Baroness Bra’s mystery billionaire
He’s a Ferrari-loving tycoon with a £25m yacht (and once had the best bath in Manchester). Yet until this week, most people had never heard of him...
DOUG Barrowman liked to think of it as the best bathtub in Manchester. Setting him back £8,000, it had jets, whirlpools, optic lights and a grandstand view of the city skyline from the terrace of his luxury triplex penthouse apartment. The view was so grand it was easy to forget his neighbours had a pretty good view of him too. A few years ago a radio station ran a news item about a naked man seen near the roof of the swanky No 1 Deansgate building, whose residents included then Manchester United stars Ryan Giggs and Gary and Phil Neville. ‘That was probably me!’ beamed the Scottish wheeler and dealer.
These days Mr Barrowman, 51, boasts even more rarefied toys – Ferraris, fine art, a home amphitheatre… not to mention his lavish £25million super-yacht. Yet almost no one had heard of the multimillionaire until he made another addition to his portfolio. Last weekend he was seen hand-in-hand with Tory peer Michelle Mone.
Pausing for a suspiciously stagedlooking kiss outside a coffee shop in Wilmslow, Cheshire, the pair who grew up just a few miles across Glasgow from each other, made for a fascinating couple.
She was one of Scotland’s best known business figures – an incorrigible self-publicist, Twitteraddict, celebrity weight-watcher, lingerie mogul, television shopping channel saleswoman and, since last year’s controversial elevation by David Cameron, Baroness Mone of Mayfair.
He, for all his riches, was practically unknown, even in his native Rutherglen, Lanarkshire, where his Uncle Kenneth, 70, still lives in the Barrowman family home dating back 60 years. When asked about Doug Barrowman this week, he had to be reminded who he was.
To be fair, much of his nephew’s business affairs have been conducted in England – or the Isle of Man where he is a tax exile. Then again, he is hardly discreet about the millions he has made in the private equity business.
‘I’ve got five homes around the world and this is certainly the biggest,’ Mr Barrowman told a Channel 4 documentary team last year as the camera drooled over his mansion – the last word in arriviste opulence – on the Isle of Man.
Before the show was over, viewers learned that he had hand-made silk carpets, a floating palace named Turquoise with 13 permanent crew and ‘seven star’ service and a well-thumbed hardback book called Luxury Toys for Men.
‘I am just a big kid really,’ he told one interviewer. But one, apparently, who ticks all the right boxes for Baroness Mone, 45.
This week she took to Twitter to declare that ‘after 25 years I’ve finally met my match’ and signed off with a red heart emoji.
The early moves of the romance were played out at the exclusive London private members’ club 5 Hertford Street, where they were introduced at a business meeting. They clicked immediately.
‘When they got talking, they couldn’t believe how much they had in common,’ gushed a wellplaced source. ‘Slowly everyone else drifted out of the room until they were the only two left. Then they talked until the early hours of the morning.’
Two months later, their courtship was moving at a dizzying pace. The couple were cruising off the French Riviera on Turquoise, complete with its jet-skis, under water scooters and inevitable whirlpool tub.
More extravagant trysts have followed. Days ago they clinked champagne flutes at Mr Barrowman’s staff Christmas party in London’s Met Bar, then dined upstairs at Nobu, an eaterie favoured by the nouveau riche.
Their similar backgrounds are sure to give them plenty to talk about. While she grew up in a working class East End household, his beginnings are in Rutherglen and later Simshill, Glasgow, whose former residents include Sir Alex Ferguson and Carol Smillie.
But while she left school at 15 and was married by 19, he was the first member of his family to go to university. After graduating in accounting at Glasgow University he landed a job with private equity giant 3i. But even then his keen entrepreneurial instinct would not allow him to settle for straightforward salaried employment. He multiplied his monthly £2,000 salary several-fold by running a paintball game business on the side.
BUT it was after he moved to Manchester, at 25, and started his own investment company, Aston Ventures (named after his favourite car) that Mr Barrowman really began making waves. Targeting solid, oldeconomy manufacturing companies in industries such as engineering, furniture and cable-making, the profits rolled in.
Meanwhile, he developed a reputation for playing, as well as working hard. He is remembered in Manchester for his ubiquitous presence at boozy receptions.
‘Doug was like a whirlwind at parties,’ recalls Martin Regan, then editor of a North-West of England business magazine. ‘There was not a party I would go to and not see him there, sometimes three and four times a week, and he often had some gorgeous, younger woman on his arm.’
While there is no suggestion this socialising with the opposite sex occurred during his marriages, a Manchester-based corporate finance accountant remembers: ‘He had a reputation as a ladies’ man with an eye for a pretty girl. He liked to flirt and crack jokes, especially if she was a pretty blonde. He was always at cocktail parties, and was brash and boastful, but good fun.’ And yet, as Ultimo bras figurehead Baroness Mone’s star rose through her talent for publicity, Mr Barrowman’s considerably greater business interests went almost entirely unnoticed in his native Scotland.
His Isle of Man-based Knox Group is said to employ 5,000 staff around the world and have assets of some £1.2billion.
