On Tuesday evening, former health secretary Matt Hancock caught wind of disconcerting rumours that a significant story about him was brewing. The concerned MP texted Isabel Oakeshott, the anti-lockdown journalist and unlikely co-author of his pandemic memoirs, asking her if she had “any clues” about the developments. He received no reply.
A little later on, the right-wing Telegraph newspaper published a new investigation: the ominously titled “Lockdown Files”. The reporting is the culmination of the paper’s two-month-long trawl through 100,000 WhatsApp messages, furnished to them by Hancock’s budding bête noire: yes, one Isabel Oakeshott. Debuting the investigation with a story on Hancock’s policy on care homes in the early stages of the pandemic, the plan now is to drip-feed out exposés on a regular basis — illuminating the secretive world inside the Whitehall blob one front-page splash at a time.
More recriminations followed on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; the investigation had acquired a portentous momentum. Civil servants, advisers and MPs alike were rueing the day they ever exchanged phone numbers with the former health secretary.
Then on Friday, in an act of news agenda synchronisation beyond the wildest dreams of any Week-in-Review writer, the privileges committee published its initial report into whether Boris Johnson lied to parliament about partygate. Fresh from a coded intervention on Rishi Sunak’s Northern Ireland Protocol deal, Johnson’s Covid misdeeds were thrust once again into the headlines.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson had gotten off relatively scot-free from The Telegraph’s WhatsApp-based snooping. His only mention came with the publication of a series of rather mundane messages that saw the then-PM query the difference between probability expressed as a percentage and as a decimal. Johnson had seen a Financial Times article express the Covid mortality rate as “0.04” (or 4 in 100), misinterpreting the figure as a percentage. Dominic Cummings duly corrected. While potentially making the case for Sunak’s maths-until-18 policy, the episode probably underlined that Johnson was not investigation’s prime target.
Of course, it is worth noting that The Telegraph‘s investigation, while undoubtedly arresting, is itself deeply partial. The paper’s reading of Hancock’s tomey texts comes from a lens — a logical starting point — of lockdown scepticism. Their intention was to paint a picture of out-of-their-depth politicians, jumped-up on power, rewriting British social norms at the whim of a WhatsApp ping. When you have 100,000 text messages word-for-word three times longer than the King James Bible, there will be no shortage of neat narratives to weave and embellish.
In some senses, The Telegraph’s editorial line on lockdowns belies the true theme of the messages, later tackled comprehensively by the privileges committee report.
Indeed, by far the most politically potent revelation from The Telegraph’s investigation was the news that Hancock, in his capacity as health secretary, had arranged for a testing kit to be couriered to the household of fellow cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. The message detailed: “we’ve got a courier going to [the Rees-Mogg] family home tonight, child will take the test, and courier will take it straight to the lab. Should have result tomorrow am”. It was at a time of deep confusion and delay within the UK’s testing system.
Putting aside personal vanities, this, far more than any supposed reckoning for lockdown-minded Machiavellians, has the potential to stick in the public consciousness. With the Conservative party already almightily exposed on Covid sleaze, the Rees-Mogg story became the latest in a long line of stories on pandemic wrongdoing. That is, of course, until Friday.
The suggestion that Boris Johnson may have misled parliament over partygate on four occasions is the biggest development in the former PM’s political career since his unceremonious departure from Downing Street.
The report is damning. It suggests that breaches of coronavirus rules would have been “obvious” to the prime minister as the lead occupant of No. 10, citing specifically a gathering dated 27 November 2020 where Johnson joked: “[This is] probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now”.
But the most revealing details — picking up on this week’s core theme — came by way of newly-disclosed WhatsApp messages from Downing Street staff. Messages exchanged in April 2021 showed that No 10 staff were well-aware that some gatherings operated in breach of Covid rules. One unknown official cites a colleague’s concerns “about leaks of PM having a piss-up and to be fair I don’t think it’s unwarranted”.
The political fallout, mirroring the “Lockdown Files” furore, was immediate. Johnson was first to enter the fray, issuing a bullish statement indicating that he had been “vindicated” by the findings. Curiously, however, Johnson also rubbished the committee’s methodology, pouring scorn on the fact that the committee had “relied on” the findings of Sue Gray, the former Whitehall mandarin expected to soon become Sir Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff.
“It is surreal to discover that the committee proposes to rely on evidence culled and orchestrated by Sue Gray”, Johnson argued.
Then came a slew of denunciations from the former PM’s allies, each pulling at this particular thread. Simon Clarke said: “Before the privileges committee can continue and rely on Sue Gray’s evidence, which will be pivotal, we need an urgent inquiry”. Mark Jenkinson, another loyalist, questioned similarly: “How can the work Keir Starmer’s top political adviser be used against Boris like this? This cannot possibly be a fair process”.
But put the political dramatics to one side, and the new revelations against the former PM, like the so-called “Lockdown Files”, point to the new political centrality of Covid sleaze. It will come as sore news for Rishi Sunak.
This was supposed to be the week the prime minister rebooted his administration as a delivery-focused alternative to previous iterations of Conservative governance. The “Windsor Framework” announced on Monday was all about proving the Conservative party could, after all, make pragmatic decisions in the national interest. Now, the equally glibly named “Lockdown files” may just undermine that image; and the Johnson revelations look set to dominate the headlines. Any fledgling momentum generated by the Framework may have already been scuppered by events far beyond the PM’s control. The Conservative party simply cannot be saved from itself.
With more revelations, more reports and more recriminations surely forthcoming, the “sleaze premium” applied to the Conservative party’s polling shows no sign of dipping. It highlights once more the political constraints on Sunak, as problems which became so endemic during Johnson’s time in Downing Street thwart his party’s electoral prospects.
Attention now turns to the former PM’s appearance before the privileges committee on March 20. We have every indiction that the coming clash will be blockbuster.
