Michelle Mone (again)

[Fide]

Baroness Mone proving what a powerhouse she is:

[Gordon EF]

Baroness Mone proving what a powerhouse she is:

Truly one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

[Bishop Briggs]

Truly one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

With an honorary doctorate from Paisley University!

[Crossbill]

We all paid her for these useful insights.

[Father Ted]

Baroness Mone proving what a powerhouse she is:

I could have told you that for nothing.

She is an attention seeking moron. It offends me that I contribute to her upkeep.

Still settling in well, on gravy train and wasting our cash like the rest

[RedRob72]

I could have told you that for nothing.

She is an attention seeking moron. It offends me that I contribute to her upkeep.

Still settling in well, on gravy train and wasting our cash like the rest

Have you read the other key recommendations from the report!?

Eg. The Government and the banks should provide more support for businesses in gaining access to loan facilities.

Who would have thought that eh!? What a complete f*ckin waste of money!

[Jacksgranda]

Have you read the other key recommendations from the report!?

Eg. The Government and the banks should provide more support for businesses in gaining access to loan facilities.

Who would have thought that eh!? What a complete f*ckin waste of money!

What does that actually mean, anyway?

[strichener]

What does that actually mean, anyway?

She must be a Rangers supporter.

[RedRob72]

She must be a Rangers supporter.

Fairly sure she's previously aligned herself to our neighbours in the East of the City.

[strichener]

Fairly sure she's previously aligned herself to our neighbours in the East of the City.

Aye that works as well. What with all the public money being used to indirectly support them via dodgy land deals etc.

[John Lambies Doos]

Has she got her tits out in the Lords yet? If not, pointless thread

[Geedub-MFC]

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/article1674958.ece?shareToken=16d327b96aa1ff316050cc19710d156e

Michelle Mone hobbles into the bar at the Connaught hotel in London, radiating glamour, despite a heavily bandaged foot — she fell over outside her Mayfair home and has broken several bones.

This is Baroness Mone’s first interview since being raised to the upper chamber and I have been given strict instructions not to talk about anything other than the report she has just conducted for Iain Duncan Smith at the Department for Work and Pensions. There is a PR stationed beside us to enforce this rule.

Fortunately the woman who once smashed her husband’s Porsche and put laxatives in his coffee after they split is not one to obey orders. She orders a large glass of chardonnay and begins to pour her heart out without restraint, until, at the end of our time together, she is grabbing my arm, wide-eyed and wounded, and asking me “honestly” why I think everyone has it in for her.

It is an interesting question. Mone, 44, ought to be heralded as a British success story; a woman who made it from a tenement in the East End of Glasgow to found a successful company: at its height, Ultimo, her lingerie company, had a £40m turnover.

No doubt that is what the Conservatives had in mind when, fresh from her support for the “no” campaign in the Scottish referendum, they made her the government’s small-business tsar and briefed her to look at ways to encourage new start-ups in deprived areas.

Instead she has become the target of a growing wave of vitriol. Her appointment to the Lords was met not only with snide remarks about “Lady Knickers” and “Baroness Bra” but with outrage from other business leaders, who questioned what she had achieved, and with claims that her other businesses are going bust (sorry).

“You tell me,” she cries, when I ask her why she is getting so much stick. She thinks the turning point was the Scottish referendum, when she received “physical threats” for appearing alongside David Cameron and backing the union.

At one point her mum “was crying in the kitchen one day saying, ‘You’re receiving threats, please stop this now.’” She told her mother to “get up off that kitchen floor. I’m not going to stop, I don’t care.” But the attacks have not stopped since; and she does care, desperately, and between mouthfuls of wine and handfuls of crisps, it all comes tumbling out.

“Is it because I’m a woman? Is it because I’m Scottish? Because I’m white? A mother of three?” she asks. “Is it because I’ve lost 8½ stone and I’m now slightly glamorous? It’s horrible to say but when I was 8½ stone heavier I never got this attention.”

One thing she is sure about is that those who are criticising her “are men, every one of them, so what does that tell you?”

Mone, I am learning, is addicted to melodrama and it is captivating, like finding oneself inside a Dynasty plotline. Part of the reason she gets such a hard time is, I suspect, because she tends to speak before she thinks.

This article was shared by a Times and Sunday Times member.

Recent media blunders include going on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and saying she “loved” her obsessive compulsive disorder because it allowed her to work harder. She denies this interpretation. Or when she tweeted a picture of a top spread out in a government Jaguar with the caption, “The things you do . . . in government car drying my travel top . . . love it so much.” It triggered howls of protest about wasting taxpayers’ money (but she denies writing it).

Which may explain why her report, which was announced with such fanfare last year, was released with none whatsoever last week. She insists it was brought forward because the date clashed with the EU referendum vote (she will not tell me where she stands on that issue, though she had “totally decided a long time ago”) and because the ministers “loved it” so much.

She has been working on the review for six months, travelling “from Land’s End to John o’ Groats”, going to “deprived areas” and recommending, among other things, easier access to start-up loans and doubling the amount of time for which the government supports new businesses — but even this has been set upon by her foes in Scotland.

I am about to ask her if she reads her bad press when she explodes: “You can criticise all you want, Mr Labour Nobody, what have you done? Did you get your backside out there for seven months and interview over 100 people? Did you work your arse off? So don’t criticise me.”

