Tag Archives: notebooks

Rishi Sunak’s costly Covid Inquiry legal challenge has failed – as expected

The High Court in London: once again, judges here have overruled the government, meaning Rishi Sunak and his followers were trying to break the law.

Well, it’s only money, isn’t it? And the behaviour of Rishi Sunak and the Cabinet Office shows that the UK clearly has oodles and boodles of long green to splash about.

Sunak’s government was warned before it launched its court bid to legalise its decision to withhold Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages, notebooks and diaries from the Covid Inquiry, that it was doomed to failure.

And now that failure has come to pass – at a huge cost to the public purse.

It turns out that one of the judges of this case, Lord Justice Dingemanns, is a rugby fanatic – so the media are full of comments that he has firmly kicked the government’s attempt at a Covid cover-up into touch.

He and co-judge Mr Justice Garnham have also applied common sense to the affair

and told the two sides to get together and work out what’s relevant to the COVID Inquiry and what’s not… The judges sensibly suggested that the Cabinet Office should appeal to Baroness Hallett about what’s relevant and let her decide.

Sunak and his civil servants have now backed down – a decision for which we should all be grateful as otherwise this could have gone all the way up to the Supreme Court.

But the whole affair has incensed campaigners including the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice

who not surprisingly have condemned the legal fight as “a desperate waste of time and money”.

Watch this develop into a swingeing attack on Sunak and his lackeys as the Covid Inquiry progresses – whenever any information that the Cabinet Office tried to censor comes to light.

Source: Rishi Sunak’s costly COVID Inquiry legal challenge was doomed to failure – and has now been kicked into touch | Politics News | Sky News

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Covid inquiry: is government bid to blackmail Boris Johnson over evidence a bust?

Disinformation: apparently, during the Covid crisis, Boris Johnson’s government set up a unit to remove posts about vaccines and lockdown that were perceived as harmful to the government’s position. Considering that most of us perceived the government to be lying, was any accurate information allowed to circulate at all?

This Cabinet Office blackmail attempt might be a bit late:

This Writer’s understanding is that Boris Johnson has already handed all his WhatsApp messages from April 2021 to February 24, 2022 over to the Covid inquiry. He gave his diaries and notebooks to the Cabinet Office and has requested that they be given back, so he can pass them on as well.

So this blackmail attempt by government lawyers might be a bit late.

The Cabinet Office has also foisted on him a requirement to co-operate with any “reasonable” demand and to send them his witness statements and any requested documents for pre-approval and redaction before they are submitted to the inquiry, according to the Times article.

The article states that

The Cabinet Office has agreed to fund his advice but last week its lawyers wrote to Johnson, saying: “The funding offer will cease to be available to you if you knowingly seek to frustrate or undermine, either through your own actions or the actions of others, the government’s position in relation to the inquiry unless there is a clear and irreconcilable conflict of interest on a particular point at issue.”

They said that the money would “only remain available” if he complied with other conditions, including sending the Cabinet Office “any witness statement or exhibit which you intend to provide to the inquiry so that it can be security checked by appropriate officials”.

Johnson, the letter continues, must not submit evidence until “you have applied any redactions which the Cabinet Office has informed you are needed before submission”.

The lawyers add the caveat that their request “does not in any way restrict your freedom nor your duty to provide sincere witness to the inquiry independently and without reference to the views of the current government”.

That reads like a lot of nonsense to This Writer.

Firstly, it seems the government is trying to unilaterally alter its contract with Boris Johnson to provide funding for his legal advice. In law (as I understand it), this cannot be enforced unless Johnson agrees to it.

Also, the claim not to be restricting his freedom/duty to provide sincere witness evidence to the inquiry independent of the current government’s views appears to be rubbish. How can he do so, without knowing the current government’s views, and having to submit his evidence to the government for redaction so that it can withhold its views from him?

