You won’t believe how this one change could shake up the government’s culture of secrecy!

The British state is, for a journalist, a deeply irritating entity. Officials, ministers and advisers too often believe that the central power of government is its ability to control the flow of information. This is also one of the reasons why it is so difficult for companies to engage with the UK government.

This was shown on a large scale in the Brexit negotiations, where secrecy was the only consistent feature of British strategy. But this week she shed some light on how this culture of reticence works, thanks to the public inquiry into the UK’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The center of this story is Heather Hallett, a judge who presides over the inquiry and who, rather unusually, has extensive powers to request documents. In April she ordered the production of diaries, notebooks and “WhatsApp communications recorded on devices owned or used by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson MP”.

These messages were said to include “exchanges between senior government ministers, top civil servants and their advisers during the pandemic.” The Cabinet resisted: it said it had provided all the information to the investigation “relevant” messages (my italics). He had redacted the messages and said the missing messages were irrelevant.

Hallett disagreed, and noted that the department left out things that were clearly relevant, including how lockdown rules were interpreted in relation to the police protest and how relations with police were handled. decentralized administrations.

As lawyer and regular FT contributor David Allen Green has noted, Cabinet appears to be trying to shape the direction of the inquiry shape the evidence. But there’s something else here: the Cabinet Office is the driving entity behind Whitehall’s culture of secrecy.

The department is, after all, the court of the sitting Prime Minister. It works for him, not for you. He also has a lot of securocrats, people who generally don’t like sunlight. The Department regularly lies to Freedom of Information Act applicants because its priors are towards opacity and secrecy.

But this saga also showed something else. In the course of this correspondence, the Cabinet Office said it “has no custody or control” of Johnson’s data. He only saw her because the former prime minister was using government lawyers to prepare the inquiry. Johnson severed ties with the team after they reported him to police over another round of suspected lockout violations.

Johnson decided this week to hand it over, thus disarming the Cabinet Office’s attempts to avoid disclosure. Hallett has given the cabinet office until 4pm today to deliver the documents. At the time of writing, it was unclear whether the department was planning to do so or engage in a legal battle.

But just go back one step: did Johnson leave the government last year, yet the Cabinet had not obtained copies of this essential documentation? This is, somewhat surprisingly, in line with the government’s broader stance on the use of what it calls “non-corporate communication channels” (NCCCs): private email, WhatsApp, and other messaging services.

His ultimate guide to officials and ministers say, “Significant government information in NCCCs should be captured in government systems to support accountability.”

But he goes on, rather coyly, to tell the reader that he must judge what is significant: “You are responsible for deciding whether this applies to each communication . . .”

In short, the government’s view is that it is okay for Johnson, as a civil servant, to be normally charged with sifting, safeguarding and providing his messages to the government for archiving. This all relies on people being honest about what counts as work. The word “significant” is also important. As in: “Ah yeah, my beer with that guy bidding on this government contract era at work but no significant.”

I say how a veteran of the fight for access to public information: you can’t trust them. There is a strategy here. People at the top of government are allowed to use private messengers, are allowed to decide what gets disclosed or kept for archiving, and have a record of coming up with weird reasons to avoid ever revealing anything.

At the same time, WhatsApp has its effects. As the Institute for Government put it, “he emphasized . . . informal ways of working. This is a dream scenario for dishonest lobbyists and a problem for the conventional and honest business that makes a case thoroughly highlighted through approved channels.

However, it’s a problem we can fix. It might be worth, for a moment, to look into the Financial Conduct Authority’s rules for people in a wide range of regulated financial activity:

A company must take all reasonable steps to prevent an employee or contractor from making, sending or receiving telephone conversations and relevant electronic communications on privately owned equipment that the company is unable to record or copy.

This is, as anyone working in a regulated entity knows, taken seriously: a contact told me of the rampage of a senior colleague who, having failed to respond to inquiries about his systems of work, was contacted on WhatsApp to deal with a urgent matter. While colleagues were right to harangue him, that single message would spell annoyance as the FCA now has a legitimate interest in their phone.

There are more than enough reasons to take such an approach in Whitehall. It’s absurd that Britain is a place where people who gamble on onion prices or sell mortgage books are subject to far stricter record-keeping rules than politicians who have locked people up in their homes for months. Your guess should be a deep suspicion of the people who work so hard to avoid leaving behind any traces of documents.

It would be wise to start treating ministers, special advisers and senior officials with the same suspicion as bankers.

Brexit in numbers

One of the most important subplots in the Brexit negotiations was, of course, Northern Ireland’s position within the union. A new poll from YouGov points to a key problem for unionism: polls of people in Great Britain they show that they simply don’t think of Northern Ireland in the same way they think of Scotland and Wales.

They would, in fact, be a little more inclined to keep the Falkland Islands than Northern Ireland.

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Britain after Brexit is curated today by Georgina Quach. Premium subscribers can sign up here receive it directly in their mailbox every Thursday afternoon. Or you can subscribe to a Premium subscription Here. Read previous editions on the newsletter Here.