“People Find Me Quite Controversial”: Molly-Mae On Motherhood And Her “Princess Diana And Charles” Level Break-Up

“I try and say a lot, without saying anything at all, if that makes sense,” she admits. She explains, “Unfortunately in this job you do have to be that way, because you could say one comment and people could literally go from loving you to hating you overnight. And that’s, like, quite savage, this whole cancel culture thing. It’s pretty scary.”

In 2022, Hague was hung, drawn and quartered on Twitter for saying that “Beyoncé has the same 24 hours in the day that we do” on The Diary of a CEO podcast. There were the memes: Hague tells homeless people to buy a house. Thinkpieces slammed her for not understanding concepts such as structural inequality. She was compared to Margaret Thatcher.

When I ask her about the backlash – would she like to clarify her comments? – she blinks hard and looks in Fran’s direction. “Obviously,” she says, picking her words carefully, “I meant absolutely no malice or anything ill-intended by that comment at all. Would I have worded it slightly differently now? One-hundred per cent, as to not upset anybody. But you’re not always going to get it right, living your life in the public eye.”

Of course, for every Hague stan there are the haters who see her as materialistic, gaffe-prone and undeserving of success. “People find me quite controversial,” she says apologetically. The reality is that Hague can barely leave her house without being mobbed for selfies: some have even been known to stake out her local Gail’s in Altrincham in the hope of spotting her. “Girls come up to me,” she says, “and they’ll get tearful, and they’re really emotional, and they sort of dive into my arms and have a big hug. It feels like they are meeting someone they already know.”

The couple had around 20 million social media followers combined – after Tommy proposed on an Ibizan clifftop in July last year, their engagement video got 3.7 million likes – so their break-up was always going to make headlines. The wedding, she tells me, was scheduled for September 2025, planning was underway. It seems, I say, like this was an unexpected break-up. Was it sudden?

“Um,” she says. “Yeah. I mean. It was a bit of a shock. The circumstances…” She sighs. She is putting on a brave face, but is clearly so sad. “I didn’t want what happened to happen,” she says softly. Hague “wanted to get married to Tommy, one hundred per cent, and that would never have changed.” She shrinks slightly into the sofa. “I wanted to get married next September and it’s very hard when it’s kind of taken away. But I will always have a lot of love and respect for him.”

I want to hug her. Hague, a homebird who seldom drinks alcohol, tells me she had doubts about the wedding itself, though. “Was I planning a big wedding because I wanted that image of a big wedding and the beautiful photographs and that moment that everyone would have expected from us on social media? Probably. Would I be more confident now, after everything that’s happened and learning even more about myself, to say, actually, that doesn’t even make me happy, screw the big Instagram moment, I’m going to do it this way? Definitely.”

They could seem an odd couple. On Love Island, Tommy touched an iron to check it was on and didn’t know the capital of France; Molly-Mae was savvy, well aware that an appearance on the show could supercharge her already flourishing social media career. Molly-Mae’s parents were police officers, while Tommy’s father, John, spent time in prison after gouging out a man’s eye during a fight. Tommy didn’t believe in sending Bambi to secondary school; Molly-Mae is adamant she will finish her education.

After they broke up, the internet went into overdrive, combing through Hague’s old vlogs and clips of Fury on nights out. A narrative emerged. Tommy had been away, partying, while Molly stayed home with Bambi, struggling to adapt to motherhood on her own. There was a video of Tommy out with the singer Chris Brown in Dubai in November 2023, a girl playfully grabbing his face. A Danish woman alleged that she’d kissed Tommy in a nightclub in North Macedonia shortly before the split.

Hague has maintained her silence post-break-up, citing their daughter as her motivation. (Coparenting, she says, is going well. They recently settled Bambi into nursery together. “We’re both being, like, really mature about it.”) The day before we meet, Tommy gave an interview to The Mail on Sunday in which he denied the cheating allegations. Can she comment on that?

“No one will ever really know what went down apart from Tommy and I, and that’s how we’d like to keep it, for Bambi’s sake,” she says. But adds of her ex: “I do think that he will talk about things eventually. I do think that when he’s ready, like, maybe more will be said. But I think that’s for him to do on his terms.” The implication is clear: the confession is Fury’s to make. She won’t go any further. “It’s not like it’s gossip, it’s real life and it’s, you know, it’s a really deep situation. It’s really sad.”

In the aftermath, Hague’s friends encircled her like a Roman battalion. “[I] had a few days,” she admits, “where I thought, ‘I don’t really know how I’m going to get through this.’” They took her to Soho Farmhouse to blow off some steam, but Hague got halfway through a rosé before putting it down and remembering she hates getting drunk. She keeps a close circle. “It’s literally like four friends,” she says. “That’s about it, really. It just works best that way, because then you know the people that are around you are genuinely there for the right reasons.”

Cardigan, Fifi Chachnil

 Matt Healy

And, of course, there is her sister, Zoe, an ever-present fixture in her life, who moved north to be closer to Hague after leaving the army in 2023. “She was a theatrical kid,” says Zoe on what Molly-Mae was like growing up, “into clothes and make-up at a young age. We were polar opposites. She was definitely bubbly and confident, and would make me laugh all the time.” Now, though, she “loves her own company. Molly’s idea of fun is being completely by herself and not conversing.” They fight, as all sisters do. “We’ve blocked each other before on WhatsApp,” Hague says, laughing. But Zoe was also her rock in the weeks after Bambi was born. “She did just as much as I did,” says Hague of her first experience of motherhood.