It is hard to imagine this shimmering mass of rage and vulnerability in the House of Lords. Though she has, I notice, undergone a subtle rebranding. Gone are the tumbling platinum curls, the Swarovski crystals and the cleavage overspill. Today her hair is in a shoulder-length bob, she is demurely dressed in black, and her nails painted a conservative taupe, though her PR team gave us a “before” picture.

She says her fellow peers have, for the most part, been welcoming, “except a couple, who have not, who maybe don’t think you deserve to be there”. The PR tries to cut her off. “Sorry, but I’m just being honest,” she shrugs.

Have they done anything overt? “No,” she continues, “but you just know.” The PR butts in again but Mone is not having any of it. “Sorry, but I’m not going to do it, I won’t give an interview and say that I haven’t had it, because I have.”

She has been putting off her maiden speech until “the criticism dies down” and is set to give it tomorrow on the subject of “women” and “mentoring” and “education”. She says she is terrified. What bothers her the most about the bad press is that she is quite rightly proud of what she has achieved.

It is hard to imagine a more deprived childhood than hers; she slept in a cupboard in the family’s one-bedroom flat — her father cut the end off the bed so it would fit — and says they did not “have a bath or a shower” until she was 12 years old.

Her brother died of spina bifida when she was 10 and her father was wheelchair-bound with a tumour. She escaped by modelling and then got a job at a brewery after fabricating qualifications on her CV.

She met Michael when she was 17, and they married after she became pregnant with their first child at 19. At 24 she bought the European rights to a silicone bra pad and together they built Ultimo with a string of patents (the frontless bra, the backless bra, the frontless, backless bra — you get the picture) and a host of celebrity endorsements.

The company was doing well until the marriage collapsed in spectacular fashion when Mone accused her husband of cheating with their marketing manager.

She has talked about this in excruciating detail (including physical fights and private detectives) and says the decision to sell Ultimo to a Sri Lanka-based lingerie group in 2014 was made partly because “it was part of my ex-husband and I wanted to get away from it”.

Meanwhile, Mone has been linked to a string of reality TV stars and is now, rather wonderfully, in a relationship with a golf pro based at Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados. She will not divulge details but says she is “the happiest I have ever been”.

She dismissed rumours that her current business interests, which include a fake-tan line and a jewellery range, are failing and says she has plans to launch “four major new businesses later this year”. And she says, with a look of bewilderment: “Ultimo was extremely successful for 15 years, then I had a really bad divorce. I still sold it and made a lot of money, so I think when they class me as a failure — I’m not the most successful,

I’m not the biggest — but you can’t say I’ve not succeeded.”

I have long settled into my role of supportive girlfriend after one too many wines, so when she says she wants to ask me a question and that I must be “honest, because fair’s fair”, I am bracing myself to produce something more; an inspirational quote, or, God help me, a hug.

“Why do you think they try to make me sound so bad?” she sighs.

Perhaps, I say, it is because you are too honest: you say how you feel. “Is that wrong?” No. I pat her hand. “Then why is she here?” she points at the PR, who is now red-faced and squirming.

And the truth is, I really do not know, because I do not think a concrete dam could stop Michelle Mone pouring her heart out.

[speckled tangerine]

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/article1674958.ece?shareToken=16d327b96aa1ff316050cc19710d156e

That is one of the saddest things I have read in years and I mean saddest as in the context of pity. She has absolutely no self awareness at all. She's heading for the looney bin.

She clearly has no real friends and it reminds me of Gazza when the fairweather types like Evans & Baker fucked off when it all went wrong.

[Sergeant Wilson]

I Google her name and weight loss. The articles, with quotes, vary. She says in them at various times she has lost 6,7 and 8 stone. None of the pictures of her show someone who could afford to lose 6 stone never mind 8. She is an inveterate liar.

[welshbairn]

I Google her name and weight loss. The articles, with quotes, vary. She says in them at various times she has lost 6,7 and 8 stone. None of the pictures of her show someone who could afford to lose 6 stone never mind 8. She is an inveterate liar.

No, it's all true, absolutely nothing to do with her flogging dodgy slimming pills. It's all here, have to admit I couldn't read it all but developed a bit of sympathy for hubby.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2964286/Spurned-jealous-husband-d-lost-six-stone-Ultimo-bra-tycoon-MICHELLE-MONE-drink-binge-eating-brutal-fallout-marriage.html

[Mark Connolly]

Those diet pills were amazing, I remember hearing her talk about them.

All she was doing was eating less, eating healthier, drinking less, exercising more and taking the diet pills, and the weight was just tumbling off!

[MarkoRaj]

She is the biggest arsehole in the world

[Mr Rational]

Evidence please.

[Mortar Bored]

I really really fucking hate the Tories.

But I think I hate Mone more.

This, exactly this. Hate is an extremely strong word that I really don't like to use but I hate & despise her.

As already said, she has completely no self awareness.

She thinks she can spout her bile and then give the big "woe is me" when questioned on it.

Other than that I'm pretty meh about her.

[Mark Connolly]

She is the biggest arsehole in the world

Evidence please.

Try this article for a start.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/article1674958.ece?shareToken=16d327b96aa1ff316050cc19710d156e