Rarely can there have been a less convincing apology than that offered by Michelle Mone in her weekend interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. Lady Mone admitted last month that she and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were involved in a company called PPE Medpro that won contracts worth £200m during the pandemic, and banked around £65m of this as profit. On Sunday, she told the BBC that she is sorry for having lied about this for years. But despite the apology, the couple gave the impression of believing that they have done almost nothing wrong. They blame others, principally the media and government officials, or the events that have placed them at the heart of the postmortem into pandemic procurement.
Lady Mone referred repeatedly to the “hell” that reporters have put her family through, as she also did in a tearful interview released on YouTube. Perhaps she hopes Prince Harry’s victory in his phone-hacking case might generate sympathy in a public primed to resent press intrusion. Never mind that the circumstances are completely different. She also said that she was advised not to declare her interest in PPE Medpro on the House of Lords register by the cabinet office.
A National Crime Agency investigation into allegations of fraud and bribery in relation to the PPE Medpro contracts is ongoing (Lady Mone and Mr Barrowman deny wrongdoing). But aside from the question of whether any criminality has taken place, Lady Mone’s repeated lies should disqualify her from parliament. It is a year since she took a leave of absence from the Lords. The scandal of the unlawful VIP lane is not limited to Lady Mone, who is right that she should not become a scapegoat for the scheme’s wider failings. Ministers including Michael Gove, with whom she dealt directly, also have questions to answer.
But Lady Mone’s dishonesty ought to be incompatible with public office. Since 2020, three different law firms have sent letters to the Guardian denying that she was connected with PPE Medpro in any way. One threatened that any suggestion of an association would be “misleading” and “defamatory”. Given this record, and the fact that she now admits to being a beneficiary – along with her grownup children – of £29m in an offshore trust set up by Mr Barrowman using PPE Medpro profits, it is astonishing that she sought to justify her actions on grounds that she wanted to avoid a “hoo-ha”. The facts are that a business in which she and her husband were involved made £65m in profit out of selling gowns and masks to the NHS – and she repeatedly lied to keep it secret.
So far, the public sector fraud authority set up to recoup pandemic losses has recovered £130m. Labour has pledged to go further, if elected, in pursuit of £7.2bn lost to fraud during the crisis (£8.7bn spent on faulty or overpriced PPE has been written off). With the National Audit Office finding that VIP firms with high-level contacts were 10 times more likely to win contracts, and criticising the Department of Health for colossal waste, there is no lack of evidence about incompetence and cronyism at the heart of government. But with a public inquiry into the pandemic under way (hearings on procurement will take place next year), it is deeply dismaying that a peer such as Lady Mone has been able to use lawyers in her efforts to suppress the truth about what happened.
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