The Michelle Mone interview was the worst PR comeback since Prince Andrew

The Baroness and her husband put on a humiliating public display in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, writes Sean O’Grady. What were they thinking?

Eventually, Mone did concede that she would indeed be a beneficiary if Barrowman pre-deceased her, heaven forbid (BBC Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg)

I’m not sure who’s advising Baroness (Michelle) Mone and her hubby Doug Barrowman these days.

Hannah Ingram-Moore maybe, who, during a catastrophic interview earlier this year with Piers Morgan, destroyed the charitable foundation set up in the name of Captain Sir Tom Moore, her dear old dad and national treasure?

Or maybe Lady Mone was recently at a perfectly normal shooting party and bumped into his former royal highness the Duke of York, a chap always ready with a few useful tips about getting out of a fix.

Whoever is at the ignoble lady’s elbow these days isn’t serving her interests terribly well. Presumably advised to do so as part of some PR charm offensive, the pair offered themselves up to Laura Kuenssberg for an interview to explain how they’d been scapegoated over the coronavirus personal protective equipment (PPE) affair, and how the mess (which wasn’t really a mess, because nothing was wrong anyway) was all everyone’s else’s fault and nothing to do with them.

Perhaps they, or their unnamed advisers, had been sent the trails for Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning show, during which she wanders around her busy studio, speaks to the camera as if to a guest and declares “I’m just going to be fair… but we need some answers”.

Well, the public does need some answers about where the £200m the taxpayers spent on PPE made by a company associated with Mone’s husband went; what happened to the £60m profits; and what their role in all of this really was. The problem for Mr & Mrs Dodgy PPE was that Kuenssberg was indeed scrupulously fair, didn’t interrupt or talk over them, and let them have their say. As the old phrase goes, she gave them more than sufficient high-quality rope with which to hang what remains of their reputations.

We got at some of the truth. And the truth, and what they had to say about it was disastrous – for them. Just like with Emily Maitlis’s encounter with Prince Andrew, all Kuenssberg needed to do with such a pair of self-entitled, deluded and greedy personalities was to sit there and pitch some straightforward queries about the facts, with a modicum of polite persistence.

Back in 2019, Prince Andrew arrogantly believed that he would clear the air once and for all about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and end the controversies. As was to be predicted, it didn’t quite turn out that way. Neither has the same tactic assisted Mone and Barrowman.

Mone can’t help being rich, fashionable, beautiful and glamorous – but the extravagant hairdo, the all-black designer outfit that made her look like she was wearing a leather catsuit and the fingers dripping with rocks didn’t help her win over a sceptical public.

Time and again Kuenssberg put to her the simple fact that the £60m or so in profit made from the deal had gone into family trusts for the general benefit of Mone, Barrowman and their two lots of kids from past relationships. Unlike the much-maligned Big Pharma and the Covid vaccines, this was no not-for-profit enterprise.

When Mone and her bloke responded to “the call that went out” they wanted to do some good – including for their family unit. Time and again Mone denied it was ever her money (technically correct but not the point) and argued she’d not personally get anything out of it if the pair divorced (again right, but not what the public is bothered about). Kuenssberg kept her cool and simply challenged her on the undisputed reality of what a family trust is for.

Eventually, Mone did concede that she would indeed be a beneficiary if Barrowman pre-deceased her, heaven forbid. Obviously, the various kids would also, depending on circumstance. So what was the point of denying the obvious, Michelle?

The couple’s case is that they did only one thing wrong – tell the press that they had nothing to do with the £200m of contracts for PPE awarded by the NHS to the consortium called PPE Medpro involving Barrowman. The “press”, of course, really means the public, whose cash it was in the first place – but that was a handy obfuscation. It was, Mone pleaded, just one “mistake” (never honestly described as a “lie”). As Kuenssberg reminded her, it was one mistake endlessly repeated, with threats to sue for libel accompanying.

In mitigation, Mone argued it was something she was obliged to do to protect her family. Also, her advisers told her it was okay. An unnamed person in the Cabinet Office informed her she needn’t declare the interest in the House of Lords register, so she didn’t, despite the rules being crystal clear. It was the government that set up the silly VIP lane for the well-connected in the first place, and Michael Gove was, Mone implied, at fault for taking her call so enthusiastically.

Now, she almost blubs, she and Barrowman have been made scapegoats for everyone else. Over an excruciating 20 minutes, Baroness Mone gave us a spectacular display of half-baked excuses, grievances, deflection, evasion and blame-throwing unworthy of the Lord’s Day. No shame; no remorse; no sense of public duty: just a bottomless well of self-pity. She really ought to be called Baroness Moan.

As so often, there remain questions that can’t be easily answered while criminal proceedings and civil litigation actions by the National Crime Agency and the Department of Health are live. But we would all be interested to know about all the communications that passed between Baroness Mone and Michael Gove and his fellow ministers. We’d be delighted to find out why the hospital gowns supplied by PPE Medpro were rejected. More than anything, we’d like to know the chances of us getting our money back.

I’ve no idea what is happening inside the legal proceedings but the sudden interest in conducting their defence in the public domain via the despised media – Mone recently released a bogus, paid-for documentary purporting to tell the story – suggests that things aren’t going that well, legally speaking.

It’s the same approach used by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – shifting the battleground to one that might be more sympathetic. If so, then that – and not misleading the press – is the worst mistake this sorry couple ever made.