Michelle Mone has said she has “no wish” to return to the House of Lords as a Conservative peer after a company linked to her was ordered to repay millions of pounds for breaching a Covid-19 PPE contract.
In a letter to Kemi Badenoch, Lady Mone accused the Tory leader of using “inflammatory language” against her and suggested she was leading the party to extinction.
The Conservatives hit back with a statement saying Mone had in effect been barred from returning to the party having “fallen well short” of its standards.
“Baroness Mone was formally written to yesterday by the Lords’ chief whip, and informed that she would not receive the Conservative whip were she ever to return,” a party spokesperson said.
“Under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the Conservative party expects parliamentarians to maintain the highest standards, and on this Baroness Mone has fallen well short.”
Mone denied any wrongdoing and said she “never received a penny” from PPE Medpro. On Wednesday, the company was ordered to pay back £122m to the government after it was found to have breached a contract to supply surgical gowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The judge concluded that PPE Medpro had not complied with the legal and regulatory requirements to ensure the gowns, manufactured in China, were certified and validated to be sterile.
In a statement, the company, which was ultimately owned by Mone’s husband, Doug Barrowman, claimed the couple had been made “scapegoats” for the then Conservative government’s overspending on PPE during the pandemic.
Mone and Barrowman for years publicly denied through their lawyers that they were involved in PPE Medpro, until in December 2023 they confirmed their involvement and Barrowman said he was the company’s ultimate beneficial owner.
Several senior politicians have called for Mone to relinquish her peerage following the high court judgment, including Badenoch and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor.
Badenoch told BBC local radio on Thursday that Mone had brought “embarrassment and shame to the party”, and should have the “book thrown at her”.
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In her letter to Badenoch on Friday, Mone said she was “shocked to the core to read about your inflammatory language on BBC radio yesterday calling for me to resign from the House of Lords”.
Mone wrote that there “seems to be a bit of amnesia” about her loss of the Conservative whip, stating that she had “removed it myself by taking a leave of absence”.
She added: “However, you will be pleased to hear that once I do clear my name, I have no wish to return to the Lords as a Conservative peer; that’s assuming there still is a Conservative party before the next general election.”
She said the Conservative government “knew of my involvement from the outset and welcomed my assistance at a time of national emergency” and argued that she had not acted differently from other politicians who had referred companies for potential Covid contracts.
