The mass leaking of thousands of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages have laid bare in the starkest terms the extent of the divisions inside the cabinet and among advisers and civil servants handling the deadliest pandemic in modern times.
But some who worked in Number 10 and across Whitehall, as well as bereaved families, have been angered by what they see as a rewriting of history by some cabinet ministers and by the framing of some of Hancock’s texts.
Some who have spoken to the Guardian say an “anti-lockdown filter” has been put on events, including many MPs who now have the benefit of hindsight.
Hancock himself has decided against releasing any additional messages or documents that could show a different light.
“It goes against our main argument and fundamental belief that it is for the independent inquiry, to look at everything objectively, not just partial information, through an anti-lockdown lens,” a source close to him said.
Even though the journalist who leaked the messages, Isabel Oakeshott, had the motivation to further the anti-lockdown argument, the content of the messages themselves still raise serious questions.
They reveal potentially key misjudgments which might have cost lives – rather than prolonged lockdowns – including rising case numbers linked to “eat out to help out”, delays in closing schools in January 2021 and concerns about the Kent variant.
There were also concerning exchanges about attempts to get critical experts removed from government bodies, including the eminent scientist Sir Jeremy Farrar and the NHS England chief Simon Stephens and the disbanding of Public Health England.
Few are prepared to defend the conduct of Hancock himself – who is the subject of widespread derision for his decision to hand his messages to Oakeshott for her to co-author a book with him on the pandemic.
But a number of former staffers said the messages had to be seen in context of the crisis at the time – and in the context of widespread pro-lockdown public opinion.
“Without defending Matt, this is a dangerous rewriting of history from a specific agenda. This should have been for the inquiry to uncover,” one veteran of that government said.
Dr Saleyha Ahsan, of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said the messages showed “how little you can understand about the pandemic if you only look at it through the lens of Westminster”.
She said families of the bereaved often had significantly different priorities for understanding, including ways the virus spread and how hospitals coped. “There’s no hope of understanding the significance of government WhatsApp messages if you don’t understand the consequences,” she said.
A number of senior figures in Boris Johnson’s government said they believed there were likely to be two key moments in 2020 which would come under difficult scrutiny during the official Covid inquiry. The first is Hancock’s handling of care homes, the subject of the Telegraph’s first splash using the leaked WhatsApps.
The second is the conduct of Johnson in the run up to the second and third lockdowns, which has mostly been exposed so far in the Substack accounts of his former adviser Dominic Cummings.
Both, they say, will probably hinge on whether the government did enough to save lives – rather than whether rules were too harsh.
Hancock has been accused of overruling advice from the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, by directing officials to remove the commitment to testing on admission to care homes from the community, and only test residents coming from hospital.
Allies of Hancock have said Whitty’s advice was “operationally impossible as we did not have enough testing”. Hancock himself has disputed the conclusions of the Telegraph’s story gleaned from his messages.
It is the one area where ministers have been prepared to help Hancock mount a defence. Helen Whately, the health minister, read out an email in the Commons sent after the text exchange which said, “we can press ahead straight away with hospitals testing patients who are going to care homes”.
She added that the email set out an aspiration that “as soon as capacity allows and we’ve worked out an operational way of delivering this” then “everyone going into a care home from the community could be tested”.
But several senior figures in Johnson’s government say they believe Hancock’s handling of care homes will still come under significant pressure during the inquiry, as well as whether his obsession with hitting a 100,000 testing target got in the way of some other decision making.
Hancock is said to be convinced that he will be vindicated particularly on the vaccine rollout and his push to lock down harder and faster in the autumn and winter of 2020.
Throughout that year, there were two camps trying to persuade a prevaricating prime minister. Messages demonstrate Johnson was being influenced by scientists who were sceptical of lockdowns and lamenting that he would be criticised for having “blinked too soon” on a second lockdown announced in November.
“Matt was pushing for a second lockdown early and was fighting against Boris’s attempts to listen to Carl Heneghan, Sunetra Gupta and Steve Baker,” a source close to him said, referring to two lockdown sceptic scientists consulted by Johnson, as well as the MP who was a key organiser of anti-lockdown movements in parliament.
In one message in November, Johnson refers to him as “the great Steve Baker … [who] believes that the numbers of deaths have been exaggerated”.
Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, also expresses concern in one message that Johnson is the more ideological opponent to a lockdown in November than then-chancellor Rishi Sunak, saying “my concern is that the PM is less convinced of need for action than Rishi”.
But even in messages from the health secretary himself, there are alarming suggestions ministers knew they were making political choices that could have cost lives. Hancock admitted in messages to Case that he had “kept it out of the news” what was happening on rising cases linked to the chancellor’s “eat out to help out” scheme.
He said he had had “lots of feedback that eat our to help out is causing problems in our intervention areas. I’ve kept it out of the news but it’s serious. So please lets not allow the economic success of the scheme to lead to its extension.”
He said he had told Sunak and that “we’ve been protecting them in the comms” and in a later exchange called it “eat out to help the virus get about”.
Case also described it as “pure Conservative ideology” when both business secretary Alok Sharma and the-then chancellor Rishi Sunak objected to restaurants being made to register diners to allow contact tracing in case of an outbreak.
Another tranche of messages released in the investigation show how ministers horse-traded over restrictions, including with education secretary Gavin Williamson. In December, during a crisis in government over whether to reopen schools, Hancock privately warned the chief of staff Dan Rosenfield the government was “under-gunning this”.
In one exchange, Hancock appears to suggest Williamson wanted to trade agreeing to the staggered return of university students in exchange for keeping schools open. Hancock and Whatley also privately discussed whether it would be “mad to open secondary schools in next couple of weeks” and Hancock saying it was “frankly a total shambles”.
One senior figure from that era said the key component missing was how vastly public opinion was in favour of tough restrictions. “If we had not closed schools, people would not have sent their children to school. That was obvious at the time,” they said.
Another former aide in Number 10 said the arguments against lockdown never spelled out what the alternatives might have been. “How many excess deaths from lockdown is not a question remotely comparable to how many excess deaths there would have been if we had not locked down,” they said.
“How many people were we prepared to see choking to death in their own homes? Were we prepared to deploy the army to stop people getting into hospitals? How many scans would have been missed if the hospitals had collapsed? I’ve not seen anyone prepared to answer those questions. If we had allowed that to happen, we’d have been dragged from Number 10 by a mob, and rightly so.”