This week he declined to discuss his personal or professional life as sources close to him suggested he regards himself as a family man with a low-key lifestyle. Certainly, Mr Barrowman was a family man for many years. His first wife, Christine Stone, was a successful money broker 12 years his senior. They had two children, now in their twenties, a son who graduated from Oxford, and a daughter who attended a top stage school.
He has two more young children by his second wife Emma, a blonde interior designer from Cheshire – this time 12 years his junior. But in April, 2015, a fleet of furniture vans arrived at their chateau-like estate in the Isle of Man and they are now divorced. Friends insist he remains friendly with both ex-wives.
Claims of a low-key lifestyle may be hard to sustain, however, in view of his appearance last year on Million Pound Mega Yachts, a TV profile of the ocean-going egos behind some of the most extravagant vessels on the high seas. Mr Barrowman was one such ego – and more than happy to parade the trophies of his wealth. And so,
when the programme was broadcast in November 2015, viewers found Mr Barrowman aboard the 183ft Turquoise but dreaming of owning a 220ft one worth more than twice the money.
Why was it so important to him? ‘I just basically have a passion to build something bigger, really as an achievement for me personally,’ was his toe-curling response.
The documentary makers certainly got their money’s worth. In one revealing scene with yacht designer Jonny Horsfield, the tycoon asks why no helipad has been included in his latest drawings for the £50million vessel.
Would he be landing helicopters on it? Probably not, but that was hardly the point – £50million superyachts should have helipads.
‘You could say it’s more of a gimmick than a practical or usable thing,’ says Mr Barrowman. ‘But it’s one of the boxes that a yacht of this size should tick.’
Other soundbites were equally illuminating: ‘Not bad for a roughass Scottish git from Glasgow,’ he said at one point. And then: ‘You sometimes have to pinch yourself and say, “Do I really own this?”’
The Scot’s spending on monuments to his success has, then, clearly spiralled since the days when he would pose for local newspapers in his garish bath tub. Yet, even after the Channel 4 show aired, his public profile was almost non-existent.
Oddly, given his fondness for ostentation, he has never featured on the annual Rich List. Yet friends believe he ‘just creeps into the billionaire bracket’ – which, if true, would make him one of the five or six richest Scots alive.
Unquestionably his resources dwarf those of Baroness Mone, whose reported worth of £20million has been questioned by financial experts. He now has six homes – the others are in the South of France, Thailand, the Caribbean island of St Barts, Wales and London’s Belgravia – and a fleet of five Ferraris, including a 200mph F40 model, which could fetch £750,000. Then there is his art collection, including originals by Picasso, Dali and Chagall; artefacts fashioned by the fabled Manx designer Archibald Knox; and an array of watches said to be worth £5million. That said, behind the kid in the candy store there remains a shrewd business brain. While Mr Barrowman holidays on Turquoise for nine weeks a year, for the rest of the time it is available for charter at eye-watering prices. And there seemed little question of him splurging £50million on the new yacht before selling his old one. Indeed, his appearance on Million Pound Mega Yachts was probably motivated as much by his desire to sell up as to show off. At the Monaco Yacht Show, he even tries to interest the Mongolian Foreign Minister in the vessel, asking: ‘Have you got a boat?’ The minister witheringly responds that Mongolia is a land-locked country. Who can say where the romance of the Glasgow tycoons will lead. Has Baroness Mone really met her match in the squat, greying yacht owner? He will be aware, of course, of her colourful past – detailed in her autobiography and updated almost daily on Twitter. He will know how effectively she punched above her company’s financial weight to market the Ultimo push-up bra, employing first the current wife of Rod Stewart, then the ex-wife.
HE knows, no doubt, that she posed in Ultimo lingerie herself, upsetting exhusband Michael, who later infuriated her when she discovered that he was seeing one of their employees. The businessman has almost certainly heard the stories, perhaps from the horse’s mouth, of how she scratched Mr Mone’s Porsche, cut up his clothes and put laxatives in his coffee.
Lastly, he will be alert to Baroness Mone’s duties in the House of Lords where, to the spluttering indignation of some peers, she now sits. Not that these appear too onerous. The latest figures show she was there for three days in October, one in November and for a total of 32 sitting days out of a maximum of 148 in the past year.
Yet, strolling around hand in hand this week, both appeared carefree and besotted. Admittedly their love lives have recently been chequered. It is only a short time since Mr Barrowman spoke fondly of his wife Emma and the blissful holidays they shared with the children aboard Turquoise.
His new girlfriend, meanwhile, recently broke up with Barbadosbased golfer Stefan Soroka, having gone so far as to say she would be happy to have a child with him.
Now there is talk that Baroness Mone will soon be installed in his various homes and Mr Barrowman is telling friends he is ‘openminded’ about the possibility of marriage – though he does not want to become a father again.
It remains to be seen whether the match is real, the egos blend and their tastes for life’s little luxuries are in tandem – or whether it is a fleeting liaison.
But one thing is certain. Mr Barrowman’s days as Scotland’s overlooked tycoon are over.