A week is a long time in politics. This one began with revelations that Covid inquiry chair Baroness Hallett was requesting Boris Johnson’s pandemic-era WhatsApps and ended with the government suing that same inquiry, set up under Johnson, created to investigate the government’s Covid conduct.
We can trace the origins of the week’s developments back to April, when Baroness Hallett used her broad powers to sequester key documents from the government. She ordered the production of diaries; WhatsApp messages sent between Johnson, cabinet ministers, advisors and senior civil servants; as well as 24 notebooks with contemporaneous notes.
In turn, the news cycle was initially dominated by stories of that eternal tussle between the PM and his predecessor-but-one: “would Sunak “protect” Johnson from the inquiry or throw him under the bus?”, was the key question. The entire episode was framed, moreover, by the spat between Johnson and the government which saw Cabinet Office officials refer the former PM to the police over further potential lockdown breaches just days prior.
But this time the government seemed determined to quiet Johnson’s indignation. And the Cabinet Office duly declared that it did not have the former PM’s data “in its custody or under its control”. In any case, allowing the inquiry to comb through private Covid communications would have dire implications for the principle of collective responsibility. The government was gambling on voters’ fidelity to political norms, historic health crisis inquiry notwithstanding. Oh, won’t somebody think of the constitution!
And so the saga evolved: Sunak, the “Covid chancellor”, had opted to protect Johnson and by extension himself. In response, the Covid inquiry — whose designs on the documents were left undiminished — issued an ultimatum: the Cabinet Office was told to either hand over Johnson’s communications by the new deadline of 4 pm on Thursday or submit any private correspondence with him over the issue.
When Thursday morning arrived, and with the government having taken such a robust line from the outset, legal action seemed increasingly inevitable. While senior Conservative MPs like William Wragg urged the Cabinet Office to back down, the battle lines were drawn. Sunak, famed for references to “integrity, professionalism and accountability”, would be suing a judge.
What does it ALL mean?
Naturally, there are a few sub-narratives to this saga, not all of which are helpful.
For example, the story Boris Johnson wants to tell is that this week’s developments are all about the relationship between Sunak and him. Friendly newspapers were hence distended with ferocious briefings about the lies and misdemeanours of the present regime. (Of course, the problem with crediting quotes to a “Boris ally” is readers are left in doubt as to whether the Johnson-backers are one hundred strong or merely Nadine Dorries taking a break from her TalkTV hosting duties).
Nonetheless, while Johnson can and will claim a political win here, the days when the former PM’s political fortunes were tied to Downing Street’s present occupant are long behind us. Sunak may be facing a series of trying political questions, but, crucially, Johnson is no closer to his comeback. The spotlight must therefore turn to Rishi Sunak’s conduct during the pandemic, something he seems desperate to bury.
It is already well-known that Sunak was the cabinet’s biggest and most influential lockdown sceptic. After all, he was the man behind “Eat Out To Help Out”, the scheme designed to usher Covid-shy Britons out of their bubbles and into restaurants. But more than this: the pandemic was the prism through which most of the nation got to know the man dubbed “Dishy Rishi”. He had a slick PR team and a toothy smile; tellingly, the PM still cites the furlough scheme as evidence of his “compassion” and record of delivery.
However, the level of secrecy that now surrounds Sunak’s approach to the Covid inquiry begs the question of what was lying beneath the glossy social media ads and catchy slogans. Conventional wisdom suggests the then-chancellor benefited immensely from the pandemic, but what skeletons might lie in Sunak’s Covid closet?
Ultimately, while we know that Eat Out To Help Out involved trade-offs (all government decisions do), we don’t know the details of Sunak’s decision-making, how such trade-offs were weighed in the Treasury and, ultimately, how much Covid transmission the government was willing to tolerate to make economic indicators to tilt upwards.
Integrity, professionalism and accountability…
Returning to the present, there are questions over how this saga has been handled by the government and what it says about Sunak’s political instincts.
In short: why did events play out so badly?
When Sunak first became prime minister, he promised to uphold the values of integrity, professionalism and accountability in government; it was a deliberate attempt to draw a line under the lax standards regime of his predecessor-but-one.
In this episode, Sunak could have continued to emphasise the contrast between himself and Johnson — especially with the former PM potentially facing further recriminations from the police. Sunak could have ploughed on with his “professionalism” pitch, taking the side of disclosure rather than secrecy. He could have ignored Johnson’s inevitable protestations. It would have been a symbolic moment as the Conservative party works to move on from its pandemic-era travails.
But this controversy highlights an area where Johnson is seemingly willing to be more transparent and accountable than the prime minister. “You have quite properly decided to leave no stone unturned in your search for the truth about government decision-making during the pandemic”, Johnson said in a letter this morning, as he directly offered his covid communications to inquiry chair Baroness Hallett.
Sunak had held off handing over the messages under the guise of protecting his predecessor-but-one, only to be wrong-footed by him. The opacity and ruthless resistance to scrutiny is far from what Sunak trailed when he became PM last October.
Of course, confidentiality and secrecy are the default positions of whoever is in power. Between Westminster and Whitehall, information flows on a need-to-know basis — the current determined, typically, by the prime minister.
But one key question raised by Britain’s Covid response was whether such committed confidentiality is necessary to good governance or simply a mask for the bad. Dominic Cummings, delivering testimony to a joint inquiry of the Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committees in the summer of 2021, had his view. Johnson’s former top aide argued that “secrecy contributed greatly to the [Covid] catastrophe”.
Now, with an inquiry into Covid under-way, was this really the time for Rishi Sunak and Downing Street to double down on its ruthless reflex for confidentiality?
In any case, such secrecy passes ammunition to the government’s critics who insist that the Covid inquiry was designed with a classic Whitehall whitewash in mind. Undoubtedly, Sunak’s opacity lends credence to the view that the outcome of the inquiry has been determined, in ministerial minds, long in advance. So the government now drip feeds Covid-era communications to the Baroness Hallett — as the inquiry she chairs works its way back to the intended conclusion, escorted by the government’s carefully-laid breadcrumbs.
There is also no avoiding the fact that the government is likely to lose its judicial review, as science minister George Freeman freely admitted on BBC Question Time last night. He and Sunak will know that under section 21 of the 2005 Inquiries Act, the chair of a statutory inquiry has the power to compel the production of written evidence. This was, ultimately, what the government agreed to when it announced a Covid inquiry in late 2021. Moreover, the remit of Baroness Hallett’s inquiry explicitly instructs her, as chair, to examine “how decisions were made, communicated, recorded, and implemented” in “the public health response across the UK”.
In the end, amid all the manoeuvring between Johnson and Sunak, it seems no concession was made to fears over how such heightened secrecy might play in the public domain on this most sensitive of subjects. Rather than realise that resistance to disclosure is both futile and deeply unpopular, the government opted to sue its own inquiry. It is extremely difficult to locate the political rationale behind such a response.
Opposition parties now accuse Sunak of a cover-up. And with parliament returning on Monday, it’s a line that will prove difficult to refute.
