The UK government must comply with an inquiry panel’s demand to disclose all of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages with his staff during the Covid-19 pandemic, a court ruled in a setback for Rishi Sunak’s administration.
The inquiry’s demand is valid, the High Court judges ruled as they dismissed the government’s challenge. In effect, the verdict means the government can’t select which messages it considers relevant to the inquiry’s investigation and must hand over the trove of WhatsApp messages over the two years of the pandemic.
It will be for the inquiry’s chair, a retired judge, to decide whether documents are irrelevant, the court said in Thursday’s decision. “The fact that a request for documents in civil proceedings for disclosure may yield some irrelevant documents does not invalidate the request, it simply means that the irrelevant documents may be redacted,” the judges said.
The ruling is a blow to Sunak, who wants to move beyond the simmering public resentment over the UK’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak was one of the most senior members of Johnson’s government during the period, and organized an “Eat Out to Help Out” plan which, according to research, worsened the pandemic.
The judgment “will mean that the Inquiry Chair is able to see the information she may deem relevant, but we can work together to have an arrangement that respects the privacy of individuals and ensures completely irrelevant information is returned and not retained,” the Cabinet Office said in a statement.
Lawyers for the government had asked the court to limit the panel’s authority to demand disclosure of ministerial conversations and said it shouldn’t be allowed access to messages that would be irrelevant to the inquiry or might contain private or sensitive conversations.
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The government brought the case with “some reluctance” and has already provided a mass of documents to the inquiry, its lawyer James Eadie had said at a hearing last week. Sunak’s administration is “significantly” undermining the investigation by refusing to hand over the messages, the Inquiry’s lawyers Hugo Keith had said in response at the time.
The decision can be appealed but it wasn’t immediately clear if the government will.
Johnson, also a party to the case, had supported the inquiry’s case saying the government’s steps during the pandemic must be minutely scrutinized but he sought arrangements to keep the information confidential.
The court rejected the government’s arguments that the inquiry’s demand was irrational and beyond its powers.
“This judicial review was a desperate waste of time and money,” said Deborah Doyle, a spokesperson for the campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK. “It’s a disgrace” the government is trying to obstruct it and “any attempt to appeal this decision or hinder its work further would be utterly shameful,” Doyle said in a statement after the ruling.
--With assistance from Emily Ashton.
(Updates with details from the judgment and comments by a campaign group throughout)