Cabinet Office at loggerheads with Covid inquiry over Boris Johnson’s messages
Ministers are holding agency towards calls for from the Covid inquiry to launch all of Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages.
The Cabinet Office has till 4pm tomorrow to reply to the request or danger authorized motion.
It has refused handy over the messages on the grounds it could be a “serious intrusion of privacy” and warns releasing particulars which might be ‘unambiguously irrelevant’ may set a dangerous precedent.
A authorities supply stated it remained “confident in our approach” and has been “engaging closely with the inquiry” to date, handing over big quantities of knowledge.
Inquiry chairwoman Lady Hallett desires entry to exchanges despatched between January 2020 and February 2022.
She stated the messages are of “potential relevance” to the inquiry’s “lines of investigation”.
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The Cabinet Office has already offered greater than 55,000 paperwork, 24 private witness statements and eight company statements to the inquiry.
But the Government believes it has no responsibility to reveal “unambiguously irrelevant” materials.
A Cabinet Office spokesman stated: “We are fully committed to our obligations to the Covid-19 Inquiry.
“As such, extensive time and effort has gone into assisting the Inquiry fulsomely over the last 11 months.
“We will continue to provide all relevant material to the Inquiry, in line with the law, ahead of proceedings getting under way.”
The inquiry desires the main points of exchanges between Mr Johnson and a bunch of presidency figures, civil servants and officers.
They embrace England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty, in addition to then-chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance.
Messages with then-foreign secretary Liz Truss and then-health secretary Matt Hancock are additionally requested, in addition to with former high aide Dominic Cummings and then-chancellor Rishi Sunak.
The inquiry had additionally requested for “copies of the 24 notebooks containing contemporaneous notes made by the former prime minister” in “clean unredacted form, save only for any redactions applied for reasons of national security sensitivity”.
It comes as Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak are anticipated to speak this week a few separate incident involving the Cabinet Office, which handed over particulars of visits to Chequers throughout the pandemic that it believed might have breached covid guidelines.
The diaries confirmed that he was visited by colleagues and buddies on the grace and favour home throughout the pandemic.
Cabinet Office officers insist no minister was concerned within the resolution, which was taken by civil servants in step with the code of conduct they function below.