Opening the high-stakes trial in a workaday, office-like courtroom in June, the government’s barrister Paul Stanley KC sought to manage expectations for the media crowd in the folding seats at the back.
The case, he said, was not going to focus on the role of Michelle Mone, the Conservative peer who helped secure multimillion pound personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts for her husband’s company during the Covid pandemic.
Rather, it was about the PPE itself, delivered on the second contract, in which the government paid PPE Medpro £122m to supply sterile surgical gowns. Health officials, it emerged in the trial, had rejected the gowns on sight in September 2020 as not compliant with laws governing PPE safety, and they were never used in the NHS. This trial was the DHSC’s claim for the company, ultimately owned by Lady Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, to repay the money.
During the pandemic, Mone and Barrowman’s false public denials of their involvement, the secret profits banked, and Mone’s Instagram pictures of herself on a sun-kissed yacht named Lady M in the summer of 2021, made her the poster woman for the Tory government’s “VIP lane” contracts, which enriched a few while the nation suffered.
Some of the evidence in the trial further illuminated Mone’s role, in pressing civil servants for the gowns contract to be awarded to the company. But Stanley, representing the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), said the court was not going to consider “any of the ethical or political implications” of Mone’s involvement.
“This case is simply about whether 25 million surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro were faulty,” Stanley told the judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill.
The press area never lacked spare seats after that first morning, as the opposing teams of lawyers pored over technical, regulatory and legal details through the summer’s heatwave. But the core issues were still of huge public interest: about how the safety of equipment required to protect lives in hospitals was assured and how Boris Johnson’s government procured PPE when the pandemic struck.
Court documents did set out some of Mone’s role in that process, including that she had made the first approach; as the Guardian revealed in March 2022, she contacted former ministers Michael Gove and Lord Agnew, who referred her offer to the VIP lane.
The “high priority lane”, termed the VIP lane by civil servants, was set up as the government was deluged with offers to fill the UK’s depleted PPE stockpile. Approaches from politically connected people were treated as more credible, and more demanding of a response, than others, even from experienced PPE suppliers.
Evidence from a Cabinet Office civil servant, Richard James, showed that most communication with PPE Medpro came from its then director, Anthony Page, who also worked for Barrowman’s financial services firm in the Isle of Man, but that “Mone remained active throughout”.
Correspondence showed how insistently Page pushed for the contract, sometimes chasing more than once on the same day, and the pressure Mone applied. As Stanley promised, the lawyers did not pick over it, but her involvement and the VIP access she was afforded shaped the context in which her husband’s company was given £122m of government money to supply vital PPE.
As officials considered details provided, James described Page to another civil servant as “desperate” to close the deal. At one point, officials told Page that a proposed Chinese factory was not technically approved, and Page reported this “extremely disappointing situation” to Mone. Mone then had “various communications” with Chris Hall, a senior official in the Cabinet Office, Stanley’s submission said, “in which she pressed Medpro’s case”.
The DHSC’s technical team approved the offer on 22 June 2020, and officials put “VIP” in the email subject line, which read: “Urgent VIP TA [technical assurance] Review … PPE Medpro Limited Gowns – ACCEPT.”
The contract was signed four days later, the DHSC buying 25m sterile surgical gowns for £4.88 each – £122m. The Guardian reported in March 2022 that the gowns appeared to cost £46m to buy from the factory – an apparent profit of £76m for PPE Medpro and three intermediary companies.
Stanley maintained throughout that the DHSC’s case was straightforward: the gowns PPE Medpro provided did not meet safety and sterility standards. The safety of medical products is established by having the manufacturing process certified by an authorised quality assurance organisation, termed a “notified body”, which have numbers to identify them. Sterile surgical gowns – the sterility necessary to prevent infection in operating theatres – must be labelled with a CE mark, denoting compliance with European standards, and a number after it, identifying the notified body which certified the manufacture. The only other way for sterile gowns to be approved in the UK would be if the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) agreed an alternative manufacturing process, known as a derogation.
The PPE Medpro gowns shipped from China bore a CE mark on their labelling but no number. This meant the manufacture, and the sterility, were not certified by a notified body. No derogation had been sought from the MHRA. Stanley’s case was that the gowns “did not comply with the law” governing safety, so PPE Medpro had not delivered sterile gowns as ordered and set out in the contract and must repay the £122m, plus millions more in storage and other costs.
Charles Samek KC, representing PPE Medpro, argued that the company had never promised to supply gowns certified with a CE mark and notified body number. Page had told civil servants in the pre-contract correspondence how the gowns would be made in China, Samek said, and the DHSC had agreed the contract on that basis.
“They were manufactured by a reputable and certified Chinese manufacturing concern,” Samek argued in his opening submission, “and they were sterilised by equally reputable and certified Chinese sterilising factories.” If a derogation was needed, it was up to the DHSC to apply for it, Samek argued.
In December 2020, as Mone and Barrowman through their lawyers publicly denied involvement, PPE Medpro issued a rare press release, saying it was not awarded contracts “because of company or personal connections to the UK government or the Conservative party”. The statement said the company was “proud” that face masks provided for the first, £80.85m contract, and the gowns, “undoubtedly helped keep our NHS workers safe at a time of shortages due to the Covid pandemic”.
That was not true; the gowns had been stopped from being distributed and were never used in the NHS. The case revealed more of that process after the gowns arrived at NHS warehousing facilities in Daventry. Zarah Naeem, an MHRA safety official, inspected them on 11 September 2020, and noted the CE mark with no notified body number. In subsequent correspondence, Page told the MHRA that PPE Medpro had never promised that the gowns would have “Notify [sic] Body accreditations”. Alan Taylor, an MHRA investigator, told Page that the CE mark should not have been on the label without a notified body having certified that all requirements for sterility had been met.
“On this basis I will advise that the stock at Daventry cannot be released to the NHS until this matter is resolved satisfactorily and the product has the correct notified body certification,” Taylor wrote.
The DHSC issued a formal rejection notice on 23 December 2020, telling PPE Medpro that the gowns were “non-compliant with the PPE laws”. Later it commissioned tests which found a high proportion of the gowns were not sterile. In the trial, Samek, on behalf of PPE Medpro, disputed the validity of those test results.
In November 2022, the Guardian revealed that Barrowman had been paid at least £65m from PPE Medpro’s profits, then transferred £29m to a trust set up to benefit Mone and her children. The Conservative government, then led by Rishi Sunak, did not sue for return of the £122m until after the public and parliamentary outcry which followed the Guardian’s reporting.
During the five-week trial, Mone never appeared, but Barrowman was in court most days, sitting behind his company’s lawyers. Yet Samek called neither Barrowman nor anybody else involved with PPE Medpro to give evidence and be questioned. Stanley called eight witnesses for the DHSC, to testify about how the contract was procured, and the gowns rejected.
Stanley had in effect cautioned that the trial would concern unsensational detail, not the stuff of political scandal. But the evidence nevertheless illuminated the inside workings of the government’s pandemic response, a glimpse into civil servants’ experiences of dealing with pressure for contracts from people given VIP treatment due to Conservative connections.
Mone posted from the Lady M in August 2021: “Living my best life!” In December 2022 she took a leave of absence from the Lords, which continues. She finally admitted in a BBC interview in December 2023 that she had lied to the media when she denied being involved in PPE Medpro, and Barrowman acknowledged the money he had made. The National Crime Agency began an investigation in May 2021 into whether Mone and Barrowman had committed any criminal offences in the procurement of the contracts, which the couple deny. The investigation, which Samek said hung over PPE Medpro “like Damocles’ sword,” is ongoing.
