Scots fashion designer says father died ‘unnecessarily’ due to lack of PPE during pandemic

Scottish fashion designer Patrick Grant has said his father died “very unnecessarily” due to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) shortages during the Covid pandemic.Grant’s father, James, had been a manager of the Scottish pop rock band Marmalade as well as an accountant and rugby coach.The judge of The Great British Sewing Bee told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that the Government, at the time, was “running this catastrophically shambolic programme to try and manage PPE supplies into the NHS”.The Saville Row tailor, 51, told presenter Lauren Laverne: “My dad died of Covid very, very early on, very unnecessarily, because there was no PPE in the hospital.“He’d gone into hospital (in March 2020) for a pretty routine operation, caught Covid in hospital and died three days later.”He added: “(I) remember (talking) to somebody in the Cabinet Office, I went to them early on and said look, ‘there are loads and loads people who can sew at home.

We’ve got very limited sewing capacity in the UK but hospitals need scrubs and gowns.“‘There are a million sewing machines in homes around the UK, lots of them want to help, there are lots of also empty factories with cutting capacity, we can get the fabric, we can cut it centrally, distribute it to home sewers’.“They (the Cabinet Office) said: ‘Oh health and safety, we wouldn’t’ and I’m like ‘it’s a pair of scrubs, like there are doctors wearing pyjamas’… (They said) ‘We would have to sign off every individual sewer through health and safety’.

I was like ‘You’ve all lost your minds’.”While choosing a “lovely song” called Get Better by Alt-J, which he said was about “struggling with the loss of a loved one” on the programme, Grant became emotional and broke down.He said: “It’s a