This is why Michelle Mone and her money matter

The Mone affair may be judged to be the sort of thing that happens when governments don’t feel much shame

The Covid-era business affairs of Baroness (Michelle) Mone, her husband Douglas Barrowman and the benefits allegedly derived from those activities by their family financial trust are extremely complicated. They’re also controversial – not to say, indeed, potentially scandalous. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, declares himself “shocked” by the story, but urges due process be followed, which is fair. But until and unless the baroness is vindicated, the shock is undiminished.

That they have not yet become a bigger story is because it is very complicated, and because the sheer scale of the amount of public money involved is so difficult to envisage.

So let us try and simplify it. From the reporting, it would appear that two companies were awarded more than £200m in public money for contracts to supply a variety of Covid kit; personal protection equipment and lateral flow tests.

The firms were relatively new: PPE Medpro and LFI Diagnostics. From the various contracts allotted to those firms, a sum of £29m reportedly ended up in an offshore HSBC trust fund, of which Mone and her children were beneficiaries.

What’s wrong with any of that? After all, the country was desperate for Covid equipment in the early stage of the pandemic, during world shortages. Lives were at stake. Corners had to be cut, surely? Perhaps in this case, too easily, and with little accountability for very substantial sums – £200m, no less. They have still not been properly accounted for.

The allegations are serious. First, that Mone, a Conservative peer “was in a class of her own” for “aggressive” lobbying of government ministers – including Matt Hancock and Michael Gove – for the contracts, according to Hancock’s diaries. If true, that does rather suggest she had an interest in the matter, and she used her influence in a way others could not; for example, by using personal emails. Lawyers for Mone and Barrowman denied that they had any “role or function in the company, or in the process by which the contracts were awarded”.

Second, any interests in the companies and contracts she and her family had should have been publicly disclosed at the time.

Third, the £200m-plus worth of equipment was not always up to the job intended. Under parliamentary privilege, and therefore to be taken with some caution, given the politics of the matter, Labour’s Angela Rayner claimed in the Commons: “The House may recall that that particular company was subsequently awarded two contracts worth £203m to supply PPE, with £81m to supply 210 million face masks awarded in May 2020 and a £122m contract to supply 25m surgical gowns awarded in June 2020.

“The face masks were bought by the government from PPE Medpro for more than twice the price of identical items from other suppliers, and the surgical gowns were rejected for use in the NHS after a technical inspection. All of them were never even used. It points to a total failure of due diligence and the rotten stench of cronyism.”

According to Hansard, Rayner went on: “The links between the company Medpro and the Tory peer in question were never publicly disclosed. In fact, they were denied repeatedly by the lawyers acting for those involved. We now know that the money ended up in offshore accounts directly linked to those individuals. By their own admission, this was for so-called tax efficiency.”

Schools minister Nick Gibb said “we were desperate” to get protective equipment at the start of the pandemic. Gibb said the government saved “hundreds of thousands of lives” by getting PPE so swiftly. “The government had to do everything it could to persuade manufacturers to shift their production,” he told BBC Breakfast. The Department of Health said: “Due diligence was carried out on all companies that were referred to the department and every company was subjected to the same checks.” PPE Medpro told the BBC in December 2020 that it had supplied equipment “fully in accordance with the agreed contract, which included clear terms as to technical specification and performance criteria of the products”.

Rayner was at her best indignant form in the Commons when she demanded that documents relating to the deals be made public, which it seems they now will be, albeit after some further delay. It’s difficult to see how they will enhance the reputations of those concerned.

So the Mone affair, as it may come to be known, is the subject of various investigations; thus far the National Crime Agency, the House of Lords standards commissioners, the House of Commons public accounts commitee and (quite possibly) the judge-led public inquiry into the official response to the pandemic. Plus, of course, growing media attention.

Mone has already volunteered to take a leave of absence from the Lords to clear her name. An infrequent attendee, she probably won’t be seen for while. The affair will drag on.

Politically, it all just has the feel of an end of an era; the fag end of a government that came to power back in 2010 promising to fix the roof. The cheerful clownish boosterism of the Boris Johnson years looks and feels empty now.

Brexit hasn’t been the answer to the economy’s problems. We didn’t get levelled up. We didn’t “prosper mightily”. We’ve had three premiers inside a year, and four chancellors. The government with a majority of 70-plus can’t get anything done, not even wind farms or housebuilding. People don’t understand why they have to wait a day for an ambulance. They can’t make the trains run on time. This Conservative government is knackered.

The public can’t be expected to be able to follow the complex ins and outs of the contracts, and they have little knowledge of the glamorous Mone, often pictured on board a yacht.

Before all this, she was just a high-flying businesswoman who had risen from poverty to build a well-known clothing brand, Ultimo. Known as Lady Bra, David Cameron nominated her for the Lords in 2015. But her extreme wealth, conspicuous consumption and personal links to Tory politicians seem to be making her a bit of a symbol of all that people perceive to have gone wrong with the way the country has been run in recent years. And they don’t like it.

The image is of a tired government, in power too long for its own good, complacent, and too casual about the best use of public money. The legend of the Covid contract awarded to Matt Hancock’s local pub landlord – strongly denied by Hancock – has become another emblem of failures.

Constrained by Commons conventions about continuing investigations, and under parliamentary privilege, Rayner was still able to demand the government “end the cover-up and begin the clean-up. We already know that the so-called VIP lane for PPE enabled the shameful waste of taxpayers’ money and inexcusable profiteering by unfit and unqualified providers.”

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The whole Covid contracts affair, in other words, may be judged to be the sort of thing that happens when governments don’t feel much shame about opening up special, opaque channels by which those they know can tender for gigantic government contracts with commensurately huge profits attached to them, almost irrespective of performance. The voters can be forgiven for thinking this kind of attitude unfair, even during a pandemic.

Add in all the other scandals of recent years – Partygate, Wallpapergate, bullyings, Owen Patterson, Pincher-by-name-pincher-by-nature, Hancock’s rule-busting love affair, multiple unnamed MPs under investigation for sexual impropriety, Raab and Braverman bending the rules, splits, plots, and the colossal blunders of the Truss era... well, you see a governing party that has forgotten what it is for.

Of course, Labour politicians are hardly blameless in terms of cronyism in local or national government – and if they’d been in power for 12 years they too might be fresh out of energy, ideas and talent.

By 2010, the brave hopes of 1997 had certainly faded. Yet the point is that democracy depends on constant scrutiny and renewal. It’s what we all feel from time to time: “time for a change”. That is why Michelle Mone and her money matter.