Don’t moan, Michelle... just do a good deed
A MID all their troubles, Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman have called in an expensive team of people to help salvage their reputation.
They include solicitor Dan Morrison, whose website boasts he is ‘known for his aggressive approach to litigation’; Dan Jukes, who used to be Nigel Farage’s head of communications; and Arthur Lancaster, described by The Times as ‘a longtime business associate of the Duke of York’. With that lot on board, what could possibly go wrong?
Most people employ PRs to help make them more famous. But Mone and Barrowman are the opposite: after too long in the headlines, they yearn for obscurity.
Might I suggest a much cheaper way of going about it? To change your name by deed poll costs only £48.32 — a real bargain, in these inflationary times.
Michelle Mone, Doug Barrowman, Dan Morrison, Dan Jukes and Arthur Lancaster could all change their names and the bill would still only be £241.60, all-in.
At the moment, the names of Barrowman and
Mone are just too memorable. Michelle Mone’s name, with its lascivious mix of money and moaning, belongs to the grand tradition of over-the-top comic characters, like Penelope Pitstop or Cruella de Vil.
And Doug Barrowman’s name is similarly satirical, reminding one of a minor character in a novel by Charles Dickens who digs up his ill-gotten gains at dead of night and carts them away in a wheelbarrow.
Like it or not, we judge people by their names. They have a subconscious effect on how we regard them. We are more likely to trust someone called Playfair and to avoid someone called Savage.
Sometimes, people’s surnames contribute to their notoriety. For instance, one of the most notorious of all murderers is Dr Crippen.
Yet, as killers go, he wasn’t all that evil. He was a timid, mildmannered man who murdered one person.
Had he been called Dr Smith, or, dare I say it, Dr Brown, he would barely be remembered today. But there’s something about the name Dr Crippen that sounds terribly creepy, and that’s why he still merits his place in the Chamber of Horrors.
The same goes for Lucrezia Borgia, Al Capone, Rasputin, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kray twins: their names all sound as though they were invented for a Hammer Horror movie.
Psychologists have a phrase, nominative determinism, for the phenomenon whereby people gravitate to professions bestsuited to their names. Hence, if you are called, say, Tailor, you are more likely to go into the fashion industry and if you’re called Plowman you’re more likely to become a farmer.
The theory of nominative determinism has been famously borne out on Radio 4’s Gardeners Question Time over the years, with panellists including Bob Flowerdew, Clay Jones and Pippa Greenwood. And, in the world of athletics, Usain Bolt became a sprinter, Ricky Lightfoot became a mountain runner and Marina Stepanova was a hurdler.
Even if your surname isn’t directly related to your calling, it can always suit it, in an impressionistic way: Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Llewelyn- Bowen and Donald Trump are all perfectly named. It’s hard to imagine the Most Rev Alfred Hitchcock, Archbishop of Canterbury, or Laurence LlewelynBowen the allin wrestler, or Donald Trump the ballet dancer.
In the world of showbusiness, there’s been a long tradition of people swapping their dull names for something more glamorous. For Richard Starkey, John Simon Ritchie, Mark Sinclair, David Evans, and Stuart Goddard, the trick seemed to work: they soon found fame as, respectively, Ringo Starr, Sid Vicious, Vin Diesel, The Edge, and Adam Ant. Would they have risen quite so high had they stuck with their old names?
NOW Michelle Mone wants to do the same trick in reverse. Luckily for her, she already has a nondescript name to fall back on. She was born Michelle Allan, and only became Michelle Mone when she married her first husband, Michael Mone. So my advice to her is to revert to Michelle Allan and hope for the best.
Of course, it doesn’t help that she is popularly known as Baroness Bra: nicknames are even harder to shake off.
At school I used to be called Hovis, echoing the advertising slogan ‘ Don’t say Brown say Hovis’. Who knows? If only I had stuck with the name Craig Hovis, I might now be headlining at Glastonbury.