Boris Johnson takes a photo during a visit to the Nigeria Navy at the Naval dockyard in Lagos, Nigeria in 2017. The British government is facing a Thursday deadline to hand over a sheaf of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s personal messages to the country’s COVID-19 pandemic inquiry.Sunday Alamba/The Associated Press
When then-prime minister Boris Johnson announced plans in 2021 for a public inquiry into how the British government handled the pandemic, he said the state had “an obligation to examine its actions as rigorously and candidly as possible.”
But as the inquiry is finally set to get under way this month, it has been derailed by a debate over the widespread use of WhatsApp by Mr. Johnson and other officials and whether tens of thousands of unredacted messages should be turned over to the inquiry for public scrutiny.
The dispute has exposed the extent to which ministers have come to rely on WhatsApp and has increased calls for the messages to be preserved like other government records.
“The fact that this row has happened partly because of a request for Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp conversations shows just how important the messaging app is to the way government works nowadays,” said Emma Norris, deputy director of the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank. “Given its importance, information held in WhatsApp messages must be treated in the same way as any other government information.”
The issue came to a head last month when Heather Hallett, the retired judge who is heading the inquiry, demanded access to WhatsApp messages from the Cabinet Office, a government department that supports the prime minister and cabinet. Lady Hallett wanted all texts exchanged between Mr. Johnson and 40 cabinet ministers and other officials between Jan. 1, 2020, and Feb. 24, 2022.
The list includes current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was chancellor of the exchequer during that period and led the government’s fiscal response.
The Cabinet Office balked and argued that Lady Hallett’s request was too broad and that the WhatsApp messages had to be vetted to weed out irrelevant material. For example, officials said, many of the messages related to family issues, “including illness and disciplinary matters,” and dealt with comments “of a personal nature” about people who were not involved in the pandemic response.
Lady Hallett rejected that argument and said it should be up to her and the inquiry to decide what is relevant. Personal reflections of ministers could be essential, she said, because there has been “well-established public concern as to the degree of attention given to the emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020 by the then-prime minister.”
She also said the messages would play an important role in examining “the way in which WhatsApp messages should be used in policy formation.”
The Cabinet Office has now gone to court and asked a judge to rule on whether it must turn over the messages in an unredacted form. Officials fear that if the court sides with Lady Hallett, it could force ministers to turn over many more private WhatsApp messages.
In a not-so-veiled swipe at Mr. Sunak, Mr. Johnson said Friday that he will bypass the Cabinet Office and directly send the inquiry all the WhatsApp messages he has from that period. “You have quite properly decided to leave no stone unturned in your search for the truth about government decision-making during the pandemic,” Mr. Johnson said in a letter to Lady Hallett. “I am not willing to let my material become a test case for others when I am perfectly content for the inquiry to see it.”
The two men have been at odds ever since Mr. Sunak led the push for Mr. Johnson to resign in July, 2022. Mr. Johnson has also been irked by the Cabinet Office’s recent decision to turn over information to the police about his possible violations of pandemic restrictions between June, 2020, and May, 2021.
Although WhatsApp has been used by officials for years, the platform became particularly popular during the pandemic, when meetings were largely banned. As a result, government ministers often resorted to the messaging app to formulate policy and discuss issues in what many thought was a private forum.
Just how politically damning revelations from WhatsApp can be became clear earlier this year when thousands of texts from former health secretary Matt Hancock were leaked by a journalist who was helping him write a memoir. Mr. Hancock led the government’s response to COVID-19, and the messages provided embarrassing details about foul-ups in a testing program, as well as internal battles over policy and unfiltered comments about colleagues.
Mr. Sunak runs the risk that disclosures from Mr. Johnson’s messages could prove equally embarrassing. One of Mr. Sunak’s novel programs was the “eat out to help out” scheme he launched in August, 2020, which offered restaurant patrons a discount on some meals as a way of boosting business recovery. Scientists have said the program may have led to a brief spike in COVID-19 cases as people gathered in restaurants. Mr. Hancock’s messages to colleagues also showed that he was highly critical of Mr. Sunak for launching the program.