Covid inquiry: Boris Johnson hands over WhatsApps and notes to Cabinet Office

 

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

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/31/boris-johnson-says-his-whatsapps-and-notes-can-be-given-to-covid-inquiry

 

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.”

Press Preview: Thursday’s front pages

BREAKING: House passes debt ceiling bill in push to avoid economic catastrophe

McCarthy Emerges From the Debt Limit Fight With Victories, and Some Wounds

 

NEWS ANALYSIS

McCarthy Emerges From the Debt Limit Fight With Victories, and Some Wounds

 

The speaker defied expectations and delivered a debt limit agreement that few thought he could manage, but left some of his Republican colleagues feeling betrayed.

 

Carl Hulse

By Carl Hulse

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/politics/kevin-mccarthy-debt-limit-republicans.html

May 31, 2023

 

When the debt limit fight began, it was widely assumed that Speaker Kevin McCarthy, untested and inexperienced in high-stakes negotiations, would either preside over an economically and politically calamitous government default or lose his hard-won post in a right-wing mutiny after caving to Democrats.

 

So far, he has managed to avoid both outcomes while claiming some fiscal and policy wins.

 

With House approval on Wednesday night of the debt limit package he personally negotiated with President Biden, Mr. McCarthy defied expectations and even earned grudging respect from White House officials while defusing the debt limit time bomb he himself planted by insisting on concessions in return for raising the nation’s borrowing limit.

 

The bar was set low for Mr. McCarthy, known more for politicking and fund-raising than for policymaking, after he struggled mightily to win his post in the first place as House Republicans took control in January.

 

But in the end, he delivered an agreement that met his goal of cutting spending from current levels. It was not pretty; in fact, it was downright ugly. He managed to do so only with significant help from across the aisle, as Democrats rescued him on a key procedural vote and then provided the support needed for passage. Mr. McCarthy exceeded his goal of winning the support of the majority of his members with 149 backing it, but more Democrats — 165 of them — voted for the bill than members of his own party, an outcome that will fuel Republican criticism that he cut a deal that sold out his own people.

 

That is not the way powerful speakers of the past have typically accomplished their goals.

 

But Mr. McCarthy has proved uncommonly willing to endure political pain and even humiliation — a trait that was on ample display during his 15-round fight for the speakership in January — while focusing on extracting a few marquee concessions from Mr. Biden that could allow him to claim victory and avert a default he plainly wanted to avoid, even if many of his members did not.

 

His allies gave him credit for taking on the White House and Senate Democrats and emerging with a positive result when most Democrats were counting on him to fail. White House officials and congressional Democrats privately predicted that Mr. McCarthy would be unable to corral his extraordinarily fractious troops, and would therefore have no leverage in fiscal talks, allowing them to force through an increase in the debt ceiling with few, if any, concessions to Republicans.

 

“Underestimated for damn sure,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, one of the lead G.O.P. negotiators. “Kevin McCarthy has always been underestimated.”

 

Lifting the debt ceiling. The deal reached by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy would suspend the nation’s debt limit until January 2025. This would allow the government to keep borrowing money so it can pay its bills on time.

 

Spending caps and cuts. In exchange for suspending the debt ceiling, Republicans demanded a range of concessions. Chief among them are caps on some spending over the next two years. The deal also claws back $10 billion in I.R.S. funding.

 

Food stamps. The bill would place additional work requirements on older Americans who receive assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but it also would expand food stamp access for veterans and homeless people.

 

Student loans. The legislation would officially end Biden’s freeze on student loan repayments by the end of summer. It would also prevent the president from issuing another last-minute extension, as he has done several times.

 

Environmental impact. Both sides agreed to new measures to get energy projects approved more quickly. The deal includes a win for Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat who strongly supports fossil fuels, by fast-tracking the construction of a contentious pipeline.

 

Mr. McCarthy’s achievement may yet come at a cost. Far-right conservative Republicans remain outraged at the agreement he struck with Mr. Biden, saying it fell woefully short of what he promised and what Republicans committed to as they pursued the majority last year.

 

Some feel personally betrayed and say he went back on his promise to insist on paring back spending even further. More than two dozen rank-and-file Republicans registered their dissatisfaction with Mr. McCarthy by opposing the procedural measure bringing the package to the floor, an aggressive challenge to the leadership that also showed they were not worried about payback from the speaker’s office.

 

Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said Mr. McCarthy had hurt himself with many House Republicans “big time, big time.”

 

“I think this is going to be a problem for him,” said Mr. Buck, who along with other critics of Mr. McCarthy said lawmakers would be talking among themselves about how or whether to proceed with an attempt to force out the speaker.

 

Mr. McCarthy, in an interview on Fox News, said talk of unseating him was not a worry.

 

“To govern is not easy, but I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history,” he said, saying that critics of the package would regret their opposition. “Every single one of those members who vote ‘no’ will miss the opportunity to vote for the largest cut in American history.”

 

That is almost certainly an exaggeration, though the agreement was chock-full of side deals and complex details that allowed the G.O.P. to claim far larger spending cuts than they secured.

 

One factor working in Mr. McCarthy’s favor in holding off a move to oust him was that conservatives with standing among House Republicans, such as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, remained in his corner. There is a distinct segment of House Republicans who are eager to move past the fiscal fight and focus more on the investigations and culture-war issues that they think play better with their voters and are being lost in the current moment.

