Now, Baroness Mone is the face of an escalating scandal that has gripped the British public. She has admitted to lying about her role in facilitating a multimillion-pound deal to sell the government personal protective equipment during the coronavirus crisis — including some 25 million hospital gowns that the government claims were unusable — and standing to personally profit.
“The public probably see me as a horrible person, a liar, or even a cheat,” Mone said last week. As the tabloid Daily Mail put it in one headline this fall: “Could this be the final undoing of Baroness Bra?”
Yet Mone’s apology on Sunday for lying about her links to the company under investigation by the government is not just a personal image issue. It is piling pressure on Britain’s Conservative government over its response to the pandemic ahead of an anticipated election in 2024 — and raising questions about whether it gave preferential deals to politically connected business owners.
With investigations and a lawsuit into either her conduct or that of the company — which is run by her husband— the issue has become a lightning rod for public anger over government waste in the early months of the pandemic.
In May 2020, as Britain was in the grips of its deadliest public health disaster in living memory, Mone reportedly offered to help a government minister rapidly procure desperately needed coronavirus protective gear for the National Health Service, the publicly funded health-care system. England’s residents were forbidden from leaving their homes for all nonessential purposes at the time, as the government raced to prevent the health system from collapsing under the strain of the death toll.
The referral led to two deals totaling 203 million pounds (approximately $257 million) for a firm called PPE Medpro. It was not publicly disclosed that PPE Medpro was run by a consortium belonging to Mone’s husband, Doug Barrowman, a Scottish investor also reported to own a 50 million-pound superyacht, five Ferrari sports cars and a painting by Pablo Picasso.
Created in May 2020, PPE Medpro signed two contracts the following month to deliver 210 million face masks and 25 million surgical gowns to the British government.
The government’s health ministry, in a lawsuit it later brought against PPE Medpro, alleged that not one of the surgical gowns delivered was usable since they were not properly sterilized — a claim the company has denied.
The National Crime Agency — Britain’s version of the FBI — is separately investigating “suspected criminal offenses” for the way PPE Medpro’s contracts were procured, it said in an emailed statement.
For its part, the House of Lords is investigating Mone herself for allegedly breaching the legislative chamber’s own code of conduct in facilitating the deal.
As a Conservative legislator, Mone made the recommendation of PPE Medpro through what’s called the High Priority Lane. This allowed companies with personal referrals to leapfrog Britain’s procurement bureaucracy during the public health emergency. This method was later ruled unlawful by Britain’s high court, which determined it unfairly expedited some contracts over others without justification.
Mone’s secrecy during that process has also been a source of controversy.
Mone kept her involvement in the deal — and her family ties to PPE Medpro — secret from the public. Her lawyers denied she had any role in the deal in response to questions from journalists. She did not disclose her links to the company in the House of Lords’ list of registered interests. And her husband’s name was not listed on the company’s filings.
In November 2021, some of this information started coming to light anyway. A Freedom of Information Request revealed that Mone did make the initial referral. Then the British media reported on her family ties to PPE Medpro through the financial consortium that backed it.
This weekend, Mone acknowledged that she did stand to personally benefit from the deal. But in a defiant BBC television interview, she said she did nothing legally wrong and had previously denied her links to the company to protect her family’s privacy.
“I’m sorry for not saying straight out: Yes, I am involved,” she said, adding that, “we’ve only done one thing, which was lie to the press to say we weren’t involved. That’s not a crime.”
She confirmed in the interview that “yes of course” she stood to benefit from the deal, since she is a beneficiary of a financial trust holding the profits. “If one day, if, God forbid, my husband passes away before me, then I am a beneficiary,” she said.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was Boris Johnson’s finance minister during the pandemic, told reporters on Monday he took the matter of PPE Medpro “incredibly seriously.” “This whole situation is subject to an ongoing criminal investigation, but also the government is taking legal action against the company involved, so there’s a limit to what I can say,” he said.
Mone has not been criminally charged — and she and her husband deny claims that PPE Medpro supplied subpar goods.
“Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman dispute the claims by [the Department for Health and Social Care] that their product was not to specification, and intend to clear their name,” their spokesman said in a statement shared with The Washington Post. Mone, the statement said, admitted “a mistake in her dealings with the media,” but had been “honest” throughout her private dealings with government officials.
Mone, in a post on X last week, accused the government of using her and Barrowman as a “scapegoat” to avoid scrutiny for their coronavirus procurement practices.
In a report last year, government officials acknowledged that more than half of the 12 billion pounds (about $15 billion) spent on personal protective equipment in the first year of the pandemic was wasted on unusable gear that didn’t meet official standards or was unsuitable.
The opposition Labour Party — which has criticized what it called a “chumocracy” in the government’s covid contracting processes, vowed in October to appoint a “Covid Corruption Commissioner” to “chase down those who have ripped off the taxpayer, take them to court, and claw back every penny of taxpayer’s money.”
As the tabloids have a field day with what one called a “car crash interview,” Mone is likely to remain in the spotlight — and not for the reasons she markets herself.
Mone has long billed herself as something of a celebrity businesswoman. Her 2015 memoir “My Fight to the Top” charted her life from “overcoming near-poverty on the rough streets” and leaving school at 15 years old to founding her now-shuttered fashion brand Ultimo Lingerie.
Also in 2015, then prime minister David Cameron appointed her as a government adviser and a Conservative baroness.
“Her journey to the top is truly one-of-a-kind,” Mone’s website says.
