‘Wonga Coup’ jailbird’s wife earns dough as cookie cook

This really takes the biscuit! her former SAS officer husband simon Mann was famously slung into prison for five and a half years following an alleged ‘Wonga Coup’ in 2004 against President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea.

Now Amanda Mann has launched her own financial coup, transforming herself into a domestic goddess by creating a baking empire and selling home-made cookies across the UK.

With Old Etonian simon once more on a confidential mission in Africa — ‘but not locked up,’ Amanda assures me — she has used the lockdown to productive effect to earn her own wonga (slang for a wad of cash).

Like so much in the couple’s extraordinary life together, there is a random element to her venture. ‘My niece and i were cooking chicken curries for our local GPs,’ explains Amanda.

‘The doctors, including a close friend who’s in A&E, were talking about their teams, so i asked how many were in the team. he said 30. so we started doing cookies.

‘They’d been given masses of food, but they hadn’t been given homemade food — best quality chocolate and all the gorgeous things that go into the cookies.’

Word soon spread near the Manns’ home on the edge of the New Forest, so Amanda began taking orders on social media. ‘But we couldn’t keep up with the orders on instagram. Then my niece, Anoushka, who’s only 14, said what we need is a website. Two weeks later, she’d built the website herself.

‘We’ve now got a big following in scotland, Newcastle, Birmingham, Wales and ireland,’ adds Amanda, who despatches the £18 boxes of 12 cookies in 100 per cent recyclable packaging.

One of the favourites among the Manns Cookies collection is the ‘Rude Box’. When correctly aligned, its cookies spell: ‘sod off Covid!’ she may even find time to pop one in the post to President Obiang who, remarkably, is now a Mann family friend.