Closing summary
Here is a round-up of the day’s main headlines:
Boris Johnson bypassed the government’s attempt to keep his unredacted WhatsApp messages secret by handing them over directly to the Covid inquiry. Johnson said he was “not willing to let my material become a test case for others”. Johnson also said he had asked the Cabinet Office to help turn his previous phone back on securely to search “for all relevant material”, which he promised to pass directly to the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett.
The potential risks of accessing Boris Johnson’s old mobile phone to retrieve WhatsApps for the Covid-19 inquiry were “minimal”, the security expert Alan Woodward told BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme. “His phone wasn’t hacked, it hadn’t been compromised or any such thing.”
Dame Elan Closs Stephens has been appointed as the acting chair of the BBC, the government announced after Richard Sharp resigned from the position earlier this year following a report which found he breached the governance code for public appointments.
Civil servants have been offered a one-off £1,500 payment from the government as part of a new pay offer to try to prevent industrial action. Ministers had initially offered a pay rise of up to 4.5%, with an extra 0.5% for those on lower pay bands. The pay rise remains unchanged but the one-off payment has been put on the table “in recognition of the pressures felt during the 2022-23 pay year”.
Two senior Conservatives have expressed doubts over Rishi Sunak’s controversial decision to launch legal action against the public inquiry into the government’s handling of Covid-19. George Freeman, the science minister, said he believed the challenge was unlikely to succeed, while the former Downing Street chief of staff Gavin Barwell said it should not have been launched at all.
Andy Burnham on Thursday evening called for MPs to be elected by proportional representation as part of Labour’s plans for a “radical rewiring of Britain”. Labour has proposed sweeping reforms to how UK democracy works, including replacing the House of Lords with a directly elected senate for the UK’s nations and regions.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has been asked to urgently clarify why a large group of asylum seekers were left on the street in Westminster for two nights running. In a letter to Braverman, the leader of Westminster city council expressed his deep concern that about 40 refugees had been placed in the borough on Wednesday night “without appropriate accommodation or support available”.
Labour promised to reverse changes to the student loan system being planned by the Conservative government in a way that could reduce monthly repayments for graduates.
Updated
For a prime minister who phoned it in, Boris Johnson is having a lot of trouble handing over one mobile
For Opinion, Marina Hyde writes about the device Johnson used most during the pandemic ,which, conveniently, cannot be switched on due to security reasons
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.”
Updated
