Mone & Barrowman: Headliners in a Rotten Circus

Baroness Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman are the glittering billboard of Covid corruption. They set up PPE Medpro in May 2020, and on the very same day it was incorporated, they landed a contract worth £122 million. Not bad for a company that didn’t exist the week before. Of course, the gowns were unusable, the contracts collapsed, and now the High Court wants the money back. Crooks, plain and simple.

But here’s the thing: they’re not the whole story. They’re just the cabaret act, distracting us with sequins, denials and crocodile tears while the real heist took place backstage.

Welcome to the VIP Lane

The government created a fast-track procurement system that looked less like emergency planning and more like the velvet rope outside a Mayfair nightclub. If you had a minister’s mobile number, in you went. If you were an established supplier offering PPE at cost? Sorry, sir, not tonight.

The result:

• Over £1 billion of PPE supplied through the VIP lane turned out to be useless.
• Contracts were inflated by around £925 million compared to normal market prices.
• Billions more were written off as defective, overpriced or simply never delivered.

Meanwhile, genuine suppliers, people actually capable of providing proper equipment, were ignored. Because they weren’t “members.”

A Country in Crisis, a Few Cashing In

While nurses wore bin bags, volunteers sewed masks at kitchen tables, and small businesses like mine stared at the abyss, the VIP-lane club was raking it in. Companies incorporated days earlier suddenly found themselves pocketing contracts in the hundreds of millions.

The numbers are staggering. The moral bankruptcy is worse.

The Hopeful Bit (Yes, Really)

Here’s the only silver lining: Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman are so narcissistic, so outraged at being caught, that they might just drag others down with them. If their sense of injustice keeps them lashing out, maybe, just maybe, the whole rotten orchard will be exposed.

Because make no mistake: Mone and Barrowman aren’t exceptions. They’re examples. A symptom of a system that rewarded connections over competence, greed over integrity, and fraud over fairness.

The VIP lane was never about protecting the NHS. It was about protecting the club. And the rest of us were left queuing outside.