Personally, This Writer thinks his best bet is to turn his back on the government’s funding and pay lawyers at Peters and Peters (according to The Times; it’s the same firm advising him at public expense on his response to Parliament’s Partygate inquiry) from his own money.

He’s certainly banked enough of it from extracurricular activities since he ceased to be prime minister.

Meanwhile, the Times article also features a couple of pieces of information which appear to have been tacked on, as they’re about the Covid inquiry but the paper didn’t seem to have anywhere else to put them:

Tussell, a data provider, says the government has issued £113 million worth of public contracts for law firms and other suppliers carrying out the inquiry.

One of the issues the inquiry will examine is the government’s communications strategy as Britain entered lockdown. The Daily Telegraph has alleged that the Cabinet Office had a secretive team called the Counter-Disinformation Unit which worked with social media companies to tackle perceived “threats” and remove posts about vaccines and lockdown that were deemed to be harmful.

Will we learn what those posts were, why they were deemed harmful, and what measures were taken against them, I wonder?

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Covid inquiry: what good is Boris Johnson’s offer to bypass the Cabinet Office, really?

Boris Johnson: he probably thinks this is all very funny.

The latest development in the Covid inquiry saga is that Boris Johnson has offered to bypass the Cabinet Office, which has refused to give up his diaries, notebooks and WhatsApps for use as evidence.

There are just two problems:

Firstly, he seems not to have the notebooks, having handed them over to the Cabinet Office last week in the expectation that its people would pass them on to the inquiry.

He has reportedly told the inquiry, “I have asked that the Cabinet Office pass these to you. If the government chooses not to do so, I will ask for these to be returned to my office so that I can provide them to you directly.”

But why would the Cabinet Office return these notebooks to him, knowing that if it does so, he’ll hand them to the inquiry – which is what the government is demanding a judicial review to avoid?

Secondly, he hasn’t handed over WhatsApps from before April 2021 – so most of the messages covering the period requested (January 1, 2020 to February 24, 2022) are missing.

And that’s really odd, because – as I’ve mentioned already – he could grab backup copies of this missing stuff from Google Drive or iCloud (depending on the make of his phone).

The claim is that the messages were compromised because it turned out his phone number had been in the public domain for 15 years and malcontents like foreign governments could have tapped into it, so he had been advised to turn it off and keep it that way.

Why? If foreign powers have had access to Johnson’s messages for up to 15 years before he did switch it off, then shouldn’t the UK authorities know what they’ve been reading?

According to the BBC article (link above),

cyber-security expert Prof Alan Woodward said the risk of turning on Mr Johnson’s old phone was “minimal”, adding: “It is perfectly possible to do that without exposing it to the potential threat.”

So Johnson has said he’s “perfectly content” to release information he’s already given the Cabinet Office to the Covid inquiry – but in fact he’s not in a position to hand over very much that’s of any use.

What good is that?

In fact, there is method in it – from Johnson’s point of view. You see, as former government lawyer David Allen Green points out, it is possible that Johnson’s new lawyers have advised him that there is no solid legal basis on which he can resist disclosing his documents to the inquiry.

So, by saying he wants to hand over these items, even though he doesn’t have them, Johnson has done two things:

He has made it clear that, whether or not the Cabinet Office had copies of his WhatsApps, diaries and notebooks before last week, it has them now – and had them in time to honour the Covid inquiry’s demand for them to be handed over.

This means gives the Covid inquiry an opportunity to show the Cabinet Office is in breach of the law.

And he has made it clear that he has waived his right to privacy – he is happy for the documents to be made public. That undermines the Cabinet Office’s claim that handing over the documents would breach the privacy of the people mentioned in them – partially. Others may still object, but it will be hard to maintain a privacy claim in court after what Johnson has done.

So, without actually helping the inquiry, Johnson has dumped the Cabinet Office deep in the metaphorical mire. I wonder if he feels pleased with himself.

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Covid inquiry: How did the Cabinet Office know Boris Johnson’s documents are ‘irrelevant’ – if it didn’t have them?

