Off the hook? Baroness Mone. One wonders whether she has darkened the doors of the House of Lords again, now Rishi Sunak appears to have cancelled any court action over the PPE procurement scandal involving her.

It seems that – under pressure from UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, whose government green-lit a torrent of corrupt PPE procurement deals during the Covid-19 crisis – judges in our courts have withdrawn permission to challenge PPE procurement deals on any level at all.

Despite the fact that enormous amounts of public money were handed over to friends and cronies of the Conservative government in return for nothing at all useful, these judges have said there is no public interest in how that public money is spent.

Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, which brought judicial review cases on many of these PPE deals, has taken to ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) to explain what has happened:

The pages from Mr Maugham’s book carry two stand-out passages for This Writer. First is this:

“‘I have the greatest respect for our judiciary and the rule of law in this country,’ wrote Rishi Sunak, before proceeding to threaten a new measure ‘which he would activate in the event of judicial recidivism*’. You can threaten judges who find against you or you can claim respect for the rule of law, but you can’t do both.”

Then we have this: “Our senior judges are drawn from an incredibly narrow section of society. They are the overwhelming beneficiary of the status quo and, the statistics show, went to school and university with those in government whose acts they now judge. Taken as a class, their politics and social outlook are bound to align with those who hold political and cultural power.”

Put it all together and we may conclude that judicial reviews of PPE procurement processes were halted not just because judges were threatened with a loss of power, but because they didn’t want to find against their friends in government and business.

And that brings us to Michelle Mone, who recommended PPE Medpro to provide Personal Protective Equipment to the UK government during the Covid crisis?

It won a contract via the Tory government’s illegal “fast track” – and then failed to come up with the goods; the government said the equipment wasn’t up to scratch, although the firm reckoned it passed inspections.

Baroness Mone and her family allegedly made £65 million from Medpro’s profits. This Site heard about this scandal in November last year, and shortly afterwards, she took a leave of absence from the House of Lords.

Nothing was heard of her for months, and then she suddenly reappeared, being photographed at fashionable London locations:

Is this the reason? Was she tipped off that it was possible for her to return to the UK because Rishi Sunak had made sure she would be protected from any kind of punishment for her actions, and she would not have to return the millions she took from the public purse?

*Recidivism: “the tendency of convicted criminals to continue to offend”. So Sunak was comparing judges with criminals, despite the evidence that it was his government that had behaved illegally.