CONDEMNED BEFORE THE FACTS EMERGED

In May 2020, Dame Kate Bingham was appointed chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce. The position was unpaid. Bingham had spent three decades working in biotechnology and life-sciences investment, but she was also married to Conservative minister Jesse Norman and moved within the same social world as senior members of the Government.

In November 2020, Good Law Project and the Runnymede Trust began legal proceedings challenging her appointment alongside those of Dido Harding and Mike Coupe. The case alleged that important pandemic positions had been awarded without open competition to people with political or personal connections. Good Law Project presented the wider issue as "cronyism": government by private relationships rather than public merit.

Bingham's name consequently became part of a moral argument about privilege, wealth and political access. The implication was not simply that the appointment process required scrutiny. It was that she represented a system in which public positions were handed to the well connected. No court had examined that conclusion.

The Government subsequently provided a detailed account of how Bingham had been selected. In June 2021, Good Law Project withdrew the challenge concerning her appointment. Its director, Jolyon Maugham, acknowledged that the process had been "better than expected". Court documents later confirmed that the claimants had withdrawn both their reliance on her appointment as evidence of a wider practice and the allegation that her appointment was itself unlawful.

By then, the Vaccine Taskforce had secured a portfolio of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. Bingham received a damehood for her work. No court found that her appointment was unlawful, yet the language of chumocracy and cronyism remains attached to accounts of it.

Public-interest litigation performs an essential function. But campaigning organisations possess reputational power as well as legal standing. When an individual is made the symbol of a moral failure before the evidence has been tested, withdrawing the case does not withdraw the insinuation. The accusation becomes the headline. The correction becomes an administrative update.

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