Opening the high-stakes trial in a workaday, office-like courtroom in June, the government’s barrister Paul Stanley KC sought to manage expectations for the media crowd in the folding seats at the back.

The case, he said, was not going to focus on the role of Michelle Mone, the Conservative peer who helped secure multimillion pound personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts for her husband’s company during the Covid pandemic.

Rather, it was about the PPE itself, delivered on the second contract, in which the government paid PPE Medpro £122m to supply sterile surgical gowns. Health officials, it emerged in the trial, had rejected the gowns on sight in September 2020 as not compliant with laws governing PPE safety, and they were never used in the NHS. This trial was the DHSC’s claim for the company, ultimately owned by Lady Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, to repay the money.

View image in fullscreen Michelle Mone and her husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, at Cheltenham festival in 2019. Photograph: David Hartley/Shutterstock

During the pandemic, Mone and Barrowman’s false public denials of their involvement, the secret profits banked, and Mone’s Instagram pictures of herself on a sun-kissed yacht named Lady M in the summer of 2021, made her the poster woman for the Tory government’s “VIP lane” contracts, which enriched a few while the nation suffered.

Some of the evidence