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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in governments playing increasingly prominent roles as active economic agents. However, state capitalism does not necessarily serve broad developmental purposes, and rather can be directed to supporting sectional and private interests. As the literature on variegated capitalism alerts us, governments and other actors regularly devise fixes in response to a systemic crisis, but the focus, scale, and scope of the interventions vary considerably, according to the constellation of interests. Rapid progress with vaccines notwithstanding, the UK government's response to COVID-19 has been associated with much controversy, not only because of an extraordinarily high death rate, but also because of allegations of cronyism around the granting of government contracts and bailouts. We focus on the latter, investigating more closely who got bailed out. We find that badly affected …