Mike

I had a friend.

We lived next door to each other for years.

Our dads worked on the Vauxhall assembly line and were made redundant at the same time. They both ended up as security guards in the McVities biscuit factory where our mums had part-time jobs.

Our families even went on holiday together for a time. Blackpool was great.

Michael and I went to the same primary school. Then secondary.

At university I did a social care degree; he dropped out and ‘went into business’.

I joined the communist party (well, you do when you are 18), before becoming a Labour supporter. He was a Tory, true blue.

We used to meet up for a pint and argue politics before gradually drifting apart. It was not deliberate; it just happened the way these things do. I got a job as a social worker in Portsmouth and moved there. He stayed near to home and my parents would tell me how well he was doing in business.

“He had his own factory down on the industrial estate. He used to employ about 80 women, making clothes for some of the big shops, like Primark. Imagine that. He was able to undercut the foreign factories. Good lad. He got a big award. That Nigel guy said that ‘it’s businessmen like Mike that will make Brexit work’.”

I had seen ‘Mike’ on the news getting his ‘award’ from Boris.

‘Most Promising Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ – for closing his factory!

Yes, closing his factory.

He supplied all of his women with industrial sewing machines and they worked from home churning out garments.

Covid was a blessing in disguise to him.

Mike did not need to furlough his women as they were working from home already (although he managed to claim furlough funding for some reason).

And then there was the demand for face masks. Overnight Mike had his women making masks by the hundreds of thousands each week. And, in the words of Tim Rice (see, Evita), ‘the money just kept on rolling in from all directions.’

Fast forward to 2022.

Mike was forced to return some of the money he had made out of the furlough scheme (The Times ran a series of articles on rogue employers and named him).

The parliamentary committee set up to report on the government’s response to the pandemic highlighted the thousands of pounds of tax payers money paid to Mike’s business for masks that were substandard and offered no protection.

There’s even been a suggestion that he return his business award.

Oh, and both of his parents died from ‘complications as a result of long Covid’.

But Mike’s a survivor. At the funerals he told me that ‘green’ was the new frontier. He has set up a company to supply electric car charging points.