Zoe came over almost every day, but after she left in the evening “I’d be here,” says Hague, “and I’d sit and I’d think, ‘What have I done?’” She was never diagnosed with postnatal depression, although she wondered at the time if she had it. Nights were the worst. “I used to suffer really badly with intrusive thoughts.” Now that Bambi is a toddler, “I absolutely adore it,” says Hague. “If I could have a million more babies that are at this stage, I would do it.”

Hague grew up in middle-class Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the youngest daughter of parents who “pushed me and Zoe into doing every sport, every extra-curricular activity, you name it”. As a teenager, she competed in beauty pageants; she worked as a lifeguard, at a gym, and at Boots while studying fashion retail at college.

But social media was always her passion and even at 16, when she started unboxing fast fashion “hauls” that she would upload to YouTube, she knew the power she could wield. By 18, she was making enough from influencing to rent her own Manchester flat, moving to the northern city because some girls she knew from the influencer scene already lived there.

Fast-forward nine years and Hague’s influence is matchless. Whatever she buys, her fans buy; where she goes, they go. So when she announced in September that she’d be launching her own clothing line, Maebe, offering “high-quality pieces designed for daily wear”, the Hague army assembled. The offering of staple basics – oversized blazers, chunky knitwear, pleated trousers – reflected Hague’s own style, having stepped back from the Love Island aesthetic, the neon and bodycon, to favour a simpler, streamlined silhouette.

Within days, the Maebe Instagram account had 880,000 followers; Hague personally met more than 2,000 fans at a London pop-up. It was terrible timing – she’d just broken up with Tommy – but she was determined that the launch, which she’d self-funded and had taken three years to come to fruition, would go ahead. Within 24 minutes of the collection going live, it sold out.

Fran brings in an armful of Maebe clothes, as Molly beams with pride. “I’ve really, like, done pretty much everything myself,” she says of the collection, a “passion project” for her. She caresses a blazer that retails for £140, the most expensive item. The material feels thick and it looks luxurious, but it is mostly synthetic fibres, as are other items in the collection, something that has sparked a backlash on TikTok, with users accusing Hague of selling fast-fashion clothes at a mark-up.

“[It] isn’t the case at all,” she says, sounding wounded, “quite the opposite.” She explains that, “I was quite surprised that people thought that I was going to come with a fast-fashion price point and that kind of product, because I’ve actually not worn fast fashion for a really long time now, probably the last two years.” Really? After all, this is the woman who parlayed her unique hold to become creative director of PrettyLittleThing, owned by the fast-fashion behemoth Boohoo, in 2021 – she only stepped away from the brand in June 2023. (Can she confirm, I ask, that they were paying her £400,000 a month? “No,” she says, “that’s not true.”)

She doesn’t regret working for PLT, recognising what the brand has done for her career, though, she admits, “It’s probably not a decision that I would make now. I don’t particularly wear fast fashion now,” she continues, “but that’s not to say that I don’t understand why girls do. I understand that not everyone can afford to shop brands that use all recycled materials.”

If Hague’s fans are spending £140 on a blazer, they’re likely to wear it longer than they would an ultra-fast-fashion item (surely a positive). But Hague herself doesn’t seem to have engaged in a meaningful way with the ethics of this industry. Beyond knowing they have factories in Turkey and China, she is unable to answer my questions on how the clothes are made. Her “right-hand woman”, Elisha Diamond, former buying director for Manchester-based brand The Couture Club, looks after that side of the business. “But we… I mean, I’m sure I can give you the details of the certifications that they all have, because I was very strict on, obviously, like, the kind of guidelines they’d need to adhere to,” she says. Fran later sends a copy of Maebe’s animal welfare, ethical worker and child labour policies, which I forward to two academics at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Westminster. They tell me that, on paper, it is pretty standard, though there’s no information on how it will ensure suppliers comply with Maebe’s requirements. Anyone can sign an agreement, whether they follow the rules on the ground is a different matter, and when I later ask if they audit their suppliers or how they propose to ensure the agreements are kept to, I don’t receive a response by our publication deadline. (To be fair to Hague, ethical supply chain issues are hardly limited to Maebe, nor its level in the fashion system).

The mood is tense, so I ask a few quickfire questions. Her favourite musician? James Blake. The last text she sent? To Zoe. What word does she say too much? “Insane,” she says, laughing. Does she want more children? Yes, she says, but mostly for Bambi’s sake: she wouldn’t want her to be an only child. Does she still believe in love? “Definitely,” she says, without hesitating. Does she plan to start dating? “No, that’s not on my radar at all.” Her biggest fear? “That I get comfortable and I stop having big dreams.” Is this her forever home? She shakes her head. “I don’t think it’s the most family-vibe house,” she says. “I’d love horses in a field.”

I remind Hague of a February 2018 Instagram selfie that she captioned “Create the life you want to live”. Did she get there, I ask, as I get ready to leave Hague’s house, declining her offer of a snack for the car ride to the station. “I would never, ever have believed it if someone would have told me back then that I’d be here now,” she says. “It is crazy.” Wherever you stand on this 25-year-old self-made multimillionaire from Hitchin, there’s no escaping the fact that the world remains hers for the taking. “I do feel very, very, very lucky,” she says, smiling.