UK government refuses to give Boris Johnson texts to Covid research

The UK government on Thursday refused to hand over former Covid-era Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s text messages to a committee investigating the handling of the pandemic, sparking a legal battle that could become a political headache for the current prime minister , Rishi Sunak.

The cabinet of the government faced a deadline of 4 p.m marketing Mr. Johnson’s unredacted text messages, diaries, and notebooks. But it stood firm, arguing that this would jeopardize private exchanges between senior officials and set a worrying precedent for future investigations.

Instead, the Cabinet Office asked a court to decide whether it should be forced to turn over all communications, including material it says would be “equivocally irrelevant” to an inquiry into the UK’s response to Covid.

“Individuals, subordinate officials, current and former ministers and departments should not be required to provide material irrelevant to the work of the inquiry,” the government said in a letter to the government. Covid-19 research.

“It represents an unwarranted encroachment on other aspects of the government’s work,” the letter said. “It also represents a breach of their legitimate expectations of privacy and protection of their personal information.”

The chair of the inquiry, Baroness Heather Hallett, claims it is the task of the commission, not the government, to determine what material is relevant to its inquiry. She originally set a deadline of May 30 before agreeing to postpone it by two days in the hope that the Cabinet Office would relent.

Historically, public inquiries in Britain have had a wide scope to demand internal government communications. But this is the first investigation in the era of WhatsApp, the texting app British officials have eagerly embraced for business and personal exchanges, all of which are forever held in cyberspace.

The government, analysts said, is concerned that the revelation of WhatsApp messages could embarrass current senior ministers, including Mr Sunak. He was Chancellor of the Treasury under Mr Johnson during the pandemic and made strong arguments against prolonged lockdowns in internal debates.

To some extent, the stalemate is a proxy for deeper tensions between Mr. Sunak and Mr. Johnson. On Wednesday, Mr. Johnson that he had handed over a bundle of text messages and other materials to the Cabinet Office, and challenged it to hand over the package, unredacted, to the inquiry.

On Thursday evening, he offered to hand over his WhatsApp messages directly to the investigation if requested.

The Cabinet Office said its lawyers were working through the night to monitor the exchanges for national security concerns and remove “clearly irrelevant” material. It said it would forward material it deemed relevant. The inquiry has also demanded text messages from a former senior assistant to Mr Johnson, Henry Cook.

The government’s response puts Mr Sunak in an awkward position, with critics already suggesting it is engaged in a cover-up. The revelation of embarrassing details could damage his reputation and hurt his Conservative Party ahead of the general election due for January 2025.

For Mr Johnson, who is no longer in government and whose unfiltered comments on Covid and other matters are well documented, the political risks are lower. He has had a frigid relationship with Mr Sunak since last July, when Mr Sunak’s resignation from his cabinet set in motion a chain of events that brought down Mr Johnson.

The former prime minister expressed his anger last week when the Cabinet Office new claims forwarded to police that Mr Johnson had broken lockdown rules by inviting friends over to his country retreat, Checkers.

Last year, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Sunak both fined by police for attending social gatherings at 10 Downing Street in 2020 and 2021 that breached social distancing rules. The scandal over lockdown parties was one of the elements that contributed to Mr Johnson’s downfall.

The dangers of WhatsApp were vividly illustrated in February when more than 100,000 text messages from a former health minister, Matt Hancockwere presented to The Daily Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, a journalist who worked with Mr. Hancock collaborated on a book about his experiences during the pandemic.

Those exchanges led Mr Hancock and his fellow ministers to discuss the pandemic in often lighthearted terms, even at a time when hundreds of people were dying every day. In a text exchange, Mr Hancock mocked “Eat Out to Help Out”, a program designed to lure people back to restaurants, which was sponsored by Mr Sunak. He called it “eating out to help spread the virus.”

The government’s reluctance to hand over the new material had less to do with the past than with the future, said Jill Rutter, a former civil servant who is now a senior research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, a London-based think tank.

“It’s mainly for reputation protection,” Ms Rutter said. “One of the things they’re worried about is that this will set a precedent for revealing huge amounts of things that would never have been revealed before.”