Baroness Mone: ‘I can’t see what we’ve done wrong’
Laura Kuenssberg’s show this morning was dominated by her interview with Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman, who have admitted their direct involvement with PPE Medpro, a company which was awarded a huge PPE contract during the pandemic, despite years claiming the contrary. The couple said they made £60 million in profit from the deal, and Mone admitted to being a beneficiary of financial trusts where the money is held. There is an ongoing criminal investigation, but Mone suggested they had been made scapegoats while Barrowman even implied a government official had asked for a bribe in exchange for the investigation to be called off. The Baroness claimed all they had done wrong was lie to the press.
Deputy PM denies accusations of cronyism
Cases like that of Mone and Barrowman have led to suggestions of cronyism at work during the pandemic. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden told Kuenssberg he was confident that all the proper checks and balances were carried out when awarding contracts, but Kuenssberg wondered why £9 billion was wasted on PPE that was never used. Dowden said the government’s strategy was to plan for ‘the reasonable worst-case scenario’ and to order the maximum amount available. He also explained the work of the the Public Sector Fraud Authority, which has been set up to recover funds that were wrongly lost.
Wes Streeting: ‘We want our money back’
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting was direct in his assessment of the Baroness Mone interview: he told Kuenssberg that no one would ‘shed a tear’ for Mone. He also announced Labour plans to appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to target those guilty of profiteering during the pandemic and to ‘claw back’ as much money as possible. Kuenssberg pointed out that the government was already enacting similar plans.
Streeting: NHS crises can’t just be excuses for more money
On Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Streeting to justify his accusations of complacency in the NHS. Streeting explained he hadn’t meant complacency among NHS workers, but rather complacency in the approach to fixing its issues. He claimed that simply providing more money would not work, and that the NHS needed to modernise and reform its systems to work more efficiently. Streeting said he believed that the NHS could remain free at the point of use – but only if those changes were made. He then blamed ‘13 years of Conservative mismanagement’ for the state of public finances.
Rwanda legislation is ‘best thing we can get’
Lastly, after Rishi Sunak used suggested that immigration could ‘overwhelm’ European states while on a visit to Italy, Oliver Dowden signalled that the Prime Minister would be unwilling to bow to pressure from the right of his party over his Rwanda legislation. He told Phillips that Sunak was a ‘rigorous person’ and had thought through the issue carefully. Phillips asked Dowden if he could envisage any changes being made to the bill, and Dowden admitted that they wouldn’t rule out amendments, but said the legislation ‘does the job’.
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