Will Labour clean up the mess from the great British Covid Spend?

Why do they call it a tsar anyway?

Given what is generally meant by the term, a government appointee who uses their specific skills to sort things out, it’s an odd title given that the real-life tsars notably failed to sort things out and, in the case of the Russian ones, were violently, er, sorted out themselves.

There is, in fact, one living man who has borne the title officially, Simeon Borisov Saxe-Coburg-Gotha of Bulgaria who was the tsar of Bulgaria from 1943 to 1946 and is distantly related to King Charles but he was between six and nine at the time so it arguably doesn’t count.

All of which is to say, there’s going to be a new tsar in town with Labour announcing it will appoint a commissioner to return to the treasury billions of pounds lost in the great British Covid spend, which took place under the last government.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves told parliament her appointee would “get back what is owed to the British people”, meaning that actually the incoming Covid corruption tsar might be described as a Covid corruption Bolshevik. This would be more accurate but also politically unpalatable, and Labour already tried that with Jeremy Corbyn.

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There’s certainly a lot out there to be recouped. Earlier this year the accounts for the Department of Health and Social Care showed it had written off nearly £10bn of the money the government spent on PPE during Covid, meaning three-quarters went on protective equipment which was unusable, is now worth less than it cost to acquire, or has passed its expiry date.

To be fair to the Conservative government of the time we all made some questionable purchases in lockdown, though equally there probably weren’t many sourdough bread makers that cost £10bn. And didn’t work.

Of that money it’s feared that more than £4bn is unrecoverable, with the Treasury believing it may be able to return around £2.6bn to the public purse. That could be spent on lifting the two-child benefit cap, improving infrastructure or just sending everyone £38 for a couple of pints. Admittedly the former two are probably better long-term plans but you must admit the pub dividend would be a vote winner.

There is, of course, one name which looms large over the PPE scandal: Michelle Mone.

Baroness Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, secured Government contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment through their company PPE Medpro after she recommended it to ministers.

By their own admission they made around a 30% profit from the contract, bringing in around £60m for Mr Barrowman – who is a resident of the Isle of Man, a tax haven.

Though masks provided by the company were used, the gowns supplied were found not to be up to the required standard.

The money was put into a number of offshore trusts, including £28.8m transferred to one registered on the Isle of Man of which Mone and her children are beneficiaries. The baroness denied in November last year that any of the money was used to fund the purchase of a £10m luxury yacht called the Lady M.

Appointed to the House of Lords in 2015 by David Cameron, Baroness Mone and Mr Barrowman initially threatened legal action against journalists reporting any connection between the peer and PPE Medpro, something both now admit was a lie.

The pair, who both deny any wrongdoing, have had their assets frozen by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of an ongoing National Crime Agency investigation while PPE Medpro is being sued by the Department for Health and Social Care. Baroness Mone and Mr Barrowman said they were “happy to offer up these assets” to begin the process of “proving their innocence more quickly”.

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Last month the NCA announced that a 46-year-old man, who was not Mr Barrowman, had been arrested in connection with their investigation.

Baroness Mone would doubtless say it’s unfair she’s become the face of the PPE scandal – especially as she denies any wrongdoing – and even went to the lengths of producing a YouTube documentary investigating just how innocent the whole thing was.

Perhaps she’s even right, given that £60m constitutes a mere yacht in the ocean against the £10bn cost to the taxpayer, though even if the NCA investigation shows everything was above board that level of profiteering will still be hard to stomach.

If Labour’s new tsar can succeed in recovering some of that wasted cash they’ve a chance of being remembered as a Peter or Catherine the Great rather than Nicholas II.