Sunak refuses to hand WhatsApp messages. Covid Inquiry should take them anyway
Smartphone, dull user: Rishi Sunak doesn’t seem to know his WhatsApp messages are stored on a cloud and can be retrieved – if he hasn’t deliberately deleted them.
How ironic: on a day when the Tory government announces a plan to stop school pupils messing around with mobile phones, it turns out that not only a previous prime minister, but also the incumbent, have been using them irresponsibly.
Would it not be more prudent, therefore, to bring in a law demanding that a record is kept of all social media messages sent and received by government ministers, on both public and their own personal devices?
Here’s The Guardian to tell you what a naughty little boy Rishi Sunak has been:
Rishi Sunak has failed to hand over his WhatsApp messages from his time as chancellor to the Covid inquiry despite the high court ruling that ministers should disclose their communications for scrutiny.
In his witness statement to the public inquiry, seen by the Guardian, the prime minister claimed that he did “not have access” to the messages during the period running the Treasury because he had changed his phone several times and failed to back them up.
The inquiry, which begins hearing evidence on Tuesday for its second stage examining the government’s handling of the pandemic, had requested key communications sent during the pandemic, from the end of January 2020 to the end of February 2022.
Sunak became chancellor in February 2020 and his messages could include details of crucial pandemic decisions made by the Treasury including ‘eat out to help out’, bounce-back loans and the furlough scheme.
So his excuse is that he changed phones several times and didn’t back up the messages? No problem.
You see, messages sent using services such as WhatsApp are stored on a cloud server – not the recipient’s device(s) – and may be recovered by the authorities under circumstances including a legal investigation.
So it doesn’t matter how many phones Sunak has been through – his messages will still be intact – unless he has personally deleted them, which would be a prosecutable offence in this instance.
The Guardian piece goes on to remind us that former prime minister Boris Johnson had been in trouble when it was revealed that the mobile phone he used from the start of the pandemic until April 2021 had been declared a security risk.
It says he refused to hand over its messages until it had been checked for safety by government officials – but has now handed over messages from June 2020 to April 2021.
The Guardian understands, however, that Johnson has told the inquiry that he has been unable to access messages between 31 January and 7 June 2020, significant dates in the first wave of the pandemic during which thousands of people died, despite the phone being in action until the following spring.
In the former prime minister’s witness statement, he suggests that other leading players in the government at the time – which could include Sunak, Michael Gove and Matt Hancock – could hand over their phones with WhatsApp or Signal messages on them instead. It is unclear whether Johnson has yet handed over his diaries.
So it seems there are several opportunities to get Sunak’s WhatsApps against his will:
The messages can be retrieved from the cloud, if he hasn’t simply deleted them and lied about doing so.
Or they can be harvested from the WhatsApp accounts of other members of the government of the day.
It will be interesting to see what happens now.
Will he come clean and either hand over the messages or admit deleting them? Or will he force the Covid Inquiry to drag them out of him or others?
And once they have been obtained, what stories will they tell?
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