Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps won’t be the Covid inquiry’s only obstacle

The unsightly spat between the government and the Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic has escalated, with the Cabinet Office launching High Court action against its own inquiry in efforts to avoid handing over Boris Johnson’s unredacted diaries and WhatsApp messages.

With much speculation about the reasons for this extraordinary move, the consensus seems to be that once some of the documentation is released, it would be very difficult to hold back from other demands in the coming months. Other documents could include potentially embarrassing revelations about the behaviour of politicians still in post – and all this in the run-up to a general election.

Johnson has now bypassed the Cabinet Office by handing over “all unredacted WhatsApps” to the inquiry, telling Baroness Hallett in a letter: “While I understand the government’s position, I am not willing to let my material become a test case for others.” However, messages from before May 2021 – which would have referred to actions in 2020 – are not included as these are said to be on an old phone that he is unable to access due to security concerns.

Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office is maintaining its position that important principles are at stake that should be settled by the court, including privacy.

At the most recent count, 226,622 have died with Covid in the UK. An estimated 1.9 million people have self-reported symptoms of ‘long Covid’, often with persistent debilitating effects that can last for months.

This gives the inquiry, led by the highly experienced and clearly determined juror Baroness Heather Hallett, a hugely important task. Even if the Cabinet Office loses the judicial review over Johnson’s messages, it is highly likely that other obstacles will emerge.

But if the inquiry is to do its job effectively it has to have all the necessary facts – and these facts will need to be examined and reported on in full, which is why openDemocracy is currently hiring reporters to attend every day of the inquiry and bring our readers in-depth knowledge of what really went on in government during the pandemic.

It is worth remembering that before Covid-19 hit the country, the UK was rated as having one of the best levels of pandemic preparedness in the world, following the publication of the expert-led 2018 National Biosecurity Strategy. Within weeks of the outbreak hitting Britain in February 2020, though, the UK had slipped behind many other states.

To understand this we only need to go back to a particular four-week period at the start of that year. If we do this, we may also learn why the government is so keen to limit the scope of the inquiry.

The main sources of information for that four weeks are already in the public domain, including evidence given over the past 30 months to parliamentary select committees. The period concerned runs from 4 January, when news of the pandemic reached Cabinet level, to 3 February, when Boris Johnson gave his Greenwich speech that summarised the government’s view of the pandemic and how to handle it.

For the Johnson government, the economy came first, market fundamentalism ruled and the pandemic was an irritation, if not completely irrelevant

In broad terms, the sequence of events was as follows. The virus was first detected as a potentially dangerous condition in the city of Wuhan in China in late 2019, the early details still being the subject of controversy. By the start of the following year, governments in East and South-East Asia were already seriously concerned at the risk of a lethal pandemic.

Taiwan was checking all arrivals from the Wuhan region for symptoms before the end of 2019 and Hong Kong notified health centres and hospitals on 4 January 2020 to look out for people with respiratory irregularities. The latter even went so far as to recommend moving such people to negative pressure isolation facilities.

Meanwhile, in Britain, then prime minister Boris Johnson was still on holiday in the Caribbean and was not told of the outbreak until 7 January, after he had returned to work. That same day there was a detailed report on the outbreak in the New Scientist, including links to the internal Hong Kong health warnings. By the middle of the month, Covid-19 was already spreading across East Asia, yet there is little evidence that it was being taken seriously by the UK government, whatever it was being told by its own experts.

This was especially true at the top levels of government. Even by 23 January, the health minister at the time, Matt Hancock, informed the House of Commons that the pandemic risk was “very low” and remained at that level until 29 January, when it was raised to “low”. The first meeting of the COBRA emergency committee was finally called on 24 January and took place on 27 January. It was chaired by Hancock, not Johnson, who did not even attend and went on to miss the following four COBRA meetings.

The first reported case of Covid-19 in the UK was on 31 January.

What Johnson did do, a few days later, was to give his major policy speech in Greenwich, detailing government policy in the wake not just of the spectacular general election victory the previous December but also the completion of the Brexit process at the end of January.

In the speech he gave a very clear view of government policy on Covid-19, albeit in his own style:

“…we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.

“And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.”

Shortly afterwards he took a further 12-day break at Chequers, reportedly to work on a planned biography of Napoleon.

How does the speech relate to the Hallett Inquiry and its request for detailed documentation on internal government Covid-19 discussions?

The Greenwich speech makes it crystal clear that for the Johnson government, the economy came first, market fundamentalism ruled and the pandemic was an irritation, if not completely irrelevant. In all probability that is why the government was tardy in introducing lockdowns, border checks and other control methods. Too often it ended up playing ‘catch up’ as the pandemic exploded out of control, leaving the UK behind most similarly placed states, whose governments had responded differently.

From being a supposed world leader in pandemic control, Britain ended up a world loser.

One reason why it is so important for the Hallett Inquiry to have full access to information, especially from the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office, is so it can determine just how far the culture of economy first and health second had permeated the heart of government, a culture so graphically reflected in Johnson’s Greenwich speech.

The inquiry needs to be able to discover just how deeply embedded the neoliberal/market fundamentalism view was, given that a culture at the top of a system will, and did in this case, have huge influence right through that system. Given that the actual path taken may have led to tens of thousands of extra deaths, it should be a key issue for the whole inquiry.

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