Doug and Michelle will easily find £122m down the back of the sofa

If ever we needed a reminder about how shabbily the UK was being run five years ago, it came this week when a judge ordered that PPE Medpro had to return in full the £122 million it was paid by the Department of Health and Social Care for sub-standard PPE supplied to the government at the height of the Covid pandemic.

Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, were interviewed on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (Picture: BBC/Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg/PA Wire)

PPE Medpro is a company owned by the husband of Conservative peer Michelle Mone, Doug Barrowman. Barrowman and Mone are calling this a miscarriage of justice and that they are being made “scapegoats” for the Tory government’s botched handling of the pandemic. In case you had forgotten, Boris Johnson and chums saw the best way to get the country through Covid was to set up a fast track “VIP” lane where vital supply contracts were awarded to their cronies.

So, once they’ve stopped shedding their crocodile tears, I’m sure Doug and Michelle will easily find £122m down the back of the sofa. Or somewhere in the hold of their luxury yacht, a vessel she was keen to publicly flaunt in the summer of 2021, when she posted a picture of herself aboard the “Lady M” with the caption “living my best life”. Pretty insensitive, at best.

So, you might ask, who is Michelle Mone and why is she in the House of Lords? To answer the first question, she invented a bra. Just to clarify, she was not the inventor of the brassiere itself. That was an American woman called Caresse Crosby.

Baroness B-Cup merely came up with a particular model which made her millions of pounds. I do not know any female friends or family who have ever admitted to owning an Ultimo bra, but I can’t imagine they are any better than what you would get in M&S. They surely can’t be so spectacular as to merit their inventor getting a peerage.

Anyway, Barrowman’s company bagged a UK government contract to supply 25m surgical gowns to the NHS, none of which were ever used. This was because they were of too low a quality and many were not even sterile.

We’ll be waiting a long time to hear Michelle Mone apologise. Yet another example of the spiv economy encouraged by Johnson.

Whenever there is story about Michelle Mone on TV or in the print media, they inevitably use library footage of her pictured in the ermine robes she wore when she was elevated to the Lords. That was before she was involved in the sale of not-fit-for-purpose gowns. It is time she was rejected, or preferably ejected, by the upper chamber of parliament. She is not fit for the purpose of wearing their gowns.