Covid inquiry: Boris Johnson hands over WhatsApps
and notes to Cabinet Office
Former prime minister gives tranche of documents to
the Cabinet Office, challenging officials to pass them on
Aubrey
Allegretti and Rowena Mason
Wed 31 May
2023 17.02 BST
Boris
Johnson has handed over a major cache of WhatsApp messages and notebooks to the
Cabinet Office, challenging it to release the documents unredacted to the Covid
inquiry.
In a move
that will pose a major headache for the government, Johnson suggested Whitehall
officials should “urgently disclose” the contents to the public inquiry.
His
provocation came as senior Conservatives urged the government to back down and
avoid a protracted legal battle over the issue.
William
Wragg, who chairs the Commons constitutional affairs committee, said the
inquiry had “the powers and authority to request evidence it sees fit to
consider”, and that the Cabinet Office should “comply with both the spirit and
the letter of how the inquiry is constituted”.
Robert
Buckland, a former justice secretary, instead called for a compromise “to avoid
an ugly turf war”. “There needs to be disclosure with agreed redactions,” he
said. “I support the government argument about the need for ministers and
officials to work in a safe space but the inquiry has agreed terms of reference
and is entitled to ask for material relevant to the ambit of its work.”
As the
pressure mounted, Cabinet Office officials were scrambling to respond to the
Covid inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, by her 4pm deadline on Thursday.
She has
demanded WhatsApp messages and notebooks from Johnson and texts from one of his
No 10 aides, Henry Cook.
The
government has been resisting, in part because some senior figures fear more
potential requests could follow concerning other ministers who are still in
post.
It emerged
earlier this week that the government had previously been in possession of
Johnson’s documents, but after officials looked through the files and decided
they were not relevant to the inquiry, the Cabinet Office said it no longer had
them.
Johnson
said in a statement on Wednesday afternoon that the Cabinet Office had had
access to the material for months. It is said that government officials and
their lawyers were invited to his offices to view the files on a number of
occasions.
Further
material was provided to the Cabinet Office this week, and Johnson’s
spokesperson said he was “perfectly happy for the inquiry to have access to
this material in whatever form it requires”.
They also
said he had cooperated with the inquiry in full and looked forward to
continuing to do so.
Rishi Sunak
was urged to confirm that the full documents would now be given to the inquiry.
Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, said the Cabinet Office had run out of
excuses and should stop trying to conceal the truth.
“If other
ministers are hoping to hide behind the same smoke and mirrors tactics to dodge
public scrutiny by the inquiry, it is increasingly clear they don’t have a leg
to stand on,” she said.
The Liberal
Democrat MP Christine Jardine said: “He can’t use Boris Johnson any more as an
excuse to avoid handing over vital evidence. Bereaved families are still
waiting for answers. They deserve so much better than yet another Conservative
stitch-up.”
Given
officials fear the issue is a litmus test and that handing over Johnson’s files
could mean other ministers would have to do the same, they may be forced to
challenge Lady Hallett’s ruling in the courts.
A judicial
review was said to be becoming more likely, but taking legal action against the
head of a public inquiry at such scale would be unprecedented.
Jonathan
Jones, a former head of the government legal department, said officials should
not refuse to share the documents to save ministers’ blushes.
Hallett has
requested messages Johnson exchanged with about 40 people, including Sunak.
“I’m sure
that it won’t be at all surprising if some of this ministers would prefer not
to disclose, because it’s politically embarrassing or personally embarrassing,”
Jones said.
“That
wouldn’t be very surprising because you’re talking about potentially a large
amount of material, some of it on personal devices. But those are not reasons
for withholding it. If it’s relevant, it should be disclosed.”
Robin
Butler, a former cabinet secretary and head of the inquiry into intelligence
about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, said he thought Hallett was being
“pretty unreasonable”.
He said:
“When I did my inquiry on WMD and we had to winkle information out of the
government, I followed the precedent of the Falklands inquiry and asked the
permanent secretary of each department to give their personal undertaking that
all information that was relevant would be released to us. That worked and
subsequently I never discovered anything that wasn’t released that should have
been.”
Stephen
Reicher, a behavioural scientist who advised the government during the Covid
pandemic, said the standoff was symptomatic of ministers’ lack of understanding
of the importance of trust.
“If there
is anything that is more corrosive of trust than releasing information which
shows rule breaking, it is to be seen to try and hide information about rule
breaking,” he said.
“It takes
us for fools at two levels, the information that is being hidden and what is
being hidden. What is more, once we have lost trust and we think of government
as the ‘other’, as venal and corrupt, the blacked-out passages lead us to imagine
unlimited transgressions which are probably worse than what did go on.”
The Cabinet
Office maintained it had already provided more than 55,000 documents, 24
personal witness statements and eight corporate statements to Hallett’s
inquiry.
It has
argued: “We are firmly of the view that the inquiry does not have the power to
request unambiguously irrelevant information that is beyond the scope of this
investigation. This includes the WhatsApp messages of government employees’
which are not about work but instead are entirely personal and relate to their
private lives.”
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