Cabinet stalled with Covid inquiry into Boris Johnson’s messages

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The government is stuck in a deadlock with the official Covid-19 inquiry as ministers refused to hand over messages not drafted by Boris Johnson during his time as prime minister.

The inquiry, chaired by Lady Heather Hallett, has given Cabinet until Tuesday to hand over Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and diaries as part of his investigation in the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

But on Monday, the Cabinet Office, the department that runs the machinery of government, resisted requests to hand over information it called “unambiguously irrelevant” to the inquiry. He suggested that this would set a damaging precedent and be harmful to Johnson’s privacy.

The row highlights the growing role messaging platform WhatsApp plays in UK politics. It comes just two months later Matt Hancock, former UK health secretary, gave 100,000 of his WhatsApp messages to a journalist who subsequently cleared them for publication.

The government has already provided more than 55,000 documents, eight company statements and 24 personal testimonies to the inquiry.

Johnson pointed out that he has already shared 5,000 pages of documents and 300 pages of emails with investigators.

However, the Cabinet Office is refusing to hand over some documents in unedited form before Tuesday’s deadline on the grounds that they are irrelevant to the inquiry.

These include Johnson’s diaries and messages with some 40 government figures, including Sunak who was chancellor at the time.

However, last week Hallett, a retired Court of Appeal judge, highlighted that some areas of the correspondence which Cabinet had said were “unambiguously irrelevant” were in his view relevant to the inquiry.

These included talks between the former prime minister and aides on London’s Metropolitan Police’s enforcement of Covid rules following the 2021 rape and murder of Sarah Everard.

“It cannot be fair that a mere assertion by such a person of ‘unambiguous irrelevance’ has the effect of extinguishing any power of the preliminary investigation to request the production of the documents so that it can determine for itself the relevance or otherwise of the material,” Hallett said in a statement.

Hallett used a section 21 order of the Inquiries Act to compel the government to turn over the information, meaning failure to do so could constitute a criminal offence.

But officials downplayed the idea of ​​the government compromising before Tuesday’s deadline: “Our position hasn’t changed,” one said. “I think legal commentators have said that if the two sides are still at loggerheads, independent legal arbitration may be needed.”

The spat could overshadow the start of the Covid investigation on June 13. The independent inquiry will examine the UK’s preparedness and response to the pandemic that started in early 2020.

There have been nearly 227,000 recorded deaths with Covid-19 on certificate in the UK, second official statistics.

Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat for St Albans MP and health spokesperson, said the government’s failure to hand over evidence in full “would make a mockery of the whole process” and would be an insult to the bereaved families.

“We are fully committed to our obligations to the Covid-19 investigation. Therefore, a great deal of time and effort has been put into assisting the inquiry comprehensively over the last 11 months,” the Cabinet Office said.

“We will continue to provide all materials relevant to the investigation, in line with the law, before the proceedings are initiated.”

A spokesman for Johnson said the revelations were within the Cabinet’s purview: “We continue to cooperate fully with the public inquiry.”