Two-fingered salute: Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps, diaries and notebooks have put the Cabinet Office between a rock and a hard place – and he may be delighted, after the Cabinet Office referred him to two police forces for possible social distancing breaches during Covid lockdowns on the basis of information in his diaries.

There’s an important piece of information missing from yesterday’s (June 1, 2023) stories about the Cabinet Office taking the Covid Inquiry to court.

It is this:

Unless the Cabinet Office supplied a signed ‘Statement of Truth’ that it had seen Boris Johnson’s notebooks and diaries for the relevant period of time, the judicial review it has requested is likely to find against it.

Allow me to explain (with help from the source listed below):

You will recall that the Covid inquiry had demanded access to Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages, diaries and notebooks covering the period from January 1, 2020 to February 24, 2022. This requirement was communicated to the Cabinet Office on April 28 this year.

The Cabinet Office responded with an application to object to this demand, dated May 15, on grounds that it was outside the legal powers of the Inquiry to request what the Cabinet Office dubbed “unambiguously irrelevant” material and that it was for the Cabinet Office to determine what was “unambiguously irrelevant”; and that the Cabinet Office did not understand the request for the diaries and notebooks, which was new.

The Cabinet Office stated that its point about irrelevance applied “with similar force and obviousness to Mr Johnson’s notebooks containing contemporaneous notes on all manner of subjects which he was, as Prime Minister, required to consider.”

(Notice that this applies to the notebooks and not the diaries – and implies that the Cabinet Office had, or had access to, the notebooks in order to know what was in them.)

On May 22, the inquiry’s chair, Baroness Hallett explained that extracts from the diaries had been received in redacted form in draft witness statements that had been “exhibited” to the inquiry. It seems she was going to formally request the diaries and notebooks after receiving these extracts from the former and information about the contents of the latter and had merely used its April 28 notice to do so.

Then, after the close of business on Friday, May 26 (and remember, the deadline for handing over the information was the following Tuesday, with a Bank Holiday weekend in between), the inquiry received a letter from the Cabinet Office saying it did not have either Johnson’s WhatsApp messages or his notebooks. It seems the claim is that it had not had them since the April 28 demand was made.

So how could the Cabinet Office say these items contained material that was “unambiguously irrelevant”?

On Tuesday (May 30), Baroness Hallett granted an extension of the deadline – of just two days, until yesterday (Thursday, June 1).

But she added a new requirement:

She says she will accept that the Cabinet Office does not have under its custody or control the requested materials only [if] there is a full detailed explanation for why this is so – and that this explanation will need to be attested to by officials with a signed statement of truth.

That is, under pain of perjury.

The full list of conditions shows that Baroness Hallett, and therefore the inquiry, wants to know whether the Cabinet Office has had the WhatsApps, diaries and notebooks at all since February 3 this year – the date the inquiry sent its initial request for information to the Cabinet Office.

This will establish whether the Cabinet Office had any grounds for its claim that these materials contained information that is “unambiguously irrelevant”.

This Writer thinks the trap here is in the notebooks. The Cabinet Office has not been clear about what is in them but has been required to issue a Statement of Truth that they contain “unambiguously irrelevant” information.

That will be hard to do, if nobody at the Cabinet Office has seen them.

As my source below – a former central government lawyer – states,

The requirement for a signed statement of truth is significant – and you may recall that the Miller II case on the prorogation of parliament was lost by the government because nobody was willing to provide a statement of truth as to the actual reasons for the prorogation.

And this Statement of Truth was required by 4pm yesterday.

And we haven’t been told whether it was provided.

But I shall ask.

ADDITIONAL: Boris Johnson’s announcement on Wednesday that he had provided unredacted WhatsApps, diaries and notebooks to the Cabinet Office and is happy to send them to the Covid inquiry makes matters even worse for the government.

