Michelle Mone should resign from the House of Lords, a senior Conservative MP has told Sky News.
Speaking to Sky News, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho said Baroness Mone of Mayfair should do the “honourable thing” and “resign” as a member of the House of Lords.
Yesterday the Mone-linked firm PPE Medpro was ordered to pay close to £122m of taxpayer cash back to the government after it was found to have breached a contract for supplying PPE during the COVID pandemic.
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The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) brought the case, saying it provided 25 million “faulty”, non-sterile gowns.
Baroness Mone was a Tory peer, although she currently has the whip suspended, meaning she isn’t a member of the official grouping in the chamber.
Speaking to Wilf Frost, Ms Coutinho said: “We’ve taken away the Conservative whip, she’s no longer a Conservative peer.
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“And I think the honourable thing to do, particularly in light of this, would be to resign.”
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Removing a peerage from someone requires an act of parliament, although members of the House of Lords can be permanently excluded by a vote in the upper chamber if an investigation finds they have committed wrongdoing.
Currently, the parliamentary investigations into Baroness Mone are paused while other inquiries – including from the National Crime Agency – play out.
In her interview with Sky News, Ms Coutinho emphasised that it was the last Conservative government that started the lawsuit against PPE Medpro.
She defended the procurement methods employed by the government during the pandemic – saying it was an “incredibly frantic environment”.
Taking decisions quickly also led to successes like the vaccine rollout, Ms Coutinho added.
But she said the public was “rightly disgusted” by some of the outcomes including people who “didn’t live up to their promises and pocketed huge amounts of money”.
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Read more:
Can PPE Medpro afford the bill?
Mone accuses government of ‘scapegoating’
PPE was a consortium led by Baroness Mone’s husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, and was awarded the government contract after she recommended it to ministers.
The legal hearing between the business and the government was centred on the 25 million surgical gowns PPE Medpro sold to the NHS for £122m, rather than the way the contract was awarded.
The judge found the gowns were not sterile and deemed this a breach of contract.
Baroness Mone was given a peerage by Lord David Cameron when he was prime minster, having worked as an entrepreneur running a lingerie firm.
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Mr Barrowman incorporated PPE Medpro on the same day in May 2020 that Baroness Mone began using her political contacts – including to Tory minister Michael Gove – to bring the firm to the government’s attention.
The day before the judgement was handed down this week, PPE Medpro was put into administration, meaning recovery will be handled by the administrator, not Mr Barrowman.
