Once hailed as a working-class success story, Michelle Mone’s tale now reads like a cautionary fable of greed, privilege, and the corrosive power of impunity, says Dani Garvelli

“She is completely shameless and, when you have no shame, you can get quite far.” So said Financial Times journalist Jemima Kelly of the eponymous anti-hero of the BBC documentary The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone. Rewatching now, after the company Mone grifted for — a company her husband Doug Barrowman effectively owned — was ordered to repay £122m for its faulty Covid gowns, it feels like the perfect assessment of the way she bullshi**ed herself into the heart of Westminster.

Even now — when she should be meekly accepting her comeuppance — the Dennistoun-girl-made-bad is trying to brazen it out, reprising the role she has made her own: a gritty street fighter, who will use any weapon at her disposal to come out on top.

Instead of reflecting on last week’s judgement, she attacked Chancellor Rachel Reeves for having joked about waging a vendetta against her. Later, she invoked the ghost of TV presenter Caroline Flack. Flack killed herself after a slew of negative tabloid stories and online abuse. Mone based her entire career on courting the publicity she now spurns.

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In the beginning, there was an appeal to her shamelessness. We’d probably have called it “chutzpah” back then: a cheeky, middle-finger up to the establishment; a refusal to conform to rules which keep working class women in their place. She might have reminded us, briefly, of Julia Robert’s Erin Brockovich, with her blousy, no-nonsense attitude, and her squeezed- in, thrust-up bosom, which Mone falsely claimed was achieved with the help of one of her Ultimo bras.

Certainly, Mone’s brassiness........

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