On its face, the Department of Health and Social Care v PPE Medpro Limited was not a case about Michelle Mone, or VIP fast lanes, or the politics and profiteering of the pandemic years.
Rather, as the DHSC’s barrister made clear on the first morning of the first day of hearings, it was about 25 million surgical gowns sold to the NHS for £122m. Were they, or were they not, appropriately certified as sterile, and thus fit for use?
The answer, unequivocally according to Lady Justice Cockerill’s judgment, was no, leaving PPE Medpro in breach of contract, and liable to repay just short of £122m.
This case was always going to be about more than dusty contract law however. By targeting the company founded and controlled by Doug Barrowman, the husband of Baroness Mone, the DHSC was taking on the couple who encapsulated the COVID PPE scandal.
Her public profile as the media-friendly lingerie entrepreneur ennobled by David Cameron, blithely sharing snaps from the Lady M yacht while the country endured lockdown, and her husband’s repeated hollow denials, made them the faces of that failure.
PPE Medpro won more than £200m of contracts only after Baroness Mone used her political contacts, including Michael Gove, to introduce the firm to the government’s VIP ‘fast lane’ and short-circuit normal procurement rules.
Michelle Mone is admitted to the House of Lords after being made a Tory peer. Pic: PA
She did so on the same day in May 2020 that her husband Doug Barrowman incorporated the company, and then lobbied hard over the next six months to see the deal completed. The judge described her as PPE Medpro’s “big gun”, deployed when civil servants were perceived to be holding up the deal.
When challenged the pair then lied for more than two years about their…
