The Big Lie Behind Rishi Sunak’s Covid Inquiry Legal Challenge

The Prime Minister's commitments to "accountability" and "transparency" are now in tatters

When Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister he promised a new era of “accountability” and “integrity”.

After years of lies and obfuscation from Boris Johnson, Sunak insisted that he was committed to forging a new open and “transparent” Government.

Fast forward seven months and all those promises have crumbled to dust.

Just after 5pm this afternoon, the Cabinet Office confirmed that it plans to take the Covid Inquiry to a Judicial Review in order to avoid handing over all of the ministerial WhatsApps it has demanded.

It is hard to overstate quite how incredible this is. The same Government which established the Inquiry, and appointed its Chair Lady Hallett just last year, is now taking them to court in order to publicly frustrate their work.

Few legal experts believe the Government is likely to succeed in its challenge. Under the terms of the Inquiries Act, Lady Hallett has the power to compel the Government to release any information she needs in order to do her work, under the threat of criminal sanction. It is up to her, and not the Government, to decide whether any such request is reasonable.

Sunak’s legal challenge therefore looks doomed to fail before it even begins. 

However, while the courts may be unlikely to find in the government’s favour, any challenge could achieve another result, which is to delay and frustrate the work of the Inquiry.

As the UK heads towards a general election, Sunak’s challenge has the potential to delay the point at which any embarrassing details about his Government’s handling of Covid will make their way into the public domain.

As I wrote for Byline Times yesterday, that means that details of Sunak’s own involvement in policies like furlough and the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme, as well as any potential communications with lockdown-sceptic groups, could now be significantly harder for the Inquiry to get their hands on.

A New Johnson Lie

The Cabinet Office’s statement today does contain one genuine (if somewhat unsurprising) revelation, which is that Boris Johnson has been caught in yet another lie.

Yesterday Johnson’s spokesman told journalists that the former Prime Minister had handed over his “full and unreacted” WhatsApps to the Cabinet Office and was urging them to release them.

At the time, I expressed caution about this statement, despite Johnson’s claim being taken at face value by some other news organisations.

However, we now know that it was yet another lie. As the Cabinet Office confirmed in their statement today, Johnson’s messages only cover the period after May 2021, and therefore miss the most crucial parts of the pandemic.

The Cabinet Office also confirmed that they have “not been able to verify the completeness of [the] material” Johnson did send.

This is important because, as I wrote for Byline, there is nothing in the current system to have stopped Johnson, or other ministers, from having deleted embarrassing messages from their phones prior to the launch of the Inquiry.

Under Government guidelines it is down to ministers alone to decide which messages are “relevant” and which are not.

This is the crux of Sunak’s legal challenge.

This power to decide which information is and isn’t “relevant”, allows for the self-censoring of internal Government communications. This power is now being threatened by Hallett’s own power to legally demand all such communications.

It is this threat to the Government’s ability to cover up its own mistakes, rather than any high-minded principles about “privacy” and “precedent”, that really lies behind Sunak’s incredible decision today to take his own Covid Inquiry to court.