Michelle Mone should resign from the House of Lords, a senior Conservative MP has told Sky News.
Speaking to Sky News, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho said Baroness Mone of Mayfair should do the “honourable thing” and “resign” as a member of the House of Lords.
Yesterday the Mone-linked firm PPE Medpro was ordered to pay close to £122m of taxpayer cash back to the government after it was found to have breached a contract for supplying PPE during the COVID pandemic.
Politics latest: No ‘golden ticket’ for refugees
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) brought the case, saying it provided 25 million “faulty”, non-sterile gowns.
Baroness Mone was a Tory peer, although she currently has the whip suspended, meaning she isn’t a member of the official grouping in the chamber.
Speaking to Wilf Frost, Ms Coutinho said: “We’ve taken away the Conservative whip, she’s no longer a Conservative peer.
“And I think the honourable thing to do, particularly in light of this, would be to resign.”
Removing a peerage from someone requires an act of parliament, although members of the House of Lords can be permanently excluded by a vote in the upper chamber if an investigation finds they have committed wrongdoing.
Currently, the parliamentary investigations into Baroness Mone are paused while other inquiries – including from the National Crime Agency – play out.
In her interview with Sky News, Ms Coutinho emphasised that it was the last Conservative government that started the lawsuit against PPE Medpro.
She defended the procurement methods employed by the government during the pandemic – saying it…
