The MRC say that they do not work like that. No money is earmarked for any particular illness – it is one reason why they do not give any breakdown into different conditions of how they spend their money. According to them, applications get reviewed and scored, normally by 3 people, and then those reviews and scores are passed to a committee who decide which applications have made the grade.
Probably my key objection was that one repeated applicant, Jonathan Kerr, said that his applications normally scored 9, 8 and 4. Now I have no way of knowing what the quality of his applications were like, but I do know about assessment and scoring. There should be pretty comprehensive guidelines given about what is required for each level of score, together with some form of training to ensure that assessors understand what is wanted. Those assessements then go to a supervisory body to agree on a final grade. It isn't that unusual to get grades of say 9, 8 and 8: that would indicate a performance around the 8/9 boundary. But a response of 9, 8 and 4 would ring major alarm bells. Either the guidelines were inadequate, or the assessor was incompetent.
I suspect that little in the way of guidelines were given, and assessors were given pretty much a free hand to award whatever score they felt appropriate, leaving it wide open to prejudice or favouritism.