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Related: About this forumMichelle Mone: 'I'm sorry for not saying straight out: Yes, I am involved'
Michelle Mone has apologised after admitting she and her husband Doug Barrowman lied to the media about their links to a company that sold personal protective equipment (PPE) to the UK government during the pandemic.
The interview, to be broadcast this morning on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show on BBC One, is the couple's first TV interview since it first emerged they were involved in providing PPE during the pandemic at a cost of more than £200m. They repeatedly denied any involvement.
Last week, they admitted they were linked to the deal during a film funded by the company and posted online.
In the BBC interview, the couple accept that they lied to the press about their involvement with the firm over many months.
(More at link):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-67738658
LeftishBrit
(41,307 posts)Michelle Mone has hit back at Rishi Sunak over his intervention in the PPE row, insisting ministers knew about her involvement in the lucrative contract from the beginning.
The Tory peer is facing calls to be barred from the House of Lords, with the prime minister insisting today that Downing Street was taking the case incredibly seriously.
But Baroness Mone fired off an angry message at Mr Sunak, writing on Twitter/X: What is Mr Sunak talking about?
I was honest with the Cabinet Office, the government and the NHS in my dealings with them. They all knew about my involvement from the very beginning.
(More at link):
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/furious-michelle-mone-hits-back-at-rishi-sunak-over-ppe-scandal/ar-AA1lFkRH
Emrys
(8,001 posts)has been simmering for quite a while.
It pisses off a lot of us in Scotland because Mone was a leading Scottish light in the NO campaign on Scottish independence - for which role she was given a seat in the Lords - and the media and police treatment of her so far has contrasted starkly with that suffered by others.
For instance, several high-ups in the SNP hierarchy have had a cloud cast over their reputations by a long-running police investigation that the MSM has made much of. That complaint, about an internal party accounting issue concerning some £600,000 raised by donations for the independence campaign, was levelled by a guy who's a notorious pro-independence troublemaker who already has a police record for wasting police time on another issue.
It led to the arrest of Sturgeon, her husband and the party treasurer (not as much of a big deal in itself as some in the media tried to claim, as in Scotland the police have to arrest you if they want to formally question you about anything, so in terms used in the rest of the UK, they were "helping police with their inquiries" ), and the spectacle of the police gathering en masse at Sturgeon's house for a dawn raid, extravagantly ransacking the place, and erecting forensics tents on her lawn while they unsubtly rifled through the house and garden - given how police numbers have dwindled in Scotland, it was impressive they could muster so many in one place, and many of them seemed to have nothing to do except put on a show for the many assembled cameras.
The allegations in that investigation have ranged from suspicions about (a) a camper van the SNP bought (with the intention of using it as a campaign battle bus - they purchased it in the late stages of COVID countermeasures, and I think the idea was that it could double as safe accommodation if they had to campaign while restrictions were still in place - the Lib Dems have a similar vehicle) that was parked outside Sturgeon's mother's house (I guess they had to park it somewhere) to (z) pens the party bought that may be a bit more flashy than your standard BICs.
Now Mone is finally facing the music for her and her husband's role in allegedly embezzling vast sums from the country in a time of crisis. She's been using her Twitter account to allege that Sunak and others in the Tory Party hierarchy were well aware of what she was doing and had no problem with it, with the implication that loads of them were at it in a big way. That may be one of the few truths she's come out with, and it looks like she figures if she's going down, she's not going down alone.
Yesterday, it was made known that Mone was no longer a Tory Party member. Today, Link to tweet
" target="_blank">they're looking into whether she ever joined it in the first place (Twitter link)!
It's going to be a bumpy ride. It hope it takes down a whole bunch of the conniving, greedy, overprivileged bastards.
Eugene
(62,736 posts)But she argued that the couple were being made scapegoats in a wider scandal about U.K. government spending during the pandemic.
Weve done one thing, which was lie to the press to say we werent involved, she said, adding: I cant see what weve done wrong.
https://apnews.com/article/uk-pandemic-covis-contracts-scandal-michelle-mone-9261f4a40b80fd986f6d0135c412367b