On Tuesday, the Conservative peer Michelle Mone announced she was taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords, to “clear her name”, after she became the centre of a growing scandal over PPE procurement. Leaked documents suggest Mone and her family secretly received £29m from the firm PPE Medpro after she recommended the company to ministers, and helped it secure access to the government’s “VIP lane” procurement stream. It was later revealed that she also lobbied aggressively for a second firm with links to her husband’s family office. Mone didn’t disclose her financial interest in PPE Medpro in the House of Lords register, but it certainly looks as if she benefited financially.
But who is to say for sure? Who holds the people “who count” accountable? Not Rishi Sunak or his government, if they can help it. To condemn Mone is to condemn their own cronyism, so they’d rather turn a blind eye. The revelations about procurement profiteering keep piling up, and yet the government has weathered it by studiously ignoring the problem. And so far, it has worked.
