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
PPE Medpro is to payback the £122,000,000 to the government for gown fraud. The agreement is to pay £100 a month for the next one million years. There are also the additional costs and interest to pay back, which may mean an additional £2 a month.
Michelle Mone, who is somehow still a f@cking Baroness, and is definitely linked to the struggling gown fraud company, is probably currently being super remorseful on her yacht. The yacht is undoubtedly called The Jolly Gown Fraud and was paid for in good honest money that was earnt in a way that no way defrauded the UK government via supplying unsuitable medical apparel.
You don’t get that kind of boat money by deceiving the Department of Health and Social Care in a time of crisis by passing off unfit-for-use robes that endanger people, no sirree bob, you get it from selling pants. Probably unsafe pants, dipped in COVID. That’s a guess, maybe one of the less dangerous strains at least.
Apparently, endangering lives by vile, opportunistic garb swindling still allows you to keep your peerage. You only lose it if the crime is worth over 1/8th of a billion pounds, luckily, she was just shy of that limit.
Crime never pays folks.... maybe we should Stop The Big Fancy Boats as they seem to be the ones containing undesirables.
Image: voltamax - Pixabay