Michelle Mone has accused the chancellor of using “dangerous and inflammatory” language about her, after a company linked to the peer was ordered to repay millions of pounds for breaching a Covid-19 PPE contract.
Mone, who has had the Conservative whip suspended, has faced cross-party calls for her to be stripped of her peerage. At a fringe event this week at Labour’s party conference, Rachel Reeves joked that she had a vendetta against Mone, adding: “Clearly she shouldn’t be in the House of Lords.”
In a letter to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, Mone said that referring to a vendetta was “connoting vengeance, feud and blood feud, is incendiary and has directly increased the risks to my personal safety”. She claimed her “social media has gone into meltdown with threats and abuse” since Reeves spoke.
Mone is facing calls to be removed from the Lords after PPE Medpro, a company to which she is linked, was ordered to return nearly £122m paid to it by the Department of Health and Social Care for 25m sterile surgical gowns under a contract awarded in June 2020. It was found to have breached the contract after the DHSC argued the company had not complied with the relevant PPE laws to ensure the gowns were actually sterile.
A life peerage cannot be relinquished but Mone could choose to resign her membership of the Lords.
Mone told Starmer: “I feel compelled to alert you to the dangerous and inflammatory statement made by your chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves.
“This is one of the most troubling interventions ever made by a senior minister of the crown. The statement was not directed at PPE Medpro as a corporate entity in civil litigation, but at me personally.
“It confirms that the machinery of the state is being deployed with the specific object of pursuing a vendetta against me, a private citizen and fellow parliamentarian.”
Mone has demanded an “immediate and formal withdrawal of the chancellor’s statement” and public clarification “that there is no government vendetta against me personally”.
She also called on the prime minister to launch an independent investigation into whether “ministers or officials have improperly influenced” the National Crime Agency, Crown Prosecution Service and civil litigation process.
The high court case was separate to an ongoing investigation by the National Crime Agency, begun in May 2021, into whether Mone and Barrowman committed any criminal offences during the process of procuring the contracts. Mone and Barrowman have denied any criminal wrongdoing.
In an 87-page ruling, Mrs Justice Cockerill, said the gowns provided by PPE Medpro, a consortium led by Mone’s husband, Doug Barrowman, “were not, contractually speaking, sterile, or properly validated as being sterile”, which meant they could not be used in the NHS.
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Mone criticised the high court judgment, describing it as a win for the “establishment”, while Barrowman said it was a “travesty of justice”.
She also claimed Nigel Farage’s accusations that Starmer had “incited violence” against those linked to Reform UK “compounds the seriousness of the matter”.
Concluding her letter, the peer said: “Prime minister, I ask you directly: do you stand by your chancellor’s assertion that the government has a vendetta against me? Or will you act decisively to end this campaign, protect my safety, and restore integrity to government?”
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservatives, told BBC local radio that Mone had brought “embarrassment and shame to the party”, and should have the “book thrown at her”.
A Labour source said: “When both the Labour chancellor and Conservative leader agree with each other, you’ve lost the argument.”
Lawyers for PPE Medpro had told the trial that it had been “singled out for unfair treatment” and accused the government of having “buyer’s remorse”, claiming the gowns became defective because of the conditions in which they were kept after delivery.
