At the Charleston literary festival earlier this month, two members ofLed By Donkeys– Ben Stewart and Oliver Knowles – were describing their first big act of 2023, which was to rename Michelle Mone’s yacht, Lady M, the “Pandemic Profiteer”. It’s a thrilling yarn, featuring a tiny boat rented under the false pretences of a picnic on the Catalan coast, a bunch of guys who didn’t really know how hard it would be to fix a giant sticker to a luxury yacht, and a chase scene at the end, as they raced back to their van, pursued by security guards.
But the original idea had been to requisition the boat and sail it all the way back to the UK, up the Thames, and deliver it to His Majesty’s Treasury. There was an intake of breath in the book-loving audience, because this was the best idea anyone had ever heard. It had everything – audacity, symmetry, justice, spectacle, the lot.
Despite the Guardian’s reporting, Mone, of course, wouldn’t admit until the end of 2023 that she profited from the government’s Covid VIP lane at all. In fact, £28.8m of the profit made by PPE Medpro, much of it on equipment that was never used, was held in a trust of which Mone and her children are beneficiaries. Inthe ickily self-justifying phrase of her husband, Doug Barrowman, they were “always going to benefit … her family benefit, my family benefit. That’s what you do when you are in a privileged position of making money.”
The fates have arguably caught up with Mone since then. As detailed inthe BBC’s Rise and Fall documentary, which airs tonight, she is on leave from the House of Lords, having been stripped of the Conservative whip, and has had£75m worth of assets frozen, pending investigation by the National Crime Agency. (Mone has denied any wrongdoing.) While these measures are obviously the crunchy bit of comeuppance, and will loom much larger on Mone and Barrowman’s minds than a sticker on their yacht ever could, the art-activist event is way more important for us.
I don’t especially care whether Mone has the Tory whip or not, or whether she sits in the House of Lords. If the state finds against her and claws back some money, fine, but it will most likely only spend it on something dismaying, such as a defence budget. “Pandemic Profiteer”, on the other hand, felt like a collective: “This is not OK.” It is not OK to make millions out of a national emergency. It’s fashionable now to say that Mone was a symptom of the late Tory malaise, not the cause. Led By Donkeys proved that it’s possible, if you concentrate hard enough, to think two things at once – both that governments should be competent, and that people, even businesspeople, should be decent.
The Led By Donkeys installations are always laced with sadness, sometimes unbearable amounts. Its action for Gaza in 2024, when 11,000 children’s outfits were laid along Bournemouth beach – to “communicate the scale of the killing”, James Sadri said at the time – was breathtakingly painful, and has only become more striking with every day since. Yet these acts of resistance don’t arrange themselves in an orderly way, so that dodgy PPE pales into insignificance beside a war crime, and Liz Truss’s brief disaster as prime minister looks minor next to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rather, they all create some social protection against despair. Whether it’s a misdeed or a tragedy, the fight only starts when you look directly at it.
At the end of their talk, Knowles and Stewart got a standing ovation, a timeless and sometimes rote expression of approval, though I’ve never seen it happen at a spoken word event before. It didn’t really feel like the end of a ballet, though; it felt more literal, like everyone, spontaneously, standing up for something.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist