Heather Mills with then-husband Paul McCartney, whom she is reluctant to talk about nowadays. Photo / Getty Images
The former model and ex-wife of a Beatle on saving herself, the planet, and her crisis-hit vegan food
Heather Mills is a woman with “an innate ability to defy and conquer anything that falls in her path”. That’s her own assessment at least.
“Who is Heather Mills?” she asks on heathermills.org, before listing the many successes that have peppered what she calls “an unusual life of extraordinary circumstances”. It’s a good question. According to her bio, she has excelled in various areas, including but not limited to: business, sport and activism (did you know she had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize? No, nor me.) In fact, she has had so many lives, it could be hard to pin her down.
Depending on where her name has been filed in your memory bank of 90s showbiz gossip, you might remember Mills as a model or a charity campaigner. You might recall that she lost her left leg when she was hit by a police motorbike in Kensington in 1993. You might remember her militant veganism or her phone hacking trial, or even her stint as a world record breaking skier. More likely, you’ll know her as the former wife of a Beatle.
We meet at her vegan food factory in Peterlee, County Durham, to talk about VBites, the vegan empire Mills founded in 2009, which she has just brought back from the brink of collapse.
In an office in the factory – which is vast and strangely quiet, though she tells me they make upwards of 75 tonnes of meat-free products a week – she sits at a conference table, peering at a laptop over thick rimmed glasses.
She is wearing a sharp, lurid green Victoria Beckham suit; her white blonde hair is sleek and pulled back, her nails long and red. Beckham, incidentally, is something of a personal hero. “I really admire her,” Mills says. “I love what she’s done with her life.”
The whole effect is very “contestant on the Apprentice”, which I soon realise is no accident. Mills is keen to come across like a titan of industry. She wants you to understand that she has an unrivalled grasp on everything from entrepreneurship, to the nation’s health, to local politics, to the gut microbiome, to the vegan food industry.
She may well do, but to most, she is likely still the woman who threw a jug of water over Paul McCartney’s lawyer, Fiona Shackleton, during her divorce proceedings.
Mills shot firmly into the public consciousness in 1999, when she began dating McCartney. I’ve been forewarned she won’t speak about her ex-husband today, but as the story goes, he fell for her when she presented an award at the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain ceremony.
McCartney was there to give an award in memory of his wife Linda, who had died the year before. He was taken with Mills; before long, they were dating and by 2002 they were married. Their daughter, Beatrice, now 20, was born in 2003. By 2006, it was all in (very public) flames. Mills was awarded a £24.3 million payout in their 2008 divorce; she had sought £125m. Outside court, she told reporters she was relieved to “secure mine and Beatrice’s future and all the charities I plan on helping”.
Mills was a mainstay in the tabloids before McCartney, for her looks, her accident, and then her charity work. When she lost her leg, she was described as the “£200,000-a-year model with a golden future” who had had her career cruelly taken from her.
The People won the bidding war for the story. “Gorgeous model Heather Mills gazed down at the stump where her shapely left leg once was – and wept…” Afterwards, she worked with landmine victims, sending unused artificial limbs from Britain to Croatia.
She threw herself into animal activism too, becoming an ambassador for Peta. A Sunday Times article from 2004 describes her as having cleverly positioned herself “between Princess Di and Mother Teresa in the spectrum of angels”.
In recent years, Mills has reinvented herself as a poster girl for veganism. She built a business making meat and dairy substitutes for supermarkets and chains – VBites produces the cheese for Domino’s Pizza and has worked with McDonald’s.
You suspect it also kept Mills in the press and gave her a soapbox to stand on. She always had a personal story to tell – Mills credits veganism with healing all manner of personal health crises, from the recovery from her accident, to her debilitating gut troubles, to the two ectopic pregnancies she suffered during her first marriage to businessman Alfie Karmal – but she wanted to save the planet too, ideally while coming out on top as a successful businesswoman.
In the Noughties, the plant-based sector was booming and she was on a mission to grow with it. Then things began to slump – last year was hailed as a nadir for vegan food as companies such as Heck sausages removed their meat alternative products from circulation citing a drop in interest. In December, VBites collapsed into administration.
At the time, stories cited rising cost pressures and a failure to secure fresh funding. Mills issued an excoriating statement blaming Brexit, the government, and the meat and dairy industries, which she said had “galvanised misinformation” around vegan food.
She wrote that she had put “blood, sweat and tears” into her business for “the sole purpose of furthering the plant-based movement”. Her efforts to save it had been “thwarted by a demand that I stepped away from day-to-day management, in order to secure essential investment”. Meanwhile, she said, VBites had been a victim of “poor management”.
Who was responsible for that poor management was rather less clear. Ahead of our interview, an email arrives from her assistant. “You may not be aware that Heather has invested millions, lost millions because of bad management and never taken a dividend in any of her plant-based businesses to try and help the animals, one’s health and save the planet… It is time the true story of just what Heather has done is told.”
Interviewing Mills is an exercise in keeping up. She has what you might call a unique conversational style, bombarding you with facts and figures at such lightning speed that talking to her feels a bit like riding a runaway train. She is at once on the defensive and strangely open. She also has a score to settle. In fact, you suspect she has spent much of her life settling scores.
