What is the public interest value of Matt Hancock’s huge cache of WhatsApp messages? They tell us a fair amount about him and his vanity. He has a laser-like focus on claiming credit. “I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO,” he writes in shouty caps, to an aide, about the plan to cut the approval time for a vaccine. “This is a Hancock triumph.” His tone is jokey and casual, his response to criticism querulous and brittle. “What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are,” Hancock texts, to which the then education secretary, Gavin Williamson, replies: “I know they really really do just hate work.” Hancock replies with two laughing emojis and a bullseye. They do not sound remotely like government ministers making high-stakes decisions: they sound like the thick two out of The Inbetweeners, moaning about their head of year and backslapping each other for their bons mots.
Hancock has a pretty high tolerance for situations that should have been intolerable to a health secretary: the “eat out to help out” policy, for example, was thought to have been driving infections – but not to worry, because he’d “kept it out of the news”. There is plenty to tease out about the man’s character, but how much of it didn’t we know already from I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here? He’s already said that he won’t be seeking re-election; his fitness for public office is now a footnote.
The professionalism and impartiality of the head of the civil service, Simon Case, have been called into question, and Michael Gove’s giant ego marvelled at. The banter, the callousness, the internecine rivalries, the chaos: it all suggests a general contempt for the public. Would we have wished it otherwise? Sure, government by mature public servants would have been more reassuring. Given what we already knew, however, from the Downing Street parties to the test-and-trace fiasco, little of this comes as a huge surprise. It’s hardly a smoking gun that Case called Boris Johnson a “nationally distrusted figure” – that distrust was palpable and often voiced.
We may see it all as our clearest view yet into the operating practices of government in this Tory era. The WhatsApps leaked to the Daily Telegraph do seem to confirm all the dark fears we had that the superficial, press clipping-driven approach apparent in public also underpinned the way inadequate ministers did their jobs in private during one of the most challenging periods of recent history.
Yet the medium really is the message, here: when policy is made over WhatsApp and transparency is delivered via a leak, a democratic debt opens up that cannot be easily be repaid. It can be serviced only by counterleak, by more gossip.
This has put the entire narrative in the hands of a newspaper fascinated by the rights and wrongs of lockdown, and whether the messaging around that time was fair or fearmongering (realistically, probably both – there was plenty to fear). Of course there are lessons to learn about the balance between civil liberties and public health, but this isn’t the way to hold Johnson and his ministers to account. Nobody was asking them to meet a completely unprecedented pandemic with perfect judgment on abstruse and novel questions such as “How serious is this new strain of the virus?”, or “Should non-cohabiting couples be allowed to see one another?”. What we could legitimately ask for was probity, coherence and the proper use of public funds, and those questions have been lost in the cacophony of a rightwing editorial agenda.
It doesn’t matter so much whether Hancock did “snogging and heavy petting” with Gina Coladangelo, or whether he broke his own social distancing rules. It’s far more important to follow the money: did the government break its own rules on procurement, and to what purpose – was it simple chumminess that saw vast sums finding their way to the likes of Michelle Mone or Pharmaceuticals Direct, a firm linked to the Conservative donor Samir Jassal? What were the criteria to get into the “VIP lane”, whether to supply PPE or focus group services?
What will it take to get full details of all government Covid-related contracts? Without those, it simply isn’t possible to inquire into the pandemic response, either informally by the press or formally by committee. We don’t know whether the contractors were qualified, and we can’t gauge the quality of what they supplied; we won’t know whether NHS staff, carers and other public sector workers could have been better protected had PPE been supplied in better time, and been of better quality. We know money was wasted, of course, but we have no way of knowing how much. We can’t easily tell the difference between incompetence and corruption.
“The use of private communications,” wrote the Good Law Project, seeking an appeal hearing in the supreme court, “has not only put our national security at risk, but led to the deletion of crucial records and information that should be available for public scrutiny.” That case was denied in December, when the court of appeal ruled that courts should not control ministers’ use of private phones and messaging services, even when they were using those to negotiate commercial deals with VIPs, in breach of their own policy.
The Lockdown Files delivered one important lesson, but not for us, unfortunately: rather for cabinet ministers, who are now purportedly putting their WhatsApps on auto-delete, prompting a warning from the information commissioner . Far from opening up the pandemic period to greater scrutiny, Hancock’s messages have merely flagged to his colleagues the importance of evading it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
