Lady M and faulty gowns: Why justice matters

By William Raven

Self-professing as “one of the UK’s most renowned entrepreneurs”, Baroness Mone of Mayfair has been regularly at the summit of the news cycle. Now that her company, PPE Medpro, has lost in a legal claim, brought by the government, to repay £122 million worth of unfulfilled PPE contracts, it may well be her last visit to such lofty heights. 

The case, which became symbolic of the scandalous handling of the Covid crisis, continues to bring “embarrassment and shame to the [Conservative] party” and was one of the many nails in the very firmly shut coffin of a Tory party that went sheepishly into the 2024 General Election. The case, originating in December 2022, was brought by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) as they sued PPE Medpro for providing 25 million unsterile medical gowns, unfit for distribution in the NHS. While the court did not consider “any of the ethical or political” implications of Mone’s, or the government’s, actions it nevertheless cuts to the heart of the sleaze which characterised the Conservative government's handling of the Covid pandemic.

Then, back in 2021, Perspectives described the Conservative government, who set this scandal in motion, as culpable of “gross stupidity, [being] incapable of performing basic tasks let alone running a country. In the worst-case scenario, the government potentially has knowingly and intentionally committed crimes against public interests, wasted taxpayer money, and bathed themselves in a cesspool of cronyism and corruption.”  

Since then, much has been revealed about the “VIP lane” of contracting cronyism operated by the under pressure and Covid-embattled Johnson administration. In this case, PPE Medpro was paid £122 million to supply 25 million surgical gowns to the NHS, all of which were delivered without the certification of sterility required to prevent infection in operating theatres. On closer analysis by the NHS to check their utility, many of the gowns tested would go on to fail even-basic sterility checks. The gowns, which were bought by a government under immense pressure to rapidly buy personal protective equipment, were valued at £4.88 each and the Guardian revealed in March 2022 that PPE Medpro had bought them in bulk from a Chinese factory for £46 million. For Barrowman, Mone’s husband and the owner of the company, this left a more-than-handsome apparent profit of £76 million which was in turn split between the two. Barrowman transferred, at least, £29 million into a trust set up to benefit Mone and her children even after she claimed to have not gained "any financial benefit [from the deal] whatsoever”.

Like rats in a sack, such bickering is undoubtedly entertaining, but it does no good for the families of Covid victims who must be infuriated to see so many individuals attempting to wash their hands clean of their loved one’s deaths. 

In response to the findings of the court, PPE Medpro stated that the couple had been “scapegoats” for the Johnson government’s overspending and in one sense they are right, but in every other, they are wrong.  It is right that Mone and Barrowman are not the only ones to have profited from the Tory government’s “VIP lane” of contracts but while the nation suffered Mone’s Instagram pictures of her eponymous yacht and the couple's false public denials of involvement drew particular attention. The “VIP lane”, or more the more mutedly named “high priority lane”, was set up by the government to enable ‘politically connected’ people to contact the government with offers to fill the UK’s hugely depleted PPE stockpiles. The reasoning behind this decision may have made sense to someone at the time, but it is clear now that we know experienced PPE suppliers were being turned away in favour of Tory donors and old public school mates, that the scheme was poorly considered and corrupt.  

In Mone’s case she leveraged her position, as a Conservative-peer since 2015, to contact then MP Michael Gove with the offer of potentially supplying PPE to the government. In now revealed emails the company described themselves as “desperate to close the deal” and “Mone remained active throughout” by using her position to pressure the government into accepting her offer. Desperate times indeed. Such rushed decisions spoke to a health service creaking under the pressure of a global pandemic. The fact that NHS nurses were forced to wear bin bags when treating patients was also not a blameless crime. The same Tory government had already, through intense austerity measures, so stripped back the UK’s pandemic preparedness that equipment and training failed to protect the NHS from the worst of the pandemic. The lack of preparedness greatly exaggerated the harms of the pandemic, Covid killing at least 232,000 people in the UK and as a nation we ashamedly had a death rate almost 50% higher than the EUs. 

The conversation has now moved on to Michelle Mone’s peerage, with the disgraced business-woman now stating she has “no wish” to remain in the Lords. Kemi Badenoch has attempted to take a stronger stance on the issue than her predecessor Rishi Sunak, with the Conservative party leader, stating that Mone “should have the book thrown at her”.  From one person on borrowed time to the next, Mone jabbed back that there may not be “a Conservative party before the next general election.” Like rats in a sack, such bickering is undoubtedly entertaining, but it does no good for the families of Covid victims who must be infuriated to see so many individuals attempting to wash their hands clean of their loved one’s deaths. 

So whether the government is able to get their £122 million back or not, especially since PPE Medpro was put into administration the day before the judgement was issued, justice is important. It is important to the families of victims, and important for Labour as they attempt to draw a line under scandal at the highest levels of government, but most of all, it is important to our nation.

As so much noise continues to build over our national identity, over what is ‘British’ and what isn’t, it must be resoundingly clear that exploiting the suffering of the most vulnerable in society, and profiting at their expense, is, and should always be, truly ‘un-British’.   

Image: Alamy