They are the king and queen of self-promotion, their oh-so-photogenic romance played out in a series of picture perfect Instagram posts to their combined 13.2 million followers.
But there’s something not quite right in the romance of Love Island’s first couple Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury.
Take boxer Tommy’s return from watching his older brother Tyson Fury’s fight last Saturday night in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He didn’t post a picture about his happy return to the £3.5 million Cheshire mansion he shares with his blonde girlfriend – instead sharing a picture of Tyson Fury and saying how much he idolises him.
Tommy and Molly-Mae got together in 2019 when they met on the fifth series of the hit ITV show Love Island
Molly-Mae wanted to get to a level where she could make a living as an influencer – and she knew that Love Island was key
Molly-Mae says she ‘eats, sleeps and breathes Instagram’, whereas pro boxer Tommy has previously admitted he doesn’t really see the point of it
The couple, at the National Television Awards in 2020, fell for each other when they were on Love Island
Then influencer Molly-Mae, 24 – who can take up to five hours to get a shot ‘just so’ – posted a hasty snap of her fiancé eating sushi seemingly to prove his return. It was so ill-composed and badly shot that Tommy wasn’t even looking at the camera.
Not what you’d expect from an influencer who takes pride in her polished posts.
And by Thursday, Tommy was gone again – sharing images of a holiday in Budapest, Hungary, which he is taking without her.
It’s not what you might expect from a young couple in love – and supposedly heading for the altar next year – and follows a string of perplexing appearances of Molly-Mae minus her massive engagement ring, which first went missing in December, after Tommy had been pictured partying with women during a work trip to Abu Dhabi.
She even failed to wish her fiance a happy 25th birthday at the start of this month.
Chatter about a split has never been louder.
So what is going on? Friends of the couple confide that relations are indeed rocky.
It seems that there are all kinds of issues, not least a ‘sex drought’ which saw Molly-Mae admit in January this year that they had not been intimate since the birth of baby daughter Bambi, 11 months previously.
Tommy, who has Traveller heritage, is also apparently acting in ways which confuse his middle-class girlfriend.
Molly-Mae, who was raised in Hertfordshire, is the daughter of two police officers and complains of Tommy’s habit of going away with friends that she ‘doesn’t know where he is going’.
He also enjoys drinking alcohol – something Molly-Mae avoids.
‘They are spending time apart quite a bit,’ a friend says. ‘They are leading quite separate lives.’
There may be further tensions over social media – a tool on which Molly-Mae’s livelihood entirely depends. She says she ‘eats, sleeps and breathes Instagram’, whereas pro boxer Tommy has previously admitted he doesn’t really see the point of it.
And although this tense situation does not amount to a split – at least not yet – there is some doubt over whether this couple really are well-matched enough to actually make it up the aisle.
The couple got together in 2019 when they met on the fifth series of the hit ITV show Love Island.
At the time, Tommy said he’d never even seen the show when he was scouted to take part on account of being a boxer and brother of Tyson Fury.
‘I didn’t have a clue what I was going on,’ Tommy said. ‘I just thought I’d be sitting in the sun chatting to a few girls.’
Molly moved from Hertfordshire to Manchester, close to fast fashion brands Pretty Little Thing and Boohoo. Soon she was earning triple what her friends were making in fashion roles
She has a self-tan range, Filter by Molly-Mae, has published a memoir and rakes in a huge amount of money via Instagram posts
In an interview Molly-Mae said she was ‘shocked’ not to win because to her mind she and Tommy were ‘the obvious winners’
By contrast, Molly-Mae Hague was an ambitious Home Counties teenager who was desperate to grow her 160,000 social media followers to a level where she could make a living as an influencer – and she knew that Love Island was key.
It was while studying fashion at London’s Fashion Retail Academy that her ambitions took a new direction.
‘I started studying what influencers posted and how they kept content relatable while showing a ‘goals’ lifestyle,’ she said. ‘I had a fashion brand contact me asking to send me some clothes for free in return for a tag and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s working!”‘
Molly moved from Hertfordshire to Manchester, close to fast fashion brands Pretty Little Thing and Boohoo. Soon she was earning triple what her friends were making in fashion roles but said it wasn’t as effortless as it appeared.
‘It’s not an easy job. You’re constantly on the go, and you can’t ever really take a day off because you always have to be that person people aspire to be,’ she said.
Romance blossomed during the show, with Tommy often seen cuddling up to her. She attempted to keep the liaison neutral, and some viewers took a dislike to her for lying to her housemates over their relationship.
Eventually, she confessed to one: ‘Obviously we’ve been doing bits [sleeping together]. I’ve denied, denied it, denied it. And I know that as soon as he cracks a smile, that’s it.’
They became runners-up on the show, and Molly-Mae was dismayed to discover when they left the villa that she had been a ‘hate figure’.
In an interview she said she was ‘shocked’ not to win because to her mind they were ‘the obvious winners’.
Maybe, she said, they had come across as ‘too perfect’.
