This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Good morning. On the sunny spring evening of 7th May 2020, in the height of the first lockdown, Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman posted a clip of themselves on Instagram stood between the stone pillars of the front door of their nine-bed, 154-acre mansion on the Isle of Man as they clapped for the NHS. “We appreciate each and every one of you”, Lady Mone said, feigning sympathy for those whose lockdown experience was poles apart from hers. Two years later, the same home was raided by officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) investigating PPE Medpro, a company she assisted with winning Covid contracts, and Mone became the poster girl for what is increasingly being regarded as one of the biggest cronyism crises ever to plague these shores.
Quite how a company that was less than three weeks old, with zero employees, no contracts, no premises, no previous transactions of any kind and with £100 in the bank came to land £203,000,000 in government contracts remains a mystery. While established manufacturers were shunned in the procurement process the government created ‘VIP lanes’ to ensure rapid supply of equipment. Where testing is concerned, figures out this week show over three-quarters of contracts were handed to firms referred from ministers, MPs, or Number 10. They received £6 billion of the £7.9 billion of testing contracts awarded between May 2020 to March 2021 – or the equivalent of 75.9 per cent.
Speaking to The London Economic this week, Marina Purkiss described the situation in grim terms. “I don’t think people will ever realise how scandalous that was”, she said. “We’re talking about the biggest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer’s pocket into the pockets of the already very wealthy connected Tory cronies”.
Mone may have been propelled into the spotlight due to the eye-watering nature of her money-grabbing schemes, but she was far from alone in all this. Meller Designs, a firm run by a Tory Party donor who supported Michael Gove’s leadership bid won £164 million in Covid contracts after the minister referred his firm to the VIP lane, while Ayanda Capital, which was advised by a man named Andrew Mills while he was also working for a government body, was awarded £250 million to supply PPE. Matt Hancock’s old landlord, of all people, was even on the receiving end of a £30 million contract to supply test tubes for Covid tests despite his company having no experience in supplying medical equipment, such was the extent of the scandal – and they are only the tip of the iceberg.
In April 2021, campaign group Transparency International found that a fifth of UK government contracts awarded to respond to the covid-19 pandemic last year contained red flag indicators of possible corruption. They identified 73 “questionable contracts” worth more than £3.7 billion in total that warranted further investigation. Most of these (65), worth £2.9 billion, were for personal protective equipment. And it’s worth noting that this was not an international phenomenon. This wasn’t something that became par for the course worldwide as countries grappled with their pandemic response. This is a uniquely British scandal. A uniquely Conservative scandal. And to this day, I feel we still don’t know the depths of it.
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