for spreading falsehoods on her behalf.

With characteristic brass neck, Mone has meanwhile sought to downplay her dishonesty. In 2023, she told a BBC interviewer that lying to the Press is ‘not a crime’ and saying she only did it to ‘protect my family’.

Telling porkies has, in truth, been part of Mone’s modus operandi since she burst on to the public scene in the early 2000s, as the sharp-elbowed boss of headline-prone lingerie firm Ultimo.

The company was purportedly founded after Michelle accompanied her first husband Michael to a dinner-dance, wearing an uncomfortable cleavage-enhancing bra, and decided there must be a way to make the products better. To gain attention for the new brand, she claimed Julia Roberts wore one of its bras in the film Erin Brockovich. But that was a complete lie.

In 2002, Mone hired the model Penny Lancaster to act as the product’s ‘face’ on what reporters were told was a then-remarkable £200,000 contract. In fact, as Lancaster recently revealed, the amount was ‘substantially below that’.

Two years later, she replaced Lancaster with her husband Sir Rod Stewart’s ex-wife Rachel Hunter, prompting the singer to brand Mone a ‘nasty piece of work’ and ‘a manipulative cow’.

While the bra firm continued to attract headlines, its financial success was always trickier to gauge. 

In 2010, when glossy magazine profiles were suggesting that it was somehow worth £50million, its accounts revealed it to be generating a mere £481,000 in profit. The ‘shareholders’ funds’ – controlled by Michelle and Michael – were just £1.2million.

In 2012, the couple’s marriage (which had produced three children) suddenly imploded, when Michael walked out of the family home on Christmas Day. He went on to marry and have another child with a woman called Samantha Bunn, a close family friend and senior Ultimo employee.

Michelle, for her part, later admitted to vandalising his Porsche, cutting up his clothes and putting laxatives in his coffee during the split.

Michael once described his ex-wife as ‘stark, raving mad’, according to a BBC documentary that dubbed her a ‘shameless, self-promoting grifter’.

Stark, raving mad or not, Mone was in 2015 elevated to the House of Lords by David Cameron. The headline-grabbing move garnered her the nickname ‘Baroness Bra’, but astonished the Scottish business community.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Donald Anderson, whose Gap Group is the UK’s largest plant hire firm, wrote: ‘Miss Mone is not a successful entrepreneur, she is a small time businesswoman with a PR exposure far in excess of any actual success…

‘If the only thing she achieved was self-publicity, I don’t think that’s a very good reason to put you into the House of Lords. If you follow that logic then the House of Lords will be full of influencers in the next ten years.’

Cameron, of course, went ahead with the appointment anyway and Mone used her maiden speech in the Lords to describe how, until the age of 12, she had been raised ‘in a tenement flat in the east end of Glasgow with no bath or shower and only a cupboard for a bedroom’.

Given that she was born in 1971, the claim raised eyebrows, drawing comparison with the fictional childhood of Harry Potter. But whatever the truth, her financial situation was to improve dramatically when she met multi-millionaire businessman Barrowman at 5 Hertford Street, the Mayfair private members’ club, some time in 2016.

The duo, who both have working-class Scottish roots, reportedly bonded over their similar rags-to-riches stories. Within months, she’d moved into his £120million mansion set on 37 acres on the Isle of Man. And in December 2018, Mone announced their engagement, sharing pictures of her eight carat diamond ring. ‘I said YES,’ she captioned a photo of the pair standing next to a Christmas tree.

Divorcee Barrowman was, from a financial point of view, highly eligible: a serial entrepreneur, whose Knox Group of businesses at one point claimed to employ 5,000 people globally and has assets of more than £1.35billion.

Yet the source of that loot is controversial. Last year, it emerged, for example, that the Group had, for most of the 2010s, operated flawed tax schemes that were sold to mostly middle-class workers. These people were told they could legally avoid paying hundreds of millions of pounds to the Inland Revenue. However, that claim turned out to be untrue.

When Barrowman’s schemes eventually unravelled, clients were left facing huge tax bills.

Many have been financially ruined and at least two former customers of his firms have since committed suicide.

After teaming up with Mone, Barrowman pursued a number of other ill-fated ventures. In 2017, they unveiled a property development in Dubai, involving two 40-floor skyscrapers that would form part of a luxury desert complex boasting high-end homes, a shopping centre and sports facilities.

However, the project was ‘cancelled’ at just 32 per cent completion. Lawyers for the couple insist that no investors lost money, saying their deposits were held in escrow and later refunded.

The following year, they launched a cryptocurrency in a bid to raise $80million, with the Baroness describing herself as ‘one of the biggest experts in cryptocurrency and blockchain’. By August of that year, the project had ‘flopped’, though all investors were refunded, according to the Sunday Times.

Rather less fortunate, when it came to getting money back, was the Department for Health and Social Care, which has of course had to resort to court action to regain the £122million wasted on the couple’s useless PPE equipment.

The big question now is whether taxpayers will ever actually get hold of the cash which, according to yesterday’s judgment, must be repaid by 4pm on October 15.

PPE Medpro’s coffers are, after all, bare: on Tuesday, the firm filed an application to enter administration, days after company filings revealed that it now boasts net assets of £666,025, after spending around £4.3million defending itself in court.

Government lawyers may try to regain some of the missing cash from Barrowman and his spouse. It emerged in November 2022 that he had extracted some £65million from the firm’s profits, transferring £29million to a trust fund set up to benefit Mone and her three children. Accessing that cash is likely to require yet more costly litigation.

Elsewhere, around £75million of the couple’s assets are currently frozen, under a court order obtained by the Crown Prosecution Service. It’s related to a National Crime Agency investigation into ‘suspected criminal offences’ concerning the supply of PPE which saw several of their properties raided by police in early 2022.

That freezing order covers a string of assets including a six-bedroom Belgravia townhouse, subsequently sold for £19million, a country estate on the Isle of Man and nine properties in Glasgow, owned through offshore companies. 

It also covers 15 accounts at upmarket banks Coutts, Hoares and Goldman Sachs. However, it only covers potential criminal litigation, which in theory prevents those assets being used to settle the current debt, which involves a civil claim.

For now, the NCA’s investigation remains ongoing. Barrowman and Mone continue to live high on the hog, denying allegations of criminality, and insisting they have done nothing wrong and that yesterday’s judgment was, to quote their unapologetic public statement ‘a travesty of justice’.

They are, in other words, still up for a fight. So wherever this ugly tale ends up, Baroness Bra’s hard-working lawyers are guaranteed to remain busy for a very long time to come.