The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone (UK 2025)

This is a two part documentary made for the BBC and currently on iPlayer in the UK. Whether it has been bought by overseas broadcasters/streamers is unclear at the moment. Why is it important and worth exploring in some detail? It has some international aspects but essentially it’s a British story that in terms of its narrative elements makes me think of a number of classic British cinema features as well as the women at the centre of popular TV soaps or drama series. The central ‘character’ in the drama is Michelle Mone, a working-class young woman from the East End of Glasgow who became a business success story with her lingerie company and it’s Ultimo ‘cleavage bra’ and eventually a form of celebrity figure who featured prominently in the media before becoming a supporter of the Conservative Party. In 2015 David Cameron made her the ‘start-up tsar’ and then a life peer. Many things happened in her personal life and her business life and during the COVID pandemic Mone became associated with the ‘VIP lane’ which enabled various Tory supporters to access an ‘inside’ route to bid for contracts to supply PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) for medical staff working with COVID patients. Mone and her second husband were identified as such by investigative reporters but in 2025 the case against her has still not been fully resolved. Mone is thought to have earned something like £29 million directly from the company PPE Medpro which was awarded a substantial contract of over £200 million.

This isn’t the only TV programme or other media publication about Mone but it is a high profile production and a good example of a documentary narrative for mainstream programming. In formal terms it is a conventional documentary presented as two one hour episodes, though on iPlayer it streams as a single narrative (but still with the annoying TV repetition of the same ‘table of contents’ at the end of Episode 1 and the start of Episode 2). There are various ‘talking heads’, several with  very entertaining stories to tell, and a great deal of archive footage. Michelle Mone’s talent for publicity means that there is a wide range of archive material referring to her early career when she was a model helping to sell cars and boxing bouts through her sex appeal. There is a commentary throughout but in this case the ‘voice of God’ on the soundtrack is delivered by a woman with a soft Scottish accent. Sophie Kennedy Clark is a Scottish actor whose voice is not too dissimilar to Mone’s, allowing the story to develop almost seamlessly, at least in the early part.

The two episodes are slightly different in feel with the first offering what the Guardian‘s reviewer Rebecca Nicholson refers to as a tale of “tits and assets”. She goes on to suggest that it is also “a story of culture and politics, and a broad portrait of an era, as well as a focused portrait of a person”. This is perceptive on both counts. The marketing of the bra certainly presents the viewer with a display of (mainly young) women demonstrating what the bra does for their cleavage, now more on display in the late 1990s. At the same time it presents Mone herself as the girl from the Glasgow tenements now enjoying the limelight and being linked to the explosion of ‘girl power’ towards the end of the Brit Pop era. Conversely, episode two is the investigative reporting story digging into Mone’s treatment of her staff, her lies and deceptions and the scandal of the waste of tax-payers’ money during COVID. The political/cultural background refers to her role as part of the No Campaign in the Scottish Referendum on Independence. I particularly like the inclusion of the story about her support for the Union and her vow to leave Scotland if Independence became a reality. This ties in with her choice of title when she became a Life Peer. Convention suggests that these titles should relate to the new peer’s origins. But Mone had left Scotland by 2015 and she was introduced as Baroness Mone of Mayfair or ‘Lady Layabout of Mayfair’ as one press correspondent put it.

Overall I think that the director Erica Jenkin, producer Lesley Shields and the rest of the creative team from Rogan Productions have done an excellent job of introducing a wide audience to this story. Rogan Productions has a strong track record of documentaries on both celebrities and major historical events. They range from one on Princess Diana and ‘that interview’ to Uprising (2021), the three linked documentaries about key moments of the political struggle by Black communities in South London in 1981 from a team headed by Steve McQueen. And if there is any discussion about these as TV rather than ‘film’ documentaries, it’s worth noting that Rogan Productions are based in Wardour Street in London, the street most associated in the UK with Hollywood and British Cinema.

As a viewer I was fascinated and repelled in equal measure by this documentary. I’m always interested in the stories of working-class people ‘making good’ but I’m suspicious of many entrepreneurs and I’ve never watched The Apprentice, a programme that Mone seems to have been associated with in some way. But I do think the documentary has something to say about British politics and social/cultural attitudes. I noted a possible meme whereby the producers here referenced Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s visit to Glasgow as the Clyde shipbuilding industry was collapsing partly because of her policies (and 15 year-old Michelle Mone was leaving school without qualifications). Thatcher’s speech is linked to the heart-wrenching sight of cranes in the shipyard keeling over and falling to the ground. Another rather poignant move was to relate the history of Mone’s childhood (told by a schoolfriend) against a music track using ‘Anji’, the magical guitar instrumental originally by Davey Graham in 1961 and covered by Glaswegian Bert Jansch in 1965. I couldn’t tell which version it was.

If you have access to iPlayer, the documentary is available for 12 months. I was very much engaged by this but I’d like the question of the lost £29 million to be resolved soon. Here’s a trailer from BBC News about the story. There are more from various different sources.

The short iPlayer trailer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0lcty2m