Rishi Sunak’s administration refused a demand from the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry to hand over former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and pandemic diaries, setting up a legal battle that risks amplifying accusations of a cover-up.
The Cabinet Office on Thursday said it’s filing for a judicial review into the request by Heather Hallett, the retired judge appointed by the government itself to lead the inquiry for the documents.
The government has refused for days to hand over the documents, arguing they are “unambiguously irrelevant” to the official probe into how ministers and officials handled the coronavirus outbreak. The approach has opened Sunak up to accusations he is attempting to cover up sensitive information, and even some members of his governing Conservative Party have urged him to comply.
But shortly before the deadline to comply on Thursday, Sunak told reporters he was “confident” in the government position.
The Tories’ preferred line about the pandemic is to focus on the roll-out of vaccines that ended lockdowns and allowed the economy to re-open. But that ignores more controversial aspects, including testing shortages, allegations of corruption and the deaths of thousands of older Britons in care homes despite government assurances that measures were in place to protect them.
Both Johnson and Sunak — who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer — were fined for breaking rules imposed to slow the spread of Covid-19, while the former was also widely criticized for missing early emergency meetings about how the UK should respond to the crisis.
Meanwhile Sunak’s signature “Eat Out to Help Out” program to encourage people back into restaurants triggered a backlash from health experts, who said it helped to spread coronavirus.
Bloomberg reported this week that the government’s top lawyer, James Eadie, had advised it not to share information with the inquiry by default, and to block the release of “politically sensitive” material about the pandemic.
The Cabinet Office said this week it has provided upwards of 55,000 documents, 24 personal witness statements and eight corporate statements to the inquiry, and that Heather Hallett, a retired judge appointed by Johnson to lead the probe, does not have the power to request the information she had demanded.
Hallett, though, has argued that everything should be disclosed and it is up to her to decide what is relevant to her work.