For years, says Mills, her business was thriving. “Veganism was going like that,” she gestures a plane taking off. After Brexit, she predicted “there was going to be a disaster in the North East”. “All the factories started closing down, and this was one of them.”
Mills considers herself something of a politician and has claimed previously to have been asked by all three of the major parties to stand for office. After Brexit, she had begun mulling over an idea to make the North East, where she grew up, a kind of plant-based Silicon Valley, with thriving factories churning out innovative vegan food and providing jobs. “It could have been the plant-based valley of the world,” she says.
We are talking in what was once the Walker’s factory; Mills bought it in 2018. “My best girlfriend rang me up and said that this factory was closing down, you’ve got to come and help us.”
It’s interesting that Mills, 56, who now lives in Kent, still feels a pull to the North East. From everything I’ve read, it must hold painful memories.
Mills grew up in Washington, Tyne and Wear, daughter of a former army officer father who she has described as “very abusive” and a mother who ran off to London when she was 9 with an actor. Mills has said previously she didn’t see her mother for “three or four years”.
Her father, Mark, “behaved like a general”. She has cited him as the root of her “discipline”. When she was 13, he was sent to prison for fraud, after which Mills moved to London. Today, she remembers him as “a really male chauvinist dick of a dad”. “He was a horrible character that I never spoke to in 30 years.” He died 10 years ago.
Mills is still close to her biochemist half-sister, who lives in the area. “A lot of my best mates are here... So I’ve got a lot of brilliant memories here as far as friends are concerned. And I was very young when I left. My mum left when I was 9, my dad went to prison when I was 13. And we were taken down to London.”
Mills considers herself a survivor of a “horrible childhood”. “Since then I’ve worked in war zones, I’ve seen people blown up. It’s like, it’s all relative. Lost my leg, had a million illnesses. More scar tissue, you just carry on. It creates no fear because you just think when you’re going to go you’re going to go. Because why didn’t I die in the war zone? Why did I lose my leg in England? You start to appreciate life and every precious moment it is and just to try and create a great environment.”
It’s all a matter of attitude, she says. “It depends how you set your mind. For me, it’s like: came from nothing and managed to make a lot happen and keep my friendships.” Another neat line for the Heather Mills bio.
These days, she is in the North East visiting her factories four days a week. Before 2021, when Mills took investment from a German company, which she says marks the beginning of a torrid time for VBites, things were going well. “I had Burger King in Zurich saying can you make [us] your vegan burger?”
Things grew more difficult when Brexit snarled up the export of her vegan cheese. “So suddenly where you had a little margin that we could give to charity you had none.”
Mills says she doesn’t take any money from her vegan empire. Instead, any profit goes to charity. “All of my money that comes from it I fund.”
Mills won a “substantial” payout from News Group in 2019. She and her sister Fiona told the court they had experienced “strange activity with their telephones” with “journalists and photographers turning up in unexpected locations”. Stories appeared in newspapers featuring private information “without any apparent identifiable source”. Mills says it took her “17 years to prove the phone hacking”. Since then, she says, the media have largely left her alone. Or in her words: “nobody’s wrote any crap”.
Mills said being a victim of phone hacking by the News of the World had impacted her “ability to raise funds” for her landmine and animal charities. These days “any profits we make always go to cover those”. Hillary Clinton once thanked her for her charity work, or more specifically for “the person she is and the work that she does”. You can find that particular clip on Mills’ YouTube channel, naturally.
When German snacks company Pfeifer and Langen (P&L) came in as minority investors in VBites, Heather’s hope was that investment from a big corporation would accelerate VBites’ growth, helping smooth the post-Brexit supply chain issues and launching Mills’ products on the German market.
In practice, it didn’t play out as she had hoped. From early on, Mills was unhappy with how things were progressing, but she was determined to continue. “I thought, ‘we’re going to help the planet, animals, all the reasons I started in the first place’.”
Mills and P&L’s versions of what happened next differ. According to Mills, P&L withdrew its funding in February 2023 “with three days’ notice”, forcing her to find a large amount of money, fast. “I said whoa, you can’t do that, but they did, just before payroll. And they’re my staff and my friends. So I went okay, and luckily managed to find the money to cover it.”
How much did she have to find? “About £1.2m.”
The Nature’s Richness Group, a division of P&L, says it didn’t withdraw funding. Rather, VBites “did not meet the requirements for further funding”.
How did Mills find the money? “Well because I basically have properties and that’s how I live.” Not that she rents them out. “I just give them rent free.”
It helped, she says, that she’d just sold a factory she’d bought in Northumberland in 2019. “So I had some money from there. And that’s how I managed to fund [VBites] to make sure people kept their jobs and kept going.”
In early December 2023, administrators were instructed. Mills claims taking the company into administration was unnecessary, but if no rescue deal was secured by December 24, the company would be wound down.
Staff were let go; she decided to bid for her own company. “I was like screw you.”
