You can’t turn on the telly or fire up the internet these days without stumbling across some celebrity or other baring their soul in a glossily produced documentary. Three hours, was it, of David Beckham – taking us from talented nipper playing keepy-uppy to grizzled paterfamilias wiping down his barbecue in wistful retirement? Or Renaissance: A Film, which showed Beyonce as flawed and human in the same way and with much the same aim as the Bible shows Jesus Christ as flawed and human. Or there was that interminable Robbie Williams doc, in which – for no reason that was completely obvious – he spent about four hours sitting glumly in his underpants in front of his MacBook, watching footage of his own earlier career.

The trade-off here is that in the interests of access these supposed documentaries are blurring the line between telly journalism and PR promo. The Beckham film jiggled the timeline here and there, and our hero’s alleged extramarital affair with Rebecca Loos was treated (without any direct reference to it being made) like some sort of natural disaster sent to test this blameless family man. The Beyonce documentary, meanwhile, made much of her debt to the gay community, but didn’t mention her taking tens of millions of dollars to play in Dubai, where they chuck gay people in jail. I don‘t suppose most Beyonce and Beckham fans will have noticed, still less minded, that these documentaries were made by the subjects’ own production companies.

A self-exculpatory documentary on YouTube just doesn’t have quite the cachet of an international co-pro with Netflix

Well, maybe one of those viewers will have noticed. One imagines that viewer, wrapped huffily in an ermine robe on the sofa at home, in front of a vast LCD television. One sees her watching how glorious Beyonce looked in all her close-ups, and what a flattering portrait it painted of a cruelly traduced public woman, and one imagines a little lightbulb going off above her expensive hairdo. For, unexpectedly, the latest person to jump on the self-produced celebrity whitewash documentary is none other than Baroness Mone.

Remember her? Tory peer, famous for selling underwear; ended up in the soup after diversifying into PPE during the covid crisis. She is now discovering that her chums in the upper reaches of the Tory party have unfriended her on Facebook and are tending to look a bit vague when people ask whether they’ve ever had much to do with her.

Mone is cheesed off about this. ‘I am ashamed of being a Conservative peer given what this government has done to us,’ she told the Sunday Telegraph, neck glinting in the winter sun. Now, in a YouTube documentary called The Interview: Baroness Mone and the PPE Scandal, she tells her side of the story. Voice quavering, she tells the film maker that people probably see her as ‘a horrible person, a liar, a cheat, a thief’. And that hurts, y’know?

She admits now that it may have been ‘an error’ to deny to the press, with the help of aggressive libel lawyers, that she had anything to do with PPE Medpro, a company she helped fast-track to making tens of millions of pounds selling allegedly faulty PPE. She did lie through her teeth about that, she admits, but she wasn’t trying to cover anything up: ‘just protecting my family’. If you have tears of laughter, prepare to weep them now.

But oh, Michelle. Ma belle. If you aspire to play in the big leagues with Becks and Beyonce, you need a much, much slicker team than this one. For a start, a self-exculpatory documentary on YouTube just doesn’t have quite the cachet of an international co-pro with Netflix, Disney or HBO. And the idea with those documentaries is that they cater to an adoring fanbase who are far more interested in what feels like intimate access to the object of their adoration than whether they’re getting the whole truth.

Michelle Mone has no such fanbase. The only people who currently take any sort of strong interest in her or companies linked to her are journalists, the tax authorities and the National Crime Agency. Accordingly, those are most of the people who will have bothered watching the documentary. And accordingly, the headlines that it has produced are, shall we say, unhelpful to Baroness M’s cause.

The first day of headlines were variations on: ‘Michelle Mone admits she lied to media over links to PPE firm’, with not so much of a mention of her touching devotion to her family’s privacy. The follow-ups, yesterday, were scarcely more helpful: ‘Experts duped into starring in Michelle Mone’s PPE documentary’.

It turns out, you see, that some of the respectable figures who agreed to appear in this documentary about PPE procurement during the Covid crisis did so without realising that the film in which they were appearing was funded by PPE Medpro, the company (owned by Michelle Mone’s husband) which is at the centre of the profiteering scandal.

This documentary ‘fight back’, in other words, has done about as effective and professional a job of rehabilitating Baroness Mone’s reputation as many think PPE Medpro did of supplying life-saving protective equipment to those at the front line of the pandemic. (Both Michelle Mone and her husband deny any wrongdoing and say the PPE gowns delivered by PPE Medpro met government specifications.)

Ten years from now, perhaps, we can look forward to a Netflix series in which, Robbie Williams style, Michelle Mone sits in her fabled underwear watching The Interview on her laptop and murmurs: ‘Made a right bollocks of that, didn’t we?’ But for now, she’s probably best served by sitting back, shutting up and letting the various investigations take their course in the hopes her good name is restored at the end of the process.

There is one silver lining, though. The investigative accountant Dan Neidle has suggested that, since PPE Medpro made this documentary as a PR effort on Baroness Mone and her husband’s behalf, it could be a taxable benefit: ‘Mone now admits her connection to PPE Medpro. She received a large benefit from it when it made an expensive-looking documentary defending her. Will she pay tax on this benefit?’ Given how beneficial this supposed benefit turned out to be, she’s surely entitled to claim a tax write-off rather than a tax charge on it. Every little helps, eh?