Michelle Mone shows how cronyism is institutionalised

YOU know the Michelle Mone scandal is really bad for the Scottish Tories when even the anti-independence Scottish press is forced to lead with it and take a short respite break from its usual diet of wall-to-wall misery.

Reading the anti-independence Scottish press, you'd be forgiven for believing that Scotland was independent already, because the Westminster government which controls most taxes and benefits, energy policy, macroeconomic policy, as well as ultimately determining the size of the Scottish Government's budget doesn't ever seem to get much blame for what ails this country.

Mone and her husband appeared in a softball interview on the Laura Kuenssberg show on Sunday to protest their innocence as they face a police investigation for allegations of fraud and bribery in the £200m PPE Medro affair.

Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman vehemently deny any allegations of wrongdoing and it was very kind of the BBC to offer them a platform from which to do so, because that's what the BBC always does in high profile fraud investigation cases, isn't it?

Kuenssberg did manage to get Mone to admit that she would benefit from the millions of pounds of profit her husband's company made from the deal, although the couple were at pains to insist that they didn't actually have the money, it was just resting in their trust fund. So that's ok, then.

But the point of the interview was so that Mone could let us know that she was the real victim here, not the journalists she had threatened and harassed with her lawyers for reporting on facts that Mone now concedes were true. Kuenssberg never asked the couple about their campaign of bullying by lawyer.

Michelle Mone is what you get when cronyism becomes not only acceptable, but institutionalised. You get people who, when faced with the unimaginable human tragedy of the pandemic, see only an opportunity to enrich themselves and use their contacts to leverage preferential access to lucrative government contracts. The fact that other people did much the same as Mone and her husband did does not absolve Mone and Barrowman of moral responsibility, it merely makes them equally unprincipled.

Unprincipled opportunists can always be expected to profiteer from tragedy, however the rotten canker of Westminster and the Conservative party at the heart of the British state do nothing to protect the public from such morally reprehensible behaviour. Rather, the Tories encourage and facilitate it and shower these dubious individuals with tens of millions of pounds of public money.

Even BBC Scotland, which has done its best to studiously ignore this story, was forced to acknowledge it, briskly trotting through it in 30 seconds during its weekend news bulletins. Naturally, Douglas Ross was not available for interview.

Rishi Sunak visits Scotland

Rishi Sunak has taken a wee break from dodging all the backbench Tory MPs who want to knife him in the back, to take a wee jaunt to a safely Tory corner of Scotland where he can be insulated from both his rebellious party and unfiltered Scottish people in the wild.

Sunak is spending a few hours in Douglas Ross's Moray constituency, ostensibly to thank service personnel for their work over the Christmas period, but really in a vain attempt to get some positive press coverage.

This way, Sunak's press handlers hope that the Prime Minister can get through 15 minutes without his typical display of tetchiness whenever he is expected to answer for his government's rank incompetence and utter nastiness.

However, he is expected to take questions from the press, so he may well be asked about the Mone scandal. Sunak was chancellor of the exchequer at the time the Scottish Tory peer made use of the so-called VIP lane to lobby for PPE Medpro to be awarded government contracts. Asked about the Mone scandal during his trip, Sunak attempted to distance himself from the affair and insisted he could not comment on an ongoing criminal investigation.

Sunak might be in a better mood this week, as he just back from a conference of actual fascists in Italy where his nasty rabble-rousing speech claiming that immigration threatens to "overwhelm" Europe was hailed as moderate and centrist.

If you judge a politician by the company he keeps, we have a Prime Minister who keeps company with Italy's far right leader Giorgia Meloni and Hungary's extreme right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. Other notable international speakers included Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, who signed the migrant pact with Meloni, and Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox.

The event also had the surprise appearance of controversial billionaire Elon Musk, who has enabled a huge growth in far right, racist, misogynistic and bigoted abuse on Twitter.

Perhaps Sunak's trip to North-East Scotland will force Douglas Ross to come out of hiding and face questioning about the scandal surrounding a prominent Scottish Conservative peer.

Another prominent Tory of Scottish origin is also left with questions to answer. During her interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Mone specifically named Michael Gove, the now Levelling Up Secretary, as being linked to her recommendation of the firm and he is facing calls to answer to MPs before Christmas recess.

Glasgow MP David Linden said that Ross and Gove had questions to answer, saying: "Let's not forget that Michelle Mone basically used her contacts in the Tory party to secure these contracts as a result of the VIP fast lane. That shows Tory sleaze its absolute height."

He added: "And I think it also raises wider questions for Douglas Ross, who, of course, was a UK Government minister at the time."

Ross may also try to claim he cannot comment on a live criminal investigation, but that never stopped him when it involved Nicola Sturgeon.