MICHELLE Mone is ready to talk! She wants to set the record straight and stop everyone from being so horrible about her. So she’s put on her best silk blouse and headed out into the middle of a field on the Isle of Man on a windy day. As you do.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says, in her best wracked-with-emotion voice. “Do you want five minutes?” asks her interviewer. She walks off, her fresh blow-dry bouncing in the breeze. The grilling will not go ahead today.
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Maybe she could have thought about putting on a coat. Or not doing the interview in a field.
A cynic might suggest she wanted to convey personal vulnerability in this scene, but it would be wrong to approach The Interview: Baroness Mone and the PPE Scandal with such cynicism.
Just because this made-for-YouTube film has been paid for by PPE Medpro – the consortium for which her husband was chairman and which is at the centre of two legal actions, one civil and one criminal – does not mean we cannot learn from it. We can learn which story the couple have decided to stick with, for starters.
The interviewer will try again another day. In the meantime he’s got an audience with Doug Barrowman, who was Mone’s fiancé when he led the operation to supply PPE through Medpro during the pandemic.
Barrowman now seems quite proud of the role he played in doing this, even boasting of saving the Government £100 million by providing masks and gowns at knock-down prices, which makes it all the more curious that his lawyers previously insisted he “never had any role or function in PPE Medpro”.
However, we haven’t just jumped straight into a sit-down with Doug. First we are reminded that lots of other Tory MPs and peers accessed the now-notorious “VIP lane” to recommend suppliers of PPE at a time when the UK Government was scrambling for supplies.
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All of this seems a bit dodgy, and yet they have not faced as much scrutiny as Mone over the deals they helped secure. Carol Vorderman doesn’t seem to despise them as much either. Is this fair? The question is left hanging, just like the boom microphone in that field.
We hear that the UK Government ended up ordering far too much PPE, and the suggestion that it may have then started looking for “technicalities” in order to reject items that had already been paid for and delivered. We hear a lot of technical information about single-wrapped and double-wrapped gowns, CE marks and sterilisation.
The wind has died down by the time Doug is interviewed on the patio but he’s taken the sensible step of putting on a little beige jacket. As he speaks we can hear the tinkling of a nearby water feature, which is welcome respite given the rest of the soundtrack consists of stressful pulsing, threatening rumbles and scary bangs.
To make things less scary for vulnerable Michelle, the decision is made to take her on a trip home to Glasgow, where she is universally beloved and therefore will feel more comfortable. We’ve been assured that she is a “very very good and astute businesswoman,” but “there is no doubt that she’s suffering from some kind of mental breakdown.
She can’t focus on anything. She’s totally distracted, you can’t even get her to read something and retain it.” How convenient.
She’s not so distracted that she can’t manage to shoehorn in an anecdote about working in a sweet shop as a child, and cracking down on peers who were pinching from the pick ’n’ mix. In case you missed it, Michelle Mone is anti-theft and always has been.
Finally, she’s ready to be grilled. Not only is she wearing a blazer this time but there’s a fire roaring in the background. The production team, who are definitely not playing along with anything here, have learned from their earlier mistakes.
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So why is she speaking out now? “We’re sick and tired of reading all the lies every single day in the media,” she said, which is an odd thing to say, because presumably her lawyers weren’t telling those lies without her permission. Asked how she felt when the pandemic began, she shoots back, deadpan: “That I can fix it. I knew I could fix it.”
She’s cheesed off that all those other dodgy politicians mentioned earlier in the film aren’t being investigated in the way she is, clearly seeing it as a trivial matter that they weren’t recommending businesses being run by their soon-to-be spouses.
She says Matt Hancock (below) is lying about her being aggressive and threatening in phone conversations – she’s just feisty! And she’s not doing well just now, so if she comes across as a bit too feisty in this interview then it’s not her fault.
“I made an error in what I said to the press,” she says, because “I didn’t want the pain for my family, through the media.” Quite rich from the “astute businesswoman” who relied on an endless stream of tacky media stunts to promote her lingerie business.
Try as she might to wrestle back control of the narrative with this film, it’s hard to imagine many will come away with any sympathy.
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