Michelle Mone sparks outrage with claim Labour 'vendetta' is endangering her life and cites murdered MPs Jo Cox and David Amess
Disgraced ‘Baroness Bra’ Michelle Mone has suggested Government criticism is putting her at risk of murder or suicide.
The Baroness, founder of Ultimo bras, has faced a tumult of calls to personally repay £122m over a consignment of faulty surgical gowns she arranged to be sold to the NHS at the height of Covid.
Ministers, plus senior Conservatives she once considered colleagues, have also been calling for her to stand down from the House of Lords following a High Court judgement on Tuesday.
It ruled her husband Doug Barrowman’s firm PPE Medpro broke its contract to supply 25 million sterile gowns during the Pandemic in 2020.
But she gave clear indications she intends to stay in Parliament, with no duty at all to personally repay the £122m, and went on to paint herself as the victim.
Baroness Mone, 53, had already on the eve of the judgement tried to claim the Department of Health and Social Care court case against PPE Medpro showed the Government had a ‘vendetta’ against her.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves responded by laughing ‘Too right, we do’, before adding that she wanted the £122m back, and that the baroness should keep out of the lords.
Despite such calls even being added to by Mone’s former Tory Party colleagues, as well as Covid victims, the baroness yesterday sought sympathy in an extraordinary letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Baroness Mone wrote: ‘I feel compelled to alert you to the dangerous and inflammatory statement made by your Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.
Baroness Michelle Mone claims she is victim of Government vendetta
‘The statement was not directed at PPE Medpro as a corporate entity in civil litigation, but at me personally.
‘It confirms that the machinery of the state is being deployed with the specific object of pursuing a vendetta against me, a private citizen and fellow parliamentarian.’
The disgraced peer said she had suffered a torrent of threats and abuse on social media since Ms Reeves’ joke, and added, referring to two murdered MPs, ‘we need only look at the tragedies of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess to understand the dangers of such reckless language’.
Saying her children had been smeared too, she referred to the television presenter Caroline Flack, who took her life while awaiting an assault trial, continuing ‘I would like to remind you of the tragic case of Caroline Flack, which shows the fatal consequences of personalised public vilification’.
Baroness Mone, 53, and husband Doug Barrowman, 60, whose firm has been ordered to repay £122m it took for NHS 'sterile' gowns which were ruled to be unusable
Baroness Mone claimed the ‘orchestrated campaign of intimidation’ against her was a breach of her human rights.
Senior Conservatives yesterday made clear that the court case against PPE Medpro was initiated under the Tory Government.
Mone and her husband are both under investigation by the National Crime Agency, and she also faces a Parliamentary investigation for personally pushing for the lucrative PPE contracts without making clear she stood to profit herself.
Mone and Barrowman are said to have made more than £65m in profits providing the faulty gowns and other equipment – but the order for repayment is against their firm, which is only worth a few hundred thousand.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Mone – ennobled by David Cameron, but now stripped of the Tory whip – had brought ‘embarrassment and shame to the party’ and deserved having the ‘book thrown at her’.
Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho added that Mone’s behaviour had been ‘disgraceful’ and said ‘the honourable thing to do’ would be for her to resign from the lords.
