Bra wars! Lady Mone hits back at peer poison
LINGERIE baroness Michelle Mone has launched a bitter attack on a group of fellow peers, accusing them of waging a campaign of hate towards her.
Baroness Mone of Mayfair, 44, was heralded as a British success story by Downing Street when her elevation to the House of Lords was announced in August last year.
She was handed the role of small business tsar on the strength of her remarkable rise from a Glasgow East End tenement to head of the internationally established Ultimo underwear company, which boasted a £40million turnover at its height.
But, in her first interview since being raised to the upper chamber, she complained that she has since
‘Is it because I’m a woman?’
become the target of a growing wave of vitriol among male peers.
Her appointment to the Lords was met not only with snide remarks about ‘Lady Knickers’ and ‘Baroness Bra’ but with outrage from other business leaders, who questioned her achievements in commerce.
Lady Mone told a Sunday newspaper she was genuinely shocked and mystified by the level of dislike her rise has stirred up among her fellow peers and captains of industry.
She said: ‘Is it because I’m a woman? Is it because I’m Scottish? Because I’m white? A mother of three? Is it because I’ve lost 8½ stone and I’m now slightly glamorous? It’s horrible to say but when I was 8½ stone heavier I never got this attention.’
She would not name names but said those criticising her ‘are men, every one of them’, adding: ‘So what does that tell you?’ She insisted fellow peers have, for the most part, been welcoming, ‘except a couple, who have not, who maybe don’t think you deserve to be there’.
After appearing alongside David Cameron to back the Union during the i ndependence referendum, Lady Mone said she received ‘physical threats’, prompting her tearful mother to beg her to stop.
She says she told her mother to ‘get up off that kitchen floor. I’m not going to stop, I don’t care’.
Lady Mone, who recently submitted her report on encouraging startup enterprise to the Government, is expected to give her maiden speech to the Lords today. Having waited ‘till the criticism dies down’, it is expected to be on the subjects of ‘women, mentoring and education’.