Ministers are gearing up to take the official COVID inquiry to court over its demand they hand over unredacted messages from Boris Johnson by this afternoon.
The Cabinet Office is unwilling to meet the 4 pm deadline set by the investigation into how the pandemic was handled to release, in full, the ex-prime minister’s WhatsApp conversations and diaries.
Probe chairman Baroness Hallett, who was hired by Boris Johnson, has warned that failure to comply with her demand to release the material under the Inquires Act would amount to a criminal offence, but ministers are resisting, believing that she’s asking for unambiguously irrelevant evidence that would represent a serious intrusion of privacy.
It means that ministers could end up taking action in the High Court to limit the reach of an official inquiry it set up.
They’ve already provided more than 55,000 documents, 24 personal witness statements and eight corporate statements, with parts that lawyers for the Government have considered irrelevant to the investigation having been redacted.
The Cabinet Office believes the inquiry doesn’t have the power to compel it to release the irrelevant material as it could set a dangerous precedent.
Ministers are also concerned that WhatsApp messages could identify junior officials.
Last night Whitehall sources told a newspaper outlet that there was no change in the Cabinet Office’s position, but discussions between lawyers continued amid hope that there could be a middle ground. One insider said that it wasn’t a case of an everything-or-nothing approach.
If there’s no breakthrough, the Government could seek to challenge Lady Hallett’s demand by way of judicial review.
According to the notice seeking the unredacted messages, the inquiry is requesting conversations between Boris Johnson and a host of government figures, civil servants and officials, including England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty, and messages with then foreign secretary Liz Truss, then health secretary Matt Hancock and then chancellor Rishi Sunak have also been requested.
The inquiry had also asked for copies of the 24 notebooks containing contemporaneous notes made by Boris Johnson in clean unredacted form, save only for any redactions applied for reasons of national security sensitivity.
In a ruling last week, Lady Hallett repudiated the idea that the inquiry’s request was unlawful. She said in her response that the demanded documentation was of potential relevance to the inquiry’s lines of investigation.
How on earth can ministers give their WhatsApp messages to journalists to sell books but refuse to hand them over to a public inquiry that the Government set up in the first place? Because they’re third-rate, self-serving housemaids who are actually handling this country.
What does Boris Johnson have to hide, well, apparently quite a lot by the looks of things.
The fact is, Boris Johnson’s leadership during the pandemic was full of failures and breaches of ethics, but the Tories will whitewash anything to protect those who are blameworthy.
Makes you wonder how Boris Johnson got voted in. How on earth did he do it? He told the gormless shriekers that he’d get Brexit done for them and that they were all special little winners, and he knew that he had to tell them that they were special, but the clever fat Neanderthal fed them lies so that he would get their vote, and they didn’t just vote for him once, they voted for him twice!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 