Michelle Mone has hit out at Rishi Sunak after the prime minister said he was taking the scandal surrounding her involvement in lucrative PPE contracts “incredibly seriously”.
The baroness is facing calls to be barred from the House of Lords after she admitted standing to benefit from £60m in profit over a contract signed with PPE Medpro at the height of the Covid crisis after she recommended it to ministers.
The Tory peer and Ultimo bra tycoon has taken a leave of absence from the Lords for more than a year as she bids to “clear her name” over the scandal. But she is free to resume membership, piling pressure on the PM to ensure she does not return to the upper House.
After Mr Sunak said he was taking the scandal “incredibly seriously”, Ms Mone said: “What is Rishi Sunak talking about? I was honest with the Cabinet Office, the government and the NHS in my dealings with them.
“They all knew about my involvement from the very beginning.”
Full report: Michelle Mone hits back at Rishi Sunak
Michelle Mone has hit back at Rishi Sunak over his intervention in the PPE row, insisting ministers knew about her involvement in the lucarative contract from the beginning.
The peer is facing calls to be barred from the House of Lords, with the PM insisting today that Downing Street was taking the case “incredibly seriously”.
Our political correspondent Archie Mitchell has the full report:
Watch: Michelle Mone admits she could benefit from £60m PPE contract
Michelle Mone hits out at ‘very biased’ Twitter community note
Michelle Mone has criticised a “community note” on Twitter/X, claiming it is “very biased and factually incorrect”.
The social media service adds context brought by other readers to certain tweets, in this instance saying: “Michelle Mone helped PPE Medpro secure a £122 million contract to supply hospital gowns, later deemed defective, not sterile and unsuitable for NHS use ‘for any purpose’”.
“The Government is now suing the firm – which Mone admits profiting from – to recover the money wasted.”
In a later post, Ms Mone said: “This label by @CommunityNotes is biased and factually incorrect. An email sent in 2020 by the Cabinet Office to PPE Medpro said our gowns had been ‘approved by technical’. We dispute all claims by the government that the product was defective, and intend to clear our name.”
Letters | Was lying really Michelle Mone’s ‘only mistake’?
In a letter to The Independent, Tim Sidaway, one of our readers in Herefordshire, has written:
Michelle Mone says her “only mistake” was repeatedly lying (my words, as she couldn’t bring herself to admit it as it is) by denying any benefit from the PPE deal made with her husband’s company at the height of the pandemic.
What about recommending the deal in the first place, knowing that her family would benefit? What about failing to declare an interest to the Lords, against procedure? And then threatening legal action to protect her lies?
At least her claims regarding government malfeasance and incompetence are believable.
Michelle Mone appeared to fight back tears in Medpro-funded film
David Oliver, a former president of the Royal College of Physicians, told the Sunday Times he had been “used’.
It was called The Interview: Baroness Mone and the PPE Scandal and presented and produced by Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective and award-winning investigative journalist. Defending the programme he told the paper it was split into “two distinct parts”, the first on the government’s handling of PPE and the second half on PPE Medpro and Mone.
‘It’s not my yacht, it’s not my money,’ says Michelle Mone
Michelle Mone has admitted that a 30 per cent profit had been made on PPE contracts, of around £60 million. But she denied to the BBC that she had bought a yacht with the money and insisted the cash was her husband’s money.
“It’s not my yacht, it’s not my money,” she said. “That cash is my husband’s cash, it’s just like my dad going home with his wage packet on a Friday night and giving it to my mum. So she’s benefiting from that as well, but that cash is not my cash and is not my children’s cash.
“If one day, God forbid, my husband passes away before me then I am a beneficiary as well as his children and my children.”
But she insisted if he divorced her she would receive nothing.
Deputy PM ‘doesn’t accept’ Michelle Mone’s claim she was ‘scapegoat’ in PPE scandal
Oliver Dowden has said he “doesn’t accept” Baroness Michelle Mone’s claim that she and her husband Doug Barrowman were made “scapegoats” for the government’s wider failings over PPE during the Covid pandemic.
Speaking to Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News, the deputy prime minister added: “There’s a limit to what I can say, but I don’t recognise that.”
It came after Lady Mone apologised for denying her links to the PPE Medpro firm which was awarded government contracts worth more than £200m to supply PPE after she recommended it to ministers.
No ‘VIP lane’ existed for PPE, says Conservative former minister
In case you missed it, a Tory ex-Treasury minister this month denied the existence of a so-called VIP lane over personal protective equipment (PPE) as the government scrambled to find sufficient kit in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The idea of there existing a VIP lane is “misconstrued”, Lord Agnew told BBC Newsnight, saying: “I don’t call it the VIP lane at all. We were getting hundreds of offers a day to help from largely very decent people who were as worried as we were in government.
“And we had to find some way of getting the more critical ones through into the procurement triaging system. So that’s all it was. The idea of it being a VIP line is very misconstrued.”
Lord Agnew resigned in January this year from his ministerial posts over what he described at the time as the “schoolboy” handling of fraudulent Covid-19 business loans.
Michelle Mone says she ‘regrets’ denying links to PPE Medpro
Baroness Michelle Mone apologised after denying her links to the PPE Medpro firm which was awarded contracts worth more than £200m to supply personal protective equipment after she recommended it to ministers, reports my colleague Holly Patrick.
The Conservative peer was questioned by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday on the controversy surrounding the firm, which is being investigated by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
“I wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. I regret and I’m sorry for not saying straight out ‘yes I am involved’,” Lady Mone said.
Opinion | The Michelle Mone interview was the worst PR comeback since Prince Andrew
In his column on Michelle Mone’s BBC interview, our associate editor Sean O’Grady writes:
“I’m not sure who’s advising Baroness (Michelle) Mone and her hubby Doug Barrowman these days.
“Hannah Ingram-Moore maybe, who, during a catastrophic interview earlier this year with Piers Morgan, destroyed the charitable foundation set up in the name of Captain Sir Tom Moore, her dear old dad and national treasure?
“Or maybe Lady Mone was recently at a perfectly normal shooting party and bumped into his former royal highness the Duke of York, a chap always ready with a few useful tips about getting out of a fix.
“Whoever is at the ignoble lady’s elbow these days isn’t serving her interests terribly well. Presumably advised to do so as part of some PR charm offensive, the pair offered themselves up to Laura Kuenssberg for an interview to explain how they’d been scapegoated over the coronavirus personal protective equipment (PPE) affair, and how the mess (which wasn’t really a mess, because nothing was wrong anyway) was all everyone’s else’s fault and nothing to do with them.”
