The former Conservative Government, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty this week to using ‘VIPs of a substandard or shoddy quality’.
Public bodies are legally required to put large contracts out to competitive tender. During the Covid crisis the Johnson government took the unprecedented step of ignoring the law and buying PPE from VIPs instead, presumably in a bid to make plastic overalls a bit more glamorous.
The problem was that Ministers didn’t know any actual VIPs. Instead of Hollywood A listers, Premiership footballers or James Bond, the PPE was bought from people like Matt Hancock’s pub landlord. If he had coincidentally turned out to be Al Murray this might have worked - but he isn’t.
We asked a civil servant: what went wrong? ‘Well’, he said, ‘we don’t get much excitement, so pretty much anybody off the telly would have turned our heads, but literally every so-called VIP was a nonentity. The only Very Important attribute any of them brought was that they were friends with a Minister. Funny, that’.
Michelle Mone is set to appeal the court’s judgment, entering some raunchy photos of her on a yacht in lacey underwear as evidence of her ‘attributes’.
The case continues . . .
Image: karinasetiawan - Pixabay
