Rishi Sunak’s claims that his pandemic-era WhatsApps were not available to be scrutinised by the Covid-19 inquiry because they ‘had been lost’ have been thrown into question.
The prime minister, who served as chancellor during the coronavirus crisis, said he was never advised to save the exchanges, despite key conversations about the Government’s response taking place via the messaging app.
He argued he was not a “prolific user” of WhatsApp anyway, and that anything of significance would have been recorded officially.
But an eagle-eyed author has pointed out that he’s changed his tune in recent months.
In June, the Cabinet Office launched a judicial review to block requests from the inquiry chairwoman to hand over unredacted WhatsApp messages between Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and other officials involved in the crisis.
Johnson too, he claims, has lost messages received at key stages during the pandemic.
According to a Freedom of Information request submitted by Byline Times, the government splashed nearly £200,000 of taxpayers’ money on lawyers to fight its unsuccessful legal battle against the demand for unredacted WhatsApp messages from ministers.
“We are content to disclose that as of November 2023 the total legal costs for the Judicial Review on the production of Government and Ministerial WhatsApp messages to the Inquiry were £192,739″, a spokesperson said.
Commenting on the matter, Ian Rex-Hawkes, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, said: “I am so fed up with the continuous wastage by this Government, especially when you consider the quarter of a million pounds spent on Boris Johnson’s partygate legal fees. It seems obvious that these messages should have been handed to the inquiry from the start.
“But they tried to avoid even releasing the amount spent at first, saying it was commercially sensitive and not in the public interest. Now they’ve finally given up and given us at least one figure.
“Just to get advice on whether they have to hand over messages to a public inquiry they have wasted nearly £200,000. If they’d asked any lawyer, that would be six minutes of work: it would cost a few hundred quid to say: “yes you should hand the WhatsApps over”…The £200,000 doesn’t represent value for money.”
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