Always follow the money

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.

- SEAN O'GRADY

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".