How we pressed ahead in our investigation ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
| The Guardian | | | | | | | | | Dear reader,
For the last three years, I have spent the run-up to Christmas doing the same thing with David Conn, a correspondent on the investigations team: wading through legal letters about the Conservative peer Michelle Mone.
This year has been no different. Although one crucial detail has changed: last weekend, Baroness Mone of Mayfair changed her tune, appearing on national TV to admit that she has been repeatedly lying to us.
We only got to this point of the investigation thanks to vital funding from our readers. Will you join them today?.
It was back in December 2020, just as the UK was heading into another pandemic-induced lockdown, that we first became curious about a company called PPE Medpro that had received more than £200m in government contracts. We suspected Mone was linked to the company and started asking questions.
A terse response from her lawyer said that “any suggestion of an association” between Mone and PPE Medpro would be “inaccurate”, “misleading” and – a word editors in my line of work never like to read – “defamatory”.
Part of my job is knowing how to tell the difference between a serious legal threat and a hollow one. We also learn to distinguish between a bona fide denial and what we in the trade call a "non-denial denial" – something that reads like a denial but is actually just an artfully worded evasion. This particular letter was the real deal: an unequivocal denial wrapped up with serious legal threats.
Other outlets might have folded. These kinds of legal threats, delivered by very expensive media lawyers, force journalists to question whether they might have got their facts wrong, or ask whether their editors have the stomach for a possible lawsuit that could cost millions of pounds and go on for years. They are designed to intimidate and, ultimately, silence. | | | | | We decided to press ahead, writing the first of dozens of stories about Mone, her husband Douglas Barrowman and PPE Medpro, each revelation peeling away another layer of the onion. A number of reporters on the investigations desk worked on these stories, but it was the indefatigable David Conn who led the charge. David never believed Mone's lies, and was determined to get to the bottom of the story. We were aided by our own team of accomplished lawyers.
Our reporting untangled PPE Medpro's global supply chain, uncovering new details about the sterile gowns the government says were unusable (PPE Medpro still maintains they were up to standard) and established exactly how the company got its contracts.
We reported on the role Mone played in helping PPE Medpro, including contacting cabinet ministers via their private email addresses to offer to supply PPE. When we revealed that leaked documents showed Mone and her husband were secretly involved in PPE Medpro, their lawyers told us our reporting was "grounded entirely on supposition and speculation and not based on accuracy”, and amounted to little more than “clutching at straws”. Again, we published.
Then, in November 2022, all of this reporting culminated in the bombshell revelation that Mone was one of the secret beneficiaries of an offshore trust that received £29m in profits originating to PPE Medpro. Her husband, Barrowman, transferred the money after being paid at least £65m in profits from PPE Medpro, a company he secretly invested in and led.
It was not a story that immediately got a lot of traction elsewhere in the UK media. They too were receiving legal warnings about following up our story. Publishing that investigation was a big decision for our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, but it was vindicated this week when Mone, in a mea culpa interview with the BBC, essentially admitted to having spent the last three years lying to us to protect her family. Her reply when pressed over the lies? “That’s not a crime.”
Perhaps not. But lies by people in power need to be exposed – and I truly believe that few other media organisations can do it like we can. The Guardian has no shareholder, proprietor or state funder who might discourage us from pursuing risky stories such as this one. There is no stone we can’t turn over. And we have a rich legacy of courageous investigative reporting.
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Head of investigations | |
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