On Wednesday morning, Judge Heather Hallett, head of the Covid inquiry, was still dismayed by the ongoing absence of the elusive government WhatsApp messages. Like King Arthur in reverse, the government WhatsApp messages slept silently in a cave for eons, only to disappear in Albion’s hour of need.
The previous week, the Cabinet Office had declared it deemed the WhatsApp messages too irrelevant to be worth submitting to the scrutiny of the judge. But this week it decided they were in fact lost, and so couldn’t be submitted anyway. How careless this government has been in this respect. The health minister Lord Bethell lost his phone when a July 2021 hearing wanted it. Tories should have to write all their communications on their hands in permanent marker. And if the WhatsApps were lost how did anyone in the Cabinet Office get to look at them to decide they were irrelevant? No one at senior government level had thought it through. It was a classic Billy Bunter defence: “I didn’t eat your WhatsApp messages Jenkins, and anyway they were horrible.”
