A former Conservative health minister Lord Bethell has rowed with Labour over “corruption” allegations after he admitted he may have deleted phone messages about Covid contracts.
The Tory peer said he was the victim of an unfair “personal” attack from Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner after she claimed he had a key role in “dishing out” contracts during the pandemic.
The government previously claimed Lord Bethell had “lost” or “replaced” his mobile phone before it could be searched for messages relevant to £85m-worth of testing contracts given to Abingdon Health.
In a new statement given to the judicial review – launched following a legal challenge by campaigners at the Good Law Project – Lord Bethell acknowledged that messages related to the contracts were deleted.
“I have cleared WhatsApp messages from my personal mobile phone from time to time in order to free up storage space,” the former minister said. “To the extent that these messages related to the Abingdon Health contract, they would have been deleted.”
It comes after it emerged that Owen Paterson – the former Tory MP at the centre of the sleaze scandal engulfing the government – had contact with Lord Bethell at the start of the Covid crisis.
Mr Paterson was reportedly party to a call with Lord Bethell and the health firm Randox last April, shortly after the firm was given a government contract to provide Covid tests.
Highlighting the fact that Randox paid Mr Paterson £100,000 a year to act as a consultant, Labour’s deputy leader tweeted: “Owen Paterson sat in on a call between Randox and Lord Bethell, who dished out Covid contracts.”
Ms Rayner added: “Randox was awarded over £500m in Covid contracts without a tender or an open process. Let’s call this what it is – corruption.”
But the former Tory health minister fired back as the Labour deputy, saying: “This sort of consistent personal attack unfairly implies wrongdoing. It sneers at our national effort, when in fact so many were seeking to save lives.”
Denying any wrongdoing in a series of tweets, he added: “I thought that we all have a responsibility for our language and rhetoric, and should avoid toxifying the national debate?”
Ms Rayner responded: “Calling corruption corruption is not ‘toxifying the national debate’, it is a statement of fact. Publish your private WhatsApps and emails detailing how Randox were awarded over £500m without tender, despite not having enough equipment and failing to deliver a previous contract.”
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has also demanded a “full, transparent investigation” into how Randox came to win Covid testing contracts. He said it was “vital the public has confidence that Owen Paterson’s paid advocacy did not influence these decisions”.
Meanwhile, the information commissioner continues to investigating Lord Bethell’s use of “WhatsApp and any other private channels” to conduct government business.