 

Mr. McCarthy’s backers say his critics do not truly understand the limits of their leverage in controlling only the House while Democrats hold the majority in the Senate and Mr. Biden is in the White House. They say that Mr. McCarthy was never going to get the type of agreement the most extreme elements of House Republicans could embrace unless he was willing to force a devastating default. He made it clear early on that he was not.

 

For months, White House officials and Senate Democrats figured they could hold off Mr. McCarthy’s demands to begin talks with Mr. Biden on budget and spending issues by declaring that he must first show that he could pass something through the House. They saw that as unlikely, given his four-seat margin for error and the varying ideologies of his membership.

 

The pivotal moment came in late April when, much to the surprise of the administration and congressional Democrats, he did just that, squeezing through a partisan measure that cut spending and rolled back Biden initiatives. The legislation had no chance of advancing in the Senate but served as a marker and won him a seat at the negotiating table.

 

“No question the White House miscalculated on this one,” said Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana, another of the key Republican negotiators. “They misjudged the speaker.”

 

“Kevin McCarthy has always been underestimated,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry, right, who, along with Representative Garret Graves, left, helped negotiate the deal.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

 

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, downplayed suggestions that Mr. McCarthy had outmaneuvered the Democrats.

 

“Look at the result,” Mr. Schumer told reporters. “It is a far, far cry from where the Republicans started out.”

 

Administration officials conceded they may have taken Mr. McCarthy too lightly. They say privately that he proved a stronger adversary in negotiations than many of them were expecting.

 

He also won some policy concessions that administration officials had not expected to give. For months, top administration officials had privately predicted that Mr. Biden would agree to modest caps on discretionary spending to accompany a debt limit increase.

 

But Mr. McCarthy successfully pushed to protect military spending from the cuts, forcing domestic programs in such areas as education and environmental protection to bear the brunt of the reductions — a condition that Democrats have strenuously resisted in past budget negotiations. He also secured a side deal that would cut $20 billion in new funding for an I.R.S. crackdown on tax cheats, which Republicans had made a top target for cuts.

 

Such successes were still not enough to satisfy hard-right critics who wanted more. But Mr. McCarthy was willing to take what he could get and declare victory — and absorb the abuse he was already receiving in return.

 

Carl Hulse

Carl Hulse is chief Washington correspondent and a veteran of more than three decades of reporting in the capital. More about Carl Hulse

Debt-Ceiling Deal Erupts Into A Republican Circus

Debt ceiling bill: key takeaways from the vote

 

Debt ceiling bill: key takeaways from the vote

 

Divisions were revealed, between and among party members, but both sides are counting the passage as a win

 

Guardian staff

Thu 1 Jun 2023 04.05 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/31/debt-ceiling-bill-key-takeaways-from-the-vote

 

The US House of Representatives passed the much-debated debt ceiling bill on Wednesday evening, moving the country closer to avoiding a potentially catastrophic default. Next up in line is the Senate, the Democrat majority chamber, which would push the bill to Joe Biden’s desk.

 

But the vote on Wednesday revealed the divided lines, not only between Republicans and Democrats, but within the parties. Here are some key takeaways from this vote on the Fiscal Responsibility Act:

 

Kevin McCarthy’s party faced significant internal resistance

More Democrats (165) than Republicans (149) supported the measure – something the right wing may use as evidence that the bill was a bad deal for their side. Indeed, the Republican opposition to the bill is much louder than that of progressive Democrats, who are concerned about the cuts to benefits programs and the impact on climate.

 

Key Democratic programs and priorities will feel the effects

An estimated 750,000 could lose food stamp benefits due to the new work requirements, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive thinktank. And in another blow to progressives, the bill gives special treatment to the Mountain Valley pipeline.

 

A quarter of the $80bn of newly allotted funding to refurbish the IRS will also be cut from Biden’s key legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act

 

But it preserves health plans, Social Security and other programs

The bill will not impact Medicaid benefits, the main government health program for low income Americans, or social security, even though McCarthy tried to keep the debate open on such programs just hours ahead of Wednesday’s vote. Republicans attempted to cut these plans to curb government spending. However the bill will avoid more increases to the bloated US defense budget.

 

And the agreement will fully fund medical care for veterans at the levels included in Biden’s proposed 2024 budget blueprint.

 

Both Biden and McCarthy are counting this as a win

While critics say the president could have avoided making multiple concessions, the president touted his ability to bring the deal together under heated circumstances, and the bipartisanship he has famously campaigned on.

 

“This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise,” the president said in a statement reacting to the news. “Neither side got everything it wanted. That’s the responsibility of governing. I want to thank speaker McCarthy and his team for negotiating in good faith, as well as leader Jeffries for his leadership. This agreement is good news for the American people and the American economy.”

 

McCarthy, meanwhile, claimed the bill would herald the “largest savings in American history” during the floor debate, though this is not quite accurate.

 

“I have been thinking about this day before my vote for speaker because I knew the debt ceiling was coming. And I wanted to make history. I wanted to do something no other Congress has done,” McCarthy told reporters after the vote. “Tonight, we all made history.”

 

The Senate is already making moves to move the bill forward

Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader has already put the debt limit bill on the Senate calendar to start the process on Thursday. There is likely to be some resistance there as well, as progressives such as Bernie Sanders have already signaled their concerns, but the bill is expected to pass.

Lawrence: The Biden debt negotiating team did an ‘incredibly good job’