As the Michelle Mone PPE scandal deepens, ministers can no longer feign ignorance

On Tuesday, the Conservative peer Michelle Mone announced she was taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords, to “clear her name”, after she became the centre of a growing scandal over PPE procurement. Leaked documents suggest Mone and her family secretly received £29m from the firm PPE Medpro after she recommended the company to ministers, and helped it secure access to the government’s “VIP lane” procurement stream. It was later revealed that she also lobbied aggressively for a second firm with links to her husband’s family office. Mone didn’t disclose her financial interest in PPE Medpro in the House of Lords register, but it certainly looks as if she benefited financially.

But who is to say for sure? Who holds the people “who count” accountable? Not Rishi Sunak or his government, if they can help it. To condemn Mone is to condemn their own cronyism, so they’d rather turn a blind eye. The revelations about procurement profiteering keep piling up, and yet the government has weathered it by studiously ignoring the problem. And so far, it has worked.

Related: Rishi Sunak ‘absolutely shocked’ by Michelle Mone allegations

There’s a phrase for this: strategic ignorance – the dismissal or ignoring of inconvenient information because it’s not in one’s interest to acknowledge it. People do it all the time. Indeed, there may even be positive psychological value in it: meditation, keeping your mobile phone out of the bedroom – these are examples of periodic strategic ignorance, and they can be cathartic and life-affirming.

But when the government makes an artform of it, the costs are too great to dismiss. A democratic government is elected to nurture life and protect the public, not to act like it’s on a never-ending mindfulness retreat. When someone acts as if they simply didn’t know, we may be inclined to treat them less harshly. But when vast amounts of public funds are at stake, we shouldn’t.

While the urge to ignore might be a universal aspect of our shared human frailty – ignorance is bliss – not everyone’s unknowing ignorance is the same. Some people’s ignorance is imposed from above, through government refusals to fund broadband access or public schooling. While for others, their ignorance might seem accidental or involuntary – even when it’s not. Often, ignorance can be cultivated to avoid liability for corporate harms or to give the boss plausible deniability. Remember Rupert Murdoch and hacking-gate? There are hierarchies of ignorance – and in today’s world, the Tory government is at the top of the hierarchy. Its ignorance appears deliberate, and it has caused untold harm.

Look at PPE procurement mismanagement during the Covid pandemic. We know gross mistakes were made. Two years ago, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy released a scathing report on government failures. Investigative efforts at the Good Law Project suggested that a “VIP lane” for PPE procurement, created in March 2020, was more like a gravy-train for Tory pals. Companies without any prior experience in supplying necessary materials were showered with billions in contracts – a lot of it on undelivered goods.

Two years on, a familiar pattern is clear. Although the Department of Health and Social Care acknowledged fraud might have figured in the wasted billions on undelivered, subpar products, there’s been little accountability. An article in the British Medical Journal sums up the problem: “The Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office have both produced meticulous evidence which would support an investigation, but it is yet to be acted on.”

The government mantra seems to be: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.

The larger problem is the way that such strategic ignorance perpetuates myths about “market efficiency”. By turning a blind eye to relentless profiteering on the public dime, the problem of corporate predation is minimised. This gives the private sector a sort of alibi. The Covid PPE gravy-train is just the tip of a longer iceberg of wasted money showered on companies through private finance initiatives over the years, by left- and rightwing governments. But instead of systematically questioning why shovelling public money into dodgy private-sector initiatives has been the default government position, scandals are ignored as if they don’t indicate a bigger problem.

And you can be sure the next time a big tranche of public money is made available for some emergency, the same cycle will repeat itself. How much fraud, how much squandering of taxpayer money needs to take place before such a presumption is exposed for the ruse it is?

In the case of the Tories, part of the problem is that they are not seen as directing the state towards specific ends. Their own claims of being hands-off and laissez-faire have been taken at face value. “Unlike the right,” Andrew Marr recently wrote in the New Statesman, “the left is comfortable using state power – and government intervention is exactly what Britain needs.”

But in reality, the right has long been happy with state intervention – it is just a lot more cagey about it than the left. The quietude serves various ends. As long as privileges showered on the rich are veiled, it’s easier to make it seem like the poor are the “scroungers”. In truth, the real benefits claimants are the rich.

The pretence of laissez-faire is the most durable ignorance alibi of the modern era. It enables corrupt governments to pretend it is an invisible hand that moves markets and not their own hands, deep in the honey jar.

• Linsey McGoey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex and director of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation

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