Ministers block inquiry demand for Boris’s texts
MINISTERS are holding firm against demands from the Covid inquiry to release all of Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages.
The Cabinet Office had until 4pm today to respond to the request – or risk legal action.
It refused to hand them over on the grounds that it would be a “serious intrusion of privacy”, warning that releasing “unambiguously irrelevant” details might set a harmful precedent.
A government source said it was “confident in our approach”. It has been “engaging closely with the inquiry” and has provided huge amounts of information.
Inquiry chairwoman Lady Hallett wants access to exchanges sent between January 2020 and February 2022. She said they are of “potential relevance” to the inquiry’s “lines of investigation”. The Cabinet Office has already provided more than 55,000 documents, 24 personal witness statements and eight corporate statements. But the Government believes it has no duty to disclose “unambiguously irrelevant” material. A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “We are fully committed to our obligations to the Covid19
Inquiry. Extensive time and effort has gone into assisting the inquiry fulsomely over the last 11 months. We will continue to provide all relevant material to the inquiry, in line with the law, ahead of proceedings.”
The inquiry wants details of exchanges between Mr Johnson and Government figures, civil servants and officials.
They include England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty plus chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, then Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and then Health Secretary Matt Hancock plus top aide Dominic Cummings and then Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
The inquiry has also requested copies of a total of 24 notebooks which were used by Mr Johnson in “clean unredacted form, save only for any redactions applied for reasons of national security sensitivity”.