Did you see that story about the Indian government official who drained an entire reservoir to retrieve a phone? Amazing that it turned out to be not even the most ludicrous government-phone-retrieval story this week.
As you may by now have read, Boris Johnson can’t give the phone he used for most of the pandemic to the Covid inquiry because of security reasons. He says he still has the phone – then again, he says a lot of things. I think the phone has faked its own death and is living in sin beneath the North Sea with Rebekah Vardy’s agent’s phone. Can we drain the North Sea? Keir Starmer could suggest it’s one of the things we should do instead of drilling in it.
Anyway, Johnson got a new phone in April 2021, a date which is obviously after all the national lockdowns and various Covid policy catastrophes. It’s good that we now do vital government business on burner phones, just like drug dealers. The WhatsApp messages from Johnson’s second phone are the only ones available to Heather Hallett’s inquiry – and only after the Cabinet Office has redacted them, though the former PM now says he’s going to send them to her directly.
As for why Johnson got a new phone in April 2021, it was because it was discovered that the prime minister’s personal mobile number had been freely available on the internet for 15 years. A normal thing to happen in our normal country. I imagine Johnson fought hard against the handset’s decommissioning – it must have been the mistress equivalent of the ghost containment unit in Ghostbusters. The ghosted women’s containment unit.
Back then, however, chancellor Rishi Sunak and cabinet secretary Simon Case were among the many government voices dismissing the idea that the PM’s cock-up was remotely serious. So imagine no one’s surprise yesterday to read Johnson’s spokesman declaring: “After a well publicised security breach in April 2021, Mr Johnson was given advice by security officials never to turn on the old device. The effect is that historic messages are no longer available to search.”
Oh dear. Honestly, what are the chances. Especially given Johnson spent this entire week playing Captain Transparency, and claiming he had handed the Cabinet Office all of the material requested by the Covid inquiry. He hasn’t. But please very much enjoy the tacit suggestion from his crew that this is an exceptionally high-stakes phone. Like, if he turns it on, people might actually die. Except … we are talking about the Covid pandemic. Boris Johnson didn’t have to use his phone for people to die unnecessarily. It happened every time he went to work. I know we complain about his many holidays – but ultimately, each one of them probably saved lives.
In further trust-aborting news, the government has decided to sue the Covid inquiry it ordered – and to do so using the Human Rights Act, of which so many of its leading lights have been such virulent critics. Thus they join fellow laughable hypocrites the Daily Mail (which despises the Human Rights Act and was last seen using it to block other media outlets naming its journalists in a phone-hacking case); and Owen Paterson (the implacable enemy of the European court of human rights who was last seen taking the UK government to it for the investigation which led to his sacking). Well done to all.
The Cabinet Office’s public argument is that many of the WhatsApp messages are private and not relevant to the inquiry. (Privately, it must be thrilled that the official record shrinks all the time thanks to WhatsApp, unless you count Mark Zuckerberg as the new keeper of it.) Then again, perhaps it’s not the job of the people who made the big Covid decisions to decide what is or isn’t evidence. And, of course, if government ministers didn’t do half their business by WhatsApp then we wouldn’t even be in this situation. But they did and we are. Live by the group chat, die by the group chat.
Meanwhile, the decision to sue the inquiry has led to the publication of letters from Lady Hallett to Johnson which, among many other things, strike a different tone to the Pandemic Diaries of former chat king Matt Hancock. To read Matt’s book was to immerse oneself in the tale of Covid’s greatest hero. And yet, that mightn’t be the line of inquiry Lady Hallett & Co will be going with. One of her preliminary questions to Johnson is: “Did you receive advice from the then cabinet secretary that Matt Hancock MP should be removed from his position?”
Others of Lady Hallett’s early questions to Johnson also tend toward the excruciating. For instance, one relating to Evgeny Lebedev: “Why did you attend a personal/social meeting on the evening of 19 March, after you had called on the UK on 16 March to stop all non-essential contact with others?” And this self-explanatory eye-roller: “Please confirm whether in March 2020 (or around that period), you suggested to senior civil servants and advisers that you be injected with Covid-19 on television to demonstrate to the public that it did not pose a threat?”
In the end, Johnson’s actions this week seem intended to imply the messages and notebooks are very, very bad for Rishi Sunak, and perhaps for Simon Case and others. Hence the affectation of cooperation by the former PM/try-hard agent of chaos. Yet you will already be aware that this man whose sole political philosophy was his personal advancement finally has one new cause: doing over Sunak.
What a titanic historical figure Boris Johnson won’t turn out to be, memorable only for the policy disasters and moral swamps into which his narcissism carelessly led us. At least we’ve got an inquiry touching on one or two of those. After that, let’s remove him from the chat.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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