Boris Johnson to give Covid inquiry unredacted WhatsApps

Boris Johnson has said he is giving his unredacted WhatsApp messages directly to the Covid inquiry.

His decision is in contrast with the government’s. It has launched a legal challenge to the inquiry’s demand that it hand over messages from the former PM and other officials.

Mr Johnson said he understood why the government was taking legal action, but added that this was not his decision.

He said he was “perfectly content” for the inquiry to see his messages.

In a letter to the head of the Covid inquiry Baroness Hallett, Mr Johnson said he would be sending her “all unredacted WhatsApps I provided to the Cabinet Office”.

Mr Johnson added he would like to send the inquiry messages pre-dating April 2021, but that he had been told he could no longer access his old phone “safely”.

In April 2021, it emerged that Mr Johnson’s personal mobile phone number had been freely available on the internet for 15 years, leading to concerns over the device’s security.

The messages received before this date would be likely to cover discussions about the coronavirus lockdowns implemented in 2020.

Mr Johnson said he would like to “test” the advice received from the security services and had asked the Cabinet Office for assistance in turning his old phone on securely.

He added he no longer had access to his contemporaneous notebooks as he handed these to the Cabinet Office.

“I have asked that the Cabinet Office pass these to you. If the government chooses not to do so, I will ask for these to returned to my office so that I can provide them to you directly.”

Earlier this week, the Covid inquiry told the government to submit messages sent between Mr Johnson and 40 other ministers and officials during the pandemic by 16:00 BST on Thursday.

The Cabinet Office – which supports the prime minister in running the government – also holds communications between ministers and civil servants which do not involve Mr Johnson.

On Thursday, the department said it would “with regret” be launching a judicial review of the demand, but promised to “continue to cooperate fully with the inquiry”.

Defending its decision not to hand over certain messages, it argued that many of the communications were “unambiguously irrelevant”, and that to hand them over would compromise ministers’ privacy and hamper future decision-making.

“It represents an unwarranted intrusion into other aspects of the work of government. It also represents an intrusion into their legitimate expectations of privacy and protection of their personal information,” it said in a letter to the inquiry.

Speaking to the BBC’s Question Time, Science minister George Freeman said he thought the “courts will probably take the view” that Baroness Hallett is entitled to decide “what evidence she deems relevant”.

But he added that “people’s privacy is really important” and that the question of how private correspondence should be handled was a “point worth testing”.

“I would like to see a situation where the inquiry says: ‘Listen, we will wholly respect the privacy of anything that’s not related to Covid. We will redact it’,” he said.

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, described the government’s legal action as a “desperate attempt to withhold evidence”. The Liberal Democrats called it a “kick in the teeth for bereaved families”.

Lord Gavin Barwell, who worked as chief of staff to former Prime Minister Theresa May, told the BBC’s Today programme he thought the government was making a “bad mistake”.

He added: “We’re having the inquiry to give people confidence we’re getting to the truth. And if the government is controlling what the inquiry can and can’t see, then people are not going to get confidence in the outcome.”