Michelle Mone is a symptom of a much deeper disease corrupting British politics

It’s a cliche that ‘the cover-up is worse than the crime’ but in the case of Michelle Mone the old saw seems pretty accurate.

Mone spent three years denying that she or her husband Doug Barrowman had anything to do with PPE Medpro, a company that, weeks after being set up, was given more than ￡200m worth of contracts to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) at the height of the Covid pandemic.

The contracts, handed out after Mone had approached Cabinet Office ministers Michael Gove and Theodore Agnew, were processed through the “VIP lane” for politically-connected people. Much of the equipment supplied by PPE Medpro was found to be “unusable”.?

Journalists - particularly the indefatigable David Conn - who tried to report the truth of all this were threatened with legal action by the Baroness. (Mone’s own government has failed to deliver on its promise to stop lawfare, but that’s another story, which I’ve written about here.)

Now Mone has come clean.?

Yes, she lied. She does stand to benefit from ￡60m profits from PPE Medpro - but lying to the press is “not a crime”.?The National Crime Agency, which is currently investigating, may see things differently.

Mone’s admission led the news headlines. Clips from her mind-bending interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg went viral. (Less watched is the 70-minute-long ‘investigative’ film exonerating Mone that was released last week, funded by… PPE Medpro.)

The Mone story has shocked many, and rightly so. This is a person made a legislator for life by David Cameron in recognition of services to, eh, supporting the Tories in Scotland who, thanks to her political connections, secured massive government contracts at a time when the health service was on its knees.

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But Mone is not alone. Far from it. The Conservative government gave billions of pounds worth of Covid contracts to its friends and donors.

This is not news. I first began reporting on suspect Covid contracts in April 2020 - just weeks into the pandemic - when a source came to me expressing concerns about how procurement rules were being ripped up and firms with political connections given privileged access.

I subsequently reported on dozens of contracts, from the PR firm run by Dominic Cummings’ best mate to the multi-million pound comms contract to the firm that orchestrated the Tories’ misleading social media campaign during the 2019 general election.

A Conservative councillor in Stroud bought a ￡3.5m farmhouse after his small, loss-making, medical supplies company was awarded ￡272m in PPE contracts. The owner of a pub frequented by then health secretary Matt Hancock was awarded multi-million pound contracts to supply test tubes to the NHS.?

In the years since we have found much, much more.?

A staggering ￡1.6billion worth of contracts were awarded as a result of referrals from just ten Conservative politicians. Contracts signed through this VIP lane were inflated by at least ￡925m, according to the Good Law Project.

It’s not just PPE contracts. Boris Johnson spent ￡30bn on test and trace. Firms such as Serco - run by Winston Churchill’s grandson Rupert Soames - were given huge contracts without standard procurement rules. Rishi Sunak has shown little interest in the billions wasted in fraudulent Covid loans.

It is tempting to dismiss these as aberrations prompted by the chaos of Covid. But the pandemic was over when Tory MP Scott Benton offered to lobby ministers on behalf of undercover journalists pretending to be gambling industry reps.?

This is what power without accountability looks like. While the jejune Mone is splashed across the front pages, a myriad of Conservative allies have walked off with life-changing sums with barely a nib in Private Eye against them.?

The system that facilitated all this is unchanged. If anything, it could be about to get even worse.?

In the Times at the weekend, unnamed Tory spinners talked up the coming general election as the fiercest and most expensive in British political history. This is almost certainly true.

While newsdesk editors seem to believe that the Conservatives are somehow ‘clean’ post-Johnson, the reality is that huge amounts of money from questionable sources are still flowing into the Tory party: in the past 12 months, Rishi Sunak has raised more money than any of his successors.?

This money will be used to fight the dirtiest election Britain has ever seen. Already Sunak has installed Australian spin doctor Isaac Levido - pupil of Lynton ‘dead cat’ Crosby’ - who has spearheaded the prime minister’s turn against net zero.?

The Conservatives have changed our election laws, ensuring that this will be the dark money general election. Now donors who want to funnel money into British politics anonymously can do so with gay abandon.

As we saw with PPE contracts, these donors have unparalleled access to the top of British politics.?

For ￡50,000 a year, Tory ‘Leader’s Group’ donors get to have off record meetings with the prime minister and leading cabinet figures four times a year. Rather than promising to take money out of our politics, Labour is trying to woo big donors.?

As long as the same rotten system of buying and selling political influence remains, scandals like Michelle Mone will be the rule, not the exception.

Rishi Sunak certainly seems to have shaken a shine to Giorgia Meloni. Italy’s far right leader was the only other G7 leader to attend the UK summit on artificial intelligence last month. At the weekend, Sunak compared Meloni to no less than his icon Margaret Thatcher.??

But the British government won’t say what Sunak and Meloni talk about behind closed doors: after the pair met in Downing Street in April, I sent a Freedom of Information request asking for a copy of any minutes or notes from the meeting.

?Number 10 refused to release any information, saying that to do so “could undermine the UK’s role in Europe and elsewhere”. But Sunak giving hardline speeches against immigration at a far-right festival whose former guests include Steve Bannon and Viktor Orban is fine…