Michelle Mone: the embodiment of British corruption

Ultimo, the bra which had lifted her to fame, had been jointly owned by a Singapore company and she sold her remaining interest in the then loss-making business in the summer of 2015. That left the entrepreneurship tsar with only one acknowledged commercial interest, a company called Trim Secrets that peddled dubious diet pills, from which she soon stood down, although it seems that her daughter’s continuing involvement was enough to encourage Mone to do a bit of promotional social media. 

When Covid struck and the government of Boris Johnson made the extraordinary decision to open a “VIP” channel to fast-track offers to supply protective medical equipment, “entrepreneurs” such as Mone would have felt almost obliged to respond. Many of those who responded did so irrespective of whether or not they had any experience or knowledge of the healthcare sector and its very special requirements.

What happened next was a ludicrous scandal of extreme cronyism, incompetent public procurement and a horrifying number of unscrupulous chancers. Whatever steps are taken to recover the money that was wasted will only succeed in recouping a fraction of the losses incurred by the public purse. 

The VIP channel was effectively a preferential route for friends, or friends of friends, of those in and around parliament. That anyone in a position of responsibility should have thought this was advisable gives an insight into the culture of desperation that permeated the Johnson perversion of government at the time. When the country was crying out for strong and calm leadership, it got the opposite. 

Yet Johnson’s administration was worse than one simply out of its depth; it really did seem to have only the slenderest grip on morality. The flouting of the Covid restrictions by Johnson and his team in No.10 may have been the most egregious example of this, but a view that the crisis should provide an opportunity to enrich cronies is perhaps even worse. Hence even the then health secretary’s favourite pub landlord stood to benefit from the VIP channel.

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Michelle Mones and moans and moans – but she got her just deserts

Politicians have lapses of judgment, just as most humans do. After all, Cameron fell for the fast talk of Lex Greensill, who promised that his business wizardry would make his fortune. 

Any business associate of Cameron’s would have been able to tell him that Greensill was merely offering a slickly repackaged version of an old-fashioned money-raising tactic called factoring. Indeed, they probably did tell him that. But the late Sir Jeremy Heywood, then a hugely respected cabinet secretary, had swallowed the snake oil too and, it seems, no one in government was able to say that the emperor was wearing no clothes.

But the creation of a lobbying structure that allowed Michelle Mone to present herself as a Covid equipment provider, via the hastily created PPE Medpro, from a privileged position in the House of Lords, was something worse. She may be an effective marketeer and she may even have an ability to design new products – but that is not enough to create, let alone build, a business. 

She might have been good at encouraging people from under-privileged backgrounds, girls in particular, to be brave and have a go at starting a small firm. But any vetting system for entry into the Lords should have sounded warning bells as Cameron decided on her appointment. Subsequently, Johnson chose to overrule the authorities anyhow and go ahead with whatever appointments he wanted – but then Johnson had never heeded advice. 

Perhaps Cameron attributed the widespread hostility towards Mone in Scotland to her defection from Labour to Conservative, or her refusal to support Scottish independence. Maybe the official vetting procedures failed to turn up sufficient cause to veto a peerage, but it is hard to imagine that no one within Cameron’s wide circle was urging caution. 

They would have been right to do so, as Mone has now had to admit to a somewhat flimsy relationship with the truth, particularly in relation to her involvement with PPE Medpro. Having denied she stood to gain any benefit from the business, it seems that she and her family would have enjoyed a juicy slug of the £120m that the court has ordered to be repaid, although, unfortunately most of the proceeds seem to have vanished into the ether. 

Government emissaries may now have to trawl various tax havens just to find any remaining pennies. Whatever they find, however, it will not answer the question of why our political system lacks the checks and balances to prevent these situations occurring.