She went on: ‘Social media is my passion, but it got to a point where I was just like, “I don’t want to do this any more.” Until you’ve done the show and come out and experienced the constant trolling, the death threats and all those messages, you’ll never understand it.’
Critics focused on Molly-Mae’s appearance, such as the dermal fillers in her jawline (which she ended up having dissolved) and her lip fillers.
‘They say my head’s shaped like a square, my face looks like a 50p, I look like SpongeBob,’ she said. ‘The hate was horrible.’
She added: ‘Some days I think: ‘Is it worth all this upset having to see all these disgusting comments?’
She has since clearly come to the conclusion that it is.
Now said to be jointly worth £9million with Tommy, Molly-Mae has picked up numerous endorsements including a deal with fast fashion retailers Pretty Little Thing. For a time she was the ‘creative director’ of the company – not bad for someone who never completed a fashion qualification – and was reportedly paid a staggering £400,000 a month.
After taking maternity leave following the birth of their daughter Bambi in January 2023, she announced in June last year that she was stepping away from the role, saying that this ‘amazing chapter’ of her life had ‘naturally come to an end’.
She still has a deal to wear their clothes, and it was announced earlier this year that she has become one of L’Oreal’s spokesmodels. Heady stuff, considering that Kendall Jenner, Helen Mirren and Eva Longoria are also brand ambassadors.
She has also published a memoir, and rakes in a huge amount of money via Instagram posts, despite frequent criticism of their ‘beige’ aesthetic. She has a self-tan range, Filter by Molly-Mae. Accounts filed at Companies House show it is surprisingly small beer. In 2021 it had net assets of £297,516. In 2022, this had fallen slightly to £268,561.
Meanwhile, the picture is less glowing elsewhere in her empire. She has three other companies. Filed accounts indicate that one of them is £58,000 in the black but owed £2.1million to creditors. Another has £1.3million in net assets, down from £1.7million the previous year.
But if she’s not quite Dragons’ Den material on paper, she has been happy to wade into that milieu.
There was a huge storm in December 2021 when she appeared on a podcast, The Diary Of A CEO, hosted by Dragons’ Den star Stephen Bartlett.
She told him: ‘I just think you’re given one life and it’s down to you what you do with it… When I’ve spoken about that before I have been slammed with people saying, “It’s easy for you to say that… you’ve not grown up in poverty….so for you to sit there and say we all have the same 24 hours in the day is not correct.” Technically, what I’m saying is correct. We do.
‘I understand that obviously we all have different backgrounds… and we do have different financial situations, but I think if you want something enough you can achieve it and it just depends to what lengths you want to go to get where you want to be in the future. I’ll go to any length. I’ve worked my absolute a*** off to get to where I am now.’
The reaction was swift, negative and huge. A report at the time pointed out that fast fashion companies such as Boohoo were paying garment workers in Leicester £3.50 an hour, far beneath the minimum wage – while she was netting £400,000 a month for probably working far fewer hours.
She was dubbed Molly-Mae Thatcher for what came across as an unsparing lack of sympathy for those struggling with poverty or disability.
The storm was such that her PR team made a statement to calm the mood, insisting that her opinions had been inaccurately repackaged on TikTok.
Perhaps not helping matters, Tommy Fury said that he agreed with his girlfriend and that anyone could get rich, if only they would really try. He said he believed that his success is down to a ‘winning mentality’ and surmised that their popularity as a couple is a result of being ‘so relatable’.
The trouble is, however, that as time has passed and the pair have become richer and more famous, they have become much less so.
Take Tommy’s proposal of marriage, in July 2023, which featured thousands of roses, a huge diamond ring, a video team and Molly-Mae’s favourite singer, flown out to Ibiza as part of the ‘surprise’.
In a similar vein, their Insta feeds brim with jaunts to five-star hotels, designer clothes and flawless styling.
Even this week Molly-Mae has been complaining bitterly that people criticised her for taking a private jet to her sister’s hen do in Ibiza last week – even though she took a Ryanair flight back home.
She seems to no longer understand that people commenting on her life is an inescapable keystone of being an influencer – and all the wealth it entails.
She complained: ‘The amount of stick I got… from getting the jet, made me think I probably won’t ever do that ever again. It takes away that specialness of that experience because the reaction is just, so not worth it.
‘Because if I fly commercial, well, it was actually making me feel like I was the worst sister in the entire world. Then, if I fly private, it is genuinely not worth it because it’s all I hear about for that next few weeks. You can’t win, you can’t actually win.’
It has to be said that she sounds like an entitled brat.
And what of Tommy and his career? Somewhat embarrassingly he lost his most recent fight to YouTuber KSI and is back in training again. He thinks he has only a couple more professional bouts before he retires.
He’s planning to release his own autobiography, entitled Lightning Can strike Twice, a reference to his fame alongside brother Tyson’s.
He’s also set to star in a low-budget gangster film, announced this month in Cannes.
Whether he and Molly-Mae will yet star in their own blow-every-budget wedding, however, remains to be seen.
