Michelle Mone Was she a leading entrepreneur or a lucky baroness?

Throughout the stunning interviews the Conservative T peer Michelle Mone gave last month, finally admitting she had lied for years when denying her involvement in lucrative PPE deals, she still maintained a claim central to her remarkable rise.

- David Conn

Hands neatly placed in her lap, she was, she told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, a "very successful individual businesswoman".

Mone and her husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, are facing a long-running National Crime Agency investigation into allegations of bribery and fraud in their securing of £200m in government contracts for a company, PPE Medpro. Both now admit involvement in the con any, but deny any wrongdoing.

It is telling that the couple, in complete contradiction to their previous aggressive legal denials, are now claiming it was Mone's business experience and contacts that enabled them to deliver PPE.

"I've got 25 years' manufacturing experience, and that's one of the reasons I was put into the House of Lords," Mone told Kuenssberg in December. When Covid hit, she said: "I looked at Doug and I thought, we could really, really help here. And I just know all the key players in the far east. And I made the call to Michael Gove."

Barrowman, who also took part in the BBC interview, had made a similar claim in a film paid for by PPE Medpro that was released on YouTube a week earlier. "Michelle and I looked at each other one day and said, you know, we have strong contacts ... in the far east," he said. "Essentially, Michelle reached out to her contacts, we formed a consortium venture with a company based in Hong Kong and a company based in the UK."

Analysis of documents, however, raises questions about whether Mone really did use her contacts in the east Asia, as is now claimed - or whether her role was principally to exploit her Tory political connections to secure those lucrative contracts.

Her claims about her level of success as a businesswoman have also been disputed. Her company had been heading into insolvency and needed to be rescued shortly before she was given a peerage.