Why does everyone hate this woman?; Rod Stewart called her a

THERE are snatches of hate in Michelle Mone's in-box. When it comes to venomous emails, most people would tend to delete immediately. But she seems to almost cherish hers, particularly those referring to her recent spat with Rod Stewart and his girlfriend Penny Lancaster, reading them over and over, letting them burn blisters in her mind. "Look at this one," she says, pulling one up on her desktop. "This says 'user'. 'My daughter was looking to purchase her wedding underwear from Ultimo. Not any more. I think it's disgusting the way you used Penny Lancaster when you were a poor outfit, then elbowed her out when you could afford someone with a bigger name. Who do you think you are? You obviously used your connection with Rod Stewart for the best publicity it could bring. Shame on you, you grubby little woman.'"

There are others too, each of them preserved, recalled and read out, as if in some kind of penance. One customer tells her she used to be "thrilled" that Mone was a fellow Weegie - now she is "ashamed". Another says he hopes to see her in the street "and punch your lights out for what you've done to Rod Stewart's bird."

"I've heard," says yet another, "about your current decision to replace Penny Lancaster with Rachel Hunter. Whoever did this to Miss Lancaster must be the meanest, most vicious businessperson alive. I don't know either of these women, but I hope your company goes bankrupt."

There are, Mone tells me, just about 15 of these among the thousands of standard enquiries and compliments she normally gets, but they are the ones she dwells on. "Now, what I would like to say to these people is, if they had their own company and they were up against Wonderbra, Gossard, all these massive companies and they had people contacting them like this, what would they do in my position? What would they do to keep all these people employed? People forget that we actually do gorgeous underwear. Underwear that fits like a dream. And these people are mental."

MJM International's announcement that it was replacing Penny Lancaster with Rachel Hunter - her boyfriend Rod Stewart's ex-wife - was, depending on your point of view, either an act of bold and savage genius or one of careless stupidity. Like a lot of the company's decisions, it was probably both at the same time. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Mone has been dragging her company out of the bog it had sunk into two years ago.

Last year it made a small profit of (pounds) 51,646, decreasing its short-time debt pile from (pounds) 1.5 million to (pounds) 1m and pulling it into the red. This year, she says, with Hunter in straps, is already bringing bigger sales. But though MJM and the Ultimo bra have received a glut of publicity over the past few years, it is not the world-league brand Mone quite wants it to be. It is still effectively only a "small company", able to file abbreviated financial statements under the Companies' Act Provisions.

The jury is still out on whether Mone, who once claimed she was aiming at a turnover of (pounds) 100m is really the smart businesswoman she once seemed. But then, she says, she never promised (pounds) 100m, exactly. "Quotes get twisted around. When I said years ago, my dream turnover was (pounds) 100m, I never said that's what we were going to be doing, that was my dream They quote me on it, 'Oh Michelle's fallen short of her 100m'."

Mone clearly has an uncontrollable mouth on her - a tongue ruled by her emotions. Before I had switched my tape on, she warned me that the one subject I was not to broach was Lancaster and Hunter, but minutes later she seemed to be incensed enough to go there without any prompting. It is Rod Stewart's comments about her being a "manipulative cow" that rankle most.

She recalls finding her 11-year-old daughter crying in the kitchen. "People think that you're just so hard and you can take everything. I'm a human like everyone. I've got feelings. I'm a mother. It upsets me. I was upset that morning and I had to go on a plane and read all those horrible things."

MONE is a tall, full-bodied pear of a woman. Bustling round the design studio, she calls her mother (who works in returns) into a dispute over the lipstick she is wearing for the photos. She's worried about her image, concerned she might come across as a little bit tarty, that people might say, "Look what she's doing for publicity now."

Publicity is her preoccupation. She appears to love it and hate it. "I'm a businesswoman," she says, "I make bras. I think people think I'm publicity hungry and I go out and I chase the press to write about me. That's not the case. If I wanted to be well-known and famous I would have chosen to be an actress. Chosen to be a singer. I chose to start a business. Because I always wanted a business. I always wanted to be in control of my own destiny and employ people and offer a service. I've wanted my own business since I was about ten years old."

The rags-to-riches legend runs thus: when Mone was a child, growing up in a flat without a bathroom in Glasgow's East End, success to her was "having a switchboard, having a phone, having a secretary and all that". It was being in the Evening Times. Now, at 32, she has three children, a 15-year marriage to Michael Mone, who is also a managing director of MJM. She has felt the ups and downs of what business really means.