The five-year unravelling of Britain’s most high-profile Covid contracts scandal involving a baroness, her husband and multimillion-pound government deals accelerated last week with a high court judgment against the company linked to the former Tory peer Michelle Mone.

The judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill, ruled that PPE Medpro, owned by Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, supplied defective personal protective equipment (PPE) for use in the NHS during the pandemic. Cockerill ordered that PPE Medpro must return the sum of £122m, which the Department of Health and Social Care paid for the order of 25m sterile surgical gowns, under a contract awarded in June 2020 via the VIP lane.

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hailed the judgment as vindication for the Labour government’s stated determination to recover some of the billions of pounds in public money wasted during the Covid crisis by Boris Johnson’s administration.

“We want our money back. We are getting our money back,” Reeves posted on X. “And it will go where it belongs – in our schools, NHS and communities.”

The June contract, and another worth £80.85m to supply face masks, also paid for by the DHSC, were granted to PPE Medpro after Mone approached the then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove in May 2020. Her offer was processed via the “VIP lane”, the system operated by Johnson’s government, giving priority to politically connected people such as Mone, treating them as more credible than experienced PPE suppliers. For years afterwards, Mone and Barrowman through their former lawyers denied involvement in PPE Medpro, until in late 2023 they acknowledged the