Oh dear. The Babe Ruth of the bar has blundered once again. Jolyon Maugham, the kimono-cladded KC, has been raging about PPE contracts during Covid for years now. One company that has particularly attracted his ire is Meller Designs Ltd, formerly co-owned by businessman David Meller.
During the pandemic, it was awarded six PPE supply contracts worth £164 million, following a referral through the ‘high priority lane’ or ‘VIP lane’. Maugham and his Good Law Project (GLP) have claimed that PPE referred through this route ‘was on average 80 per cent more expensive.’
In a December 2023 article for the Guardian, the GLP claimed that internal government documents showed that the unit price paid for items under VIP lane contracts was up to four times higher than average. Maugham’s outfit specifically cited Meller Designs as an example of this practice. It claimed that, in three of its six contracts, ‘the government paid between 1.2 and 2.2 times the average unit price. The average price for medical gowns was £5.87 but the gowns bought from Meller Designs cost £12.64.’ Case closed, you might think.
But, this week, a newly submitted document to the Covid inquiry shows that Maugham has got it wrong, once again. A witness statement by Chris Hall, a former caseworker in the high priority line, declares that ‘the Guardian report and the Good Law Project analysis were both factually incorrect. In fact, the data indicates that the price paid to Meller Designs was below the going rate at that time’. Whoops!
Hall goes on to say that the error appears to be a result of the Graun and GLP’s ‘failure to identify the goods in question correctly’. This is because – wait for it – ‘the contract with Meller Designs was in fact a deal for coveralls, and not gowns’. Yes, that’s right – far from being more than twice the going rate, the unit price was actually below the average market price at that time. The art of the deal indeed.
Given Maugham’s interest in this story, Mr S is surprised that this revelation is yet to be tweeted breathlessly to his many followers. Perhaps he is too busy out practicing his bat swing…
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