This week might have seemed like a good one for Matt Hancock, after the former Health Secretary surprised many by finishing third on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
However, he may soon regret his foray into the jungle after his appearances helped push the scandal of contracts for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) back into public consciousness.
So too did revelations about Tory peer Baroness Michelle Mone, who, according to The Guardian, allegedly made £29m from a PPE contract given to a company she had recommended to ministers.
In my view, these PPE contracts are potentially the largest whole-scale fraud the country has ever seen.
And I use the word ‘seen’ deliberately because these contracts were handed out in plain sight, using the Covid pandemic as a fig leaf to justify them.
What the country needs now is a fully funded and robustly equipped national inquiry into whether there was PPE corruption and profiteering during the pandemic.
When I raise this on Twitter, there are those who say we should move on, or that it was inevitable due to the pandemic, while often dishing out the usual abuse and whataboutery.
But we can’t let it slide – it is vitally important that we find out the truth and that we know the full extent of exactly what happened between early 2020 and today.
I can’t just forget about it.
I visited the Covid-19 memorial wall and met with the mourning families and having lost my uncle to the virus, I know that there are questions that need to be answered in order for people to grieve properly.
Those telling me and other families to simply move on just do not understand the pain.
On top of that, our democracy needs protecting.
If we allow this kind of corruption to go unpunished what will happen next time?
As a member of the Science & Technology Select Committee in the House of Commons, I have had a ringside seat to all things pandemic.
In this capacity, I was able to personally quiz Matt Hancock when he was Secretary of State for Health as part of our Coronavirus: Lessons Learnt inquiry, as well as others including Professor Chris Whitty and Professor Jonathan Van-Tam and many more.
But I know not everyone reads reports of parliamentary committees, so I intend to use this column to highlight exactly why we need to blow this scandal wide open.
And as revelations continue to come out, perhaps finally we can hold Matt Hancock, the snivelling, kangaroo penis eating weasel that he is, to account for his actions of the past few years.
Take PPE MedPro, the company at the heart of the revelations about Baroness Michelle Mone, which was awarded over £200m in contracts to supply equipment in 2020.
As far as we can tell, they received two contracts – one for £80m and another for £122m – again seemingly without any competitive tendering process.
Documents suggest that Baroness Mone recommended for PPE Medpro a place in the Government’s VIP lane, which prioritised companies that had connections to senior politicians, for contracts.
That same VIP lane has been ruled unlawful by the High Court, and it seems to me it was often abused by already wealthy people to satisfy their uncontrolled greed.
It has been reported that £29m of PPE Medpro’s profits were transferred to an offshore trust of which Michelle Mone and her children are beneficiaries.
And when you dig into the litany of contracts that were freely given out seemingly without any competitive tendering process, the full scale of the cronyism and potential corruption becomes apparent.
For brevity’s sake however, I will just give just two examples involving Matt Hancock.
His Department of Health awarded a PPE contract worth £252million to Ayanda Capital Limited, a firm with direct links to Andrew Mills, a former adviser to Liz Truss. The face masks purchased in that contract cannot be used for their original purpose.
The company’s CEO insists his ‘conscience is clear’ over the deal.
Hancock also gave PestFix, a pest control company, £350m in contracts via the VIP lane to supply PPE. They have just been ordered to repay £70m for providing equipment unfit for purpose.
There are so many more examples I could cite thanks to the fantastic work done by those at Good Law Project and many others, but I am sure you get the point!
People were dying while many with Tory Party connections seemingly had their hand in the till, helping themselves and their mates line their pockets with public money while the rest of the country were struggling to survive the pandemic.
Labour estimates that these crony contracts cost the Treasury about £3.5bn worth of public money.
As the reported Michelle Mone case highlights, we still don’t yet know the full truth.
It seems that hardly a week goes by when yet again we find a new dodgy contract and missing millions in funds.
How many more cases are out there? How many more friends of government and the establishment have profiteered during our time of national crisis?
We have had plenty of examinations of this question; be it by the National Audit Office or the Public Accounts Committee, but I fear they have not yet scratched the surface.
It is high time that we took a hard look, via an inquiry with legal standing, at every pound that was spent and wasted on PPE during the pandemic, who got that money and what the public got for it.
Yes, there will be some mistakes made in the midst of that initial Covid scramble for PPE, and that might be understandable, but in order for us all to judge we need to know the whole truth. And we can only get that through a national inquiry into PPE profiteering.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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