Case shines a light on the Tories' handling of Covid

Opening the highstakes trial in a workaday, office-like courtroom in June, the government's barrister Paul Stanley KC sought to manage expectations for the media crowd in the folding seats at the back.

- David Conn

The case, he said, was not going to focus on the role of Michelle Mone, the Conservative peer who helped secure multimillion pound personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts for her husband's firm during the Covid pandemic.

Rather, it was about the PPE itself, delivered on the second contract, in which the government paid PPE Medpro £122m to supply sterile surgical gowns. Health officials, it emerged in the trial, had rejected the gowns on sight in September 2020 as not compliant with laws governing PPE safety, and they were never used by the NHS.

This trial was the Department of Health and Social Care's claim for the company, ultimately owned by Lady Mone's husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, to repay the money.

During the pandemic, Mone and Barrowman's false public denials of their involvement, the secret profits banked, and Mone's Instagram pictures of herself on a sun-kissed yacht named Lady M in the summer of 2021, made her the public face of the Tory government's "VIP lane" contracts, which enriched a few while the nation suffered.

Some of the evidence in the trial further illuminated Mone's role in pressing civil servants for the gowns contract to be awarded to the company. But Stanley, representing the DHSC, said the court was not going to consider "any of the ethical or political implications" of Mone's involvement. "This case is simply about whether 25m surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro were faulty," Stanley told the judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill.