Special report: Uniserve was paid £1.4bn for Covid contracts that included supply of £178.5m in never-used equipment

When Mrs Justice Cockerill handed down her judgment in the high court against PPE Medpro, the company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone, for supplying unsafe personal protective equipment during the Covid crisis, her findings were a landmark in a five-year saga that cast the opaque world of government deal-making into stark light.

PPE Medpro was ordered to refund the full £122m that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) paid for unusable gowns in the summer of 2020, as Boris Johnson’s government scrambled to refill the UK’s depleted stocks.