Writing things down is a deliberate act in politics. Ed Balls boasted in our New Labour Years class at King’s College London that there are no documents in the National Archives with his name on them as an adviser to Gordon Brown. All the important business was done face-to-face or on the phone, and civil servants would write down what had been decided.
Being careful about writing things down was a rule tested to destruction by the spread of texting and especially WhatsApp, as the embarrassing and expletive-strewn disclosures of Dominic Cummings’s successful campaign to destroy Boris Johnson showed.
