[1andrew1]

Gone past the stage of being surprised by this.

Revealed: Key Cummings and Gove ally given COVID-19 contract without open tender...
The Cabinet Office has awarded an £840,000 contract for researching public opinion about government policies to a company owned by two long-term associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, without putting the work out for tender.

Public First, a small policy and research company in London’s Tufton Street, is run by James Frayne - whose work alongside Cummings dates back to a Eurosceptic campaign 20 years ago - and Rachel Wolf, a former advisor to Gove who co-wrote the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto.

The government justified the absence of a competitive tendering process, which would have enabled other companies to bid, under emergency regulations that allow services to be urgently commissioned in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

However the Cabinet Office’s public record states that portions of the work, which involved conducting focus groups, related to Brexit rather than COVID-19, a joint investigation by openDemocracy and the Guardian has established.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dar...t-competition/