Mills says she had £5.6m invested in the company, with £4.85m sitting as a secured loan. “So I said well I’ll relinquish my £4.85m and my £5.6m investment, and I’ll add another million on top which I’d then by that time got access to.
“And I won, which nobody was happy about apart from my staff.”
Mills admits she has been “naive”. “I really regret having taken investment. It would be something that I’d warn [others] really, really be careful about as a small family business taking on big corporates. It’s all in the fine detail.”
She brushes off any suggestion this has been a hard season of her life. “I’ve been through so much mentally.” It’s the injustice of it all that she can’t bear. “It’s like just tell me to my face. Just tell me, ‘we’re going to try to take the company’. I hate it, because I’m dead straight.”
We walk from the office to an unused area in the factory for Mills to have her photo taken. Her assistant turns to me. “I could listen to her all day. She’s got some mad stories hasn’t she?”
That she has. There is a typically odd one behind the new range she is launching as part of the VBites reboot, in fact. “No Bloat” is meant for people who are suffering with bloating or acid reflux. It is inspired by Mills’ own digestive struggles, which stem from a bout of Lyme disease she contracted in 1999, when she was on a fact-finding mission in Cambodia with the Duchess of Kent.
She was reporting for an Esther Rantzen programme (another of Mills’ many lives – as a TV journalist) when she was bitten, she believes, “by a dengue fly”. When she fell ill, doctors said she’d contracted dengue fever.
“They misdiagnosed it. It was actually Lyme. Lyme disease comes from anything that carries the disease ... It’s a big myth that it’s only from deer.”
The Lyme wreaked havoc on her body. “It wiped out my microbiome, my colon, everything,” she says. “My appendix burst. They rushed me to hospital just in time. Then they took my gallbladder out, which they didn’t need to take out. So I suddenly couldn’t digest anything. So I had to live off liquid food for three years.”
Mills was ski racing then (you’ll recall she had a stint in the 2010s as a pro skier – she still holds the record for the fastest disabled woman on skis) and couldn’t afford a sensitive digestive system. “I had to live perfectly because there are no toilets at the top of a mountain. It’s covered in white snow. And if you have an accident it’s not great. I would lose complete control of my bowels and have to jump out of cars.”
The Lyme created “a putrefied appendix” which meant she was “always in agony”. She went to Germany for further tests. “In the UK they test blood whereas in Germany they test urine,” she explains. “They told me straight away ‘you’ve got Lyme disease and you’ve had it for a long time’.”
There are, it should be said, a few problems with this story. Namely: there is no mosquito species known to harbour the bacterium that causes Lyme, there’s no evidence that Lyme affects your gut microbiome, appendicitis is not epidemiologically associated with the disease, and urine testing to diagnose it is not, in the words of one expert, “mainstream medicine”.
However she contracted these illnesses, it does sound as if she had a rough time of it.
VBites’ new line is for people suffering as she has. “Fifty per cent of the UK are living off antacids and PPIs [proton pump inhibitors],” Mills explains, as we talk – not, it should be said, over a stomach-settling ginger tea, but black coffee.
I can’t say I’ve been able to find much scientific data to back up the idea that half the population are popping antacids, but Mills is nothing if not persuasive.
“Imagine you’ve had a life of putrefied meat in your colon, they’ve done godiva experiments on people who have been vegetarian 30 years, die at 70 and they’ve still got putrefied meat in their colon. Just sitting in the crevices.”
I think she must mean “cadaver”, not “godiva”. But I get her gist: eat a lamb chop and it’ll stick around in your body.
These days, Mills has worked out the exact amount of certain ingredients she can eat without being in pain. “32 peanuts no problem, you go to 38 and there’s a tipping point”.
She lives what sounds like a tightly controlled life and works constantly. “I sleep four hours.” On Mondays, after an hour in the gym, she gets a train from Kent to St Pancras and on to the north to visit her factories, staying with a childhood friend until Thursday evening when she takes a train back down south.
Life is “a suitcase”. “For 30 years I’ve never slept in the same bed for more than two weeks ever.” This sounds like a slight exaggeration. Even when Beatrice was young? “We were on tour all the time so that was moving. And then when school came we had joint custody so I would only travel on the days that our child was with their father.”
Mills won’t be drawn on her daughter other than to say she has finished university and is “working”. Keeping her out of the spotlight has been her “biggest achievement”. “Thank goodness I did because our child wants nothing to do with public life.”
Last year, it was reported Mills was engaged to businessman Michael Dickman, whom she “met on a train” and is 17 years her junior. In fact they aren’t engaged, she says, but have been happily together for five years.
I wonder why she is still plugging away when the vegan sector appears to be in freefall. It isn’t, she says, this is just a blip. The industry simply became “saturated with a lot of bad products”. “People would try them and go ‘urgh, I’m not doing vegan’. And so it started to push the train backwards that we’d been pushing uphill for decades.”
Investors who pull funding from vegan startups “will regret it”, she warns.
For her part, Mills wants to be “left alone to do the work that has to be done”. She believes vehemently in the power of “keeping things positive”. “That’s, I suppose, how I’ve overcome and survived all the madness.”
And with that I leave her to it, before she has time to tell me about that Nobel Peace Prize.
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