It's taken just 12 months for Boris Johnson to create a government of sleaze

It took the last Tory government the best part of 18 years to become mired in sleaze, but Boris Johnson’s administration is smelling of it already. Whether doling out lucrative contracts, helping billionaire property developers cut costs, or handing out lifetime seats in the House of Lords, the guiding principle seems to be brazen cronyism, coupled with the arrogance of those who believe they are untouchable and that rules are for little people.

This week came word of at least £156m of taxpayers’ money wasted on 50 million face masks deemed unsuitable for the NHS. They were bought from a private equity firm through a company that had no track record of producing personal protective equipment – or indeed anything for that matter – and that had a share capital of just £100. But this company, Prospermill, had a crucial asset. It was co-owned by one Andrew Mills, adviser to the government, staunch Brexiteer and cheerleader for international trade secretary, Liz Truss.

Somehow Prospermill managed to persuade the government to part with £252m, boasting that it had secured exclusive rights over a PPE factory in China. Just one problem. The masks it produced use ear loops, when only masks tied at the head are judged by the government to be suitable for NHS staff. If the government wanted to spend £156m on masks for the nation’s kids to play doctors and nurses, this was a great deal. But in the fight against a pandemic, it was useless.

All this has come to light thanks to the Good Law Project, which is challenging through the courts what it calls “the government’s £15bn supermarket sweep approach to PPE procurement”. As if to remind us of the necessity of judicial review – a process now threatened with “reform” by this government – the group have initiated such proceedings over several deals with suppliers with no conspicuous experience or expertise in PPE, including a pest controller and a confectionery wholesaler. But this latest one is the biggest.

I asked Jolyon Maugham, who runs the project, whether what he had seen amounted to corruption. He doesn’t use that word himself, preferring to note that “mutual back-scratching” tends to be how it works in this country. “You have contracts awarded to the wrong people because of incompetence, and you have contracts awarded to the wrong people because the wrong people knew what ears to whisper into.”

Such whispers are becoming the background noise of this government. This week the housing secretary Robert Jenrick was asked about his encounter with Richard Desmond at a Tory fundraising dinner last November, at which Desmond showed the cabinet minister a video of the housing development he wanted to build. Jenrick said he wished he “hadn’t been sat next to a developer at an event and I regret sharing text messages with him afterwards”, which rather glossed over the key fact: namely, that Jenrick promptly rushed through a decision on the project, the speed of which allowed Desmond’s company to avoid paying roughly £40m in tax to the local council. That move was later designated “unlawful”, and Jenrick was forced to overturn his decision.

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It would be nice to think that episode was a one-off, but it’s hard to do so when developers have given £11m in donations to the Conservatives since Johnson arrived in Downing Street just one year ago.

One can hardly blame entrepreneurs and go-getters for wanting to get cosy with Johnson’s ministers. They see how business is done. They’ve noticed the seven government contracts together worth nearly £1m that were awarded in the course of 18 months to a single artificial intelligence startup, an outfit that just so happened to have worked for Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign.

The company is called Faculty and, handily, the government minister tasked with promoting the use of digital technology, Theodore Agnew, has a £90,000 shareholding in it. Any suggestion of a conflict of interest is breezily brushed aside. More conveniently still, Faculty’s chief executive, Marc Warner, has attended at least one meeting of Sage, the scientists’ group advising the government on coronavirus. Better yet Warner’s brother, Ben, works at Downing Street as a data scientist and has been a regular at Sage where, as one attendee put it to the Guardian, he “behaved as Cummings’ deputy”. Faculty insists all “the proper processes” have been followed in the awarding of their contracts.

Meanwhile, a political consultancy firm with strong ties to both Cummings and Michael Gove managed to win an £840,000 contract without any open tendering process at all. Public First is a small research company, but it is run by James Frayn, an anti-EU comrade of Cummings going back two decades, and his wife Rachel Wolf, the former Gove adviser who co-wrote the Tory manifesto for last year’s election. The government says it could skip the competitive tendering stage because emergency regulations applied, thanks to Covid. Except the government itself recorded some of Public First’s work as related to Brexit (it now says this was an accounting anomaly and that all the work related to the pandemic).

To confirm the new order, you might take a look at the prime minister’s list of nominations to the House of Lords. Besides his brother Jo, you’ll also spot former advisers, donors, Brexiters, and longtime Johnson pal Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian-born billionaire owner of London’s Evening Standard. It’s all terribly cosy. “It’s a pattern of appointing your mates, that’s the common thread,” says Labour’s Rachel Reeves. When fighting a pandemic, you don’t want “contracts for contacts”, she says; you want to look for “the best people, not whether they voted leave or made donations”.

Why is the government behaving this way? An obvious explanation is the 80-seat majority it won in December. The knowledge that parliamentary defeat is a distant prospect, and that you will not face the voters for four long years, can translate into complacency, even a sense of impunity. Johnson’s sparing of Cummings and Jenrick, when a more fragile prime minister would surely have felt compelled to fire them both, has emboldened those individuals and their watching colleagues. They’re not about to start shooting people on Fifth Avenue, as Trump once boasted, but like the US president, they believe they can get away with anything.

That fits with the credo Johnson and Cummings had even before they bagged their majority. Johnson was hardly a stickler for probity to start with; his attitude to the rules, grandly branded a libertarian philosophy by his pals, has long been elastic, at least when it comes to himself and those around him. As for Cummings, his breach of the lockdown during the pandemic’s most grave phase leaves no doubt: he sees the rules as applying to lesser mortals, not him.

This week, research published in the Lancet proved how devastating “the Cummings effect” has been for public faith in the government’s handling of the pandemic. Through their cronyism, their cavalier disregard for basic propriety, Johnson and his circle are draining trust at a time when it is essential to the public health. One day that will matter for the Conservatives’ political fortunes. But it matters for the rest of us right now.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

• The Scott Trust, the ultimate owner of the Guardian, is the sole investor in GMG Ventures, which is a minority shareholder in Faculty