Michael Gove has been placed under investigation by parliament’s standards watchdog after failing to declare VIP hospitality he received from a Tory donor whose company won multimillion-pound PPE contracts during the Covid pandemic.
The housing secretary accepted tickets for a Queens Park Rangers match in 2021 from David Meller, whose company Meller Designs was awarded six PPE contracts worth £164 million.
At the time Gove was the Cabinet Office minister responsible for PPE procurement and recommended Meller’s company as a potential supplier to the government’s chief commercial officer.
The hospitality was never declared on the register of members’ interests, a requirement if the hospitality exceeds £300 in value.
Gove’s recommendation of Meller Designs was not public knowledge in August 2021 when Meller accompanied Gove and his son to QPR’s first match of that season — a 1-1 draw at home with Millwall.
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At the time Gove’s spokesman told the Guardian, which first reported the story, that his failure to declare the complimentary tickets was an “oversight” and that he had written to parliamentary authorities to inform them of the omission.
It is understood that this has now triggered an investigation by the standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg. He is also said to be looking into a small number of other undeclared instances of hospitality received by Gove and which were also reported to him by the housing secretary.
However, a spokesman for Gove declined to comment. Under parliamentary rules, the commissioner does not comment on investigations until they are completed.
Meller has been a substantial donor to the Conservative Party and his educational charity sponsored academies when Gove was education secretary. Meller Designs, part of Meller’s family business until it was sold in January 2021, was a wholesaler of own-label fashion accessories to retailers, which in 2019, the year before the pandemic, made a pre-tax profit of less than £200,000.
The Guardian reported that the £164 million contracts boosted its revenues by 1,400 per cent in 2020 and its profit increased to £16 million in 2020. Meller and his co-owner then shared dividends of £5 million.
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Gove is one of six Tory MPs being investigated by the standards commissioner. These include Dame Eleanor Laing, the deputy speaker, Sir Bernard Jenkin and Virginia Crosbie, who are believed to be under investigation for allegedly attending birthday drinks in breach of lockdown rules.
The Metropolitan Police closed its investigation into the same allegations in December with no action being taken against any individuals.
Other Conservative MPs under investigation include Bob Stewart and Miriam Cates, who is facing claims that she has caused “significant damage to the reputation of the House as a whole, or of its members generally”.