In a judicial review, the Cabinet Office will no longer be able to say it does not have the disputed material – but will still be required to prove that it had not been in possession of it between February 3 and May 31. Any claim that it contains “unambiguously irrelevant” material may be dismissed as irrelevant to the main issue, which is whether the Cabinet Office knew that at the time it was claiming it to the Covid inquiry.

Source: How the Covid Inquiry may have set an elegant spring-trap for the Cabinet Office – The Law and Policy Blog

Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps ‘could bring down the government’

Delete… delete: if that IS what he’s doing with the material the Cabinet Office has apparently handed back to him, Boris Johnson probably has quite a lot to get through and still has quite a long way to go.

From Prime Minister to Prime Suspect – that’s Boris Johnson’s life!

After the Cabinet Office refused to provide every WhatsApp message and notebook Johnson made during the Covid-19 pandemic to the inquiry into the government’s handling of that crisis, it is being suggested that it is because they contain incriminating material that could bring down the UK’s Conservative government.

The government added fuel to this fire when the Cabinet Office said it doesn’t even have the material demanded by inquiry chairwoman Baroness Hallett – which suggests that it has been given back to Johnson himself so he can get busy deleting anything suspicious.

This latest scandal is another blow for current prime minister Rishi Sunak, whose protestations of “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level” when he took office last October now stand in tatters.

Sunak is the one who claimed that the government has handed over “tens of thousands of documents”, as if that makes a difference:

He can say that, but we all know – dont we? – that it isn’t the number of documents being handed over that matters – it’s the information they contain.

Lord Falconer made this clear:

If all the material isn’t handed over by 4pm tomorrow (Thursday, June 1, 2023) then the government will have committed a criminal offence and may face court action. To prevent that, it may request a judicial review – but this would only be a delaying action:

Why would the government want to delay? Well, if it has given the material back to Boris Johnson, then…

If he has done it before, who’s to say he won’t do it again, given the opportunity?

The public demand for the information to be provided in full is growing. The words of former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen, who nearly died of Covid-19, are particularly poignant:

And this long message from Dr Andrew Meyerson is a reminder of the wider context:

But let’s not forget Johnson’s side of it. Having seen diary material revealing further potential breaches of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown law, his government-appointed (and publicly-funded) legal team passed it on to the police – so Johnson fired the lawyers and hired a new crew costing four times as much, for whom he still wants us (and that includes you) to pay:

It seems the authorities are doing everything they can to make this inquiry as easy on Boris Johnson as it can possibly be.

Did you lose friends and/or family members to Covid-19? If so, how do you feel about all this? And who have you told?

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Evidence deadline extended for Tory government that wants to corrupt Covid-19 inquiry

Social media junkie: Boris Johnson is probably deleting WhatsApp messages in this shot. “Less than two days until the new deadline! Must hurry! Veni, vici, voodoo! Posterus erectus!”

The Cabinet Office has been given an extra two days to divvy up all of Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and notebooks written during the Covid-19 pandemic to the inquiry into how the government handled it – or face court action.

The original deadline was 4pm on Tuesday (May 30). It has now been extended until 4pm on Thursday (June 1).

Claims that some of the material is “unambiguously irrelevant” have been dismissed by the inquiry’s chair, Baroness Hallett. She said it is her role – not that of the government – to decide what is relevant.

Her point is excellent. No inquiry into the activities of the government can be said to be fair if the government dictates the evidence that is submitted to it. In fact, any such affair could only be considered corrupt to the core.

Indeed, that is exactly what many are already saying about the way the Cabinet Office has been digging in its heels:

Let’s stick with Antony Seldon for a moment, because he made this great character analysis of Boris Johnson:

Clearly the consensus is that the Cabinet Office should swallow its pride and dish the dirt.

But in the interests of balance, let’s have a dissenting viewpoint:

(For information: Andrea Jenkyns is a Tory MP who is currently deputy chairwoman of the Brexiteer European Research Group (ERG). Her claim that other Tories got the leader they wanted in Rishi Sunak suggest a developing schism among Tory MPs that could split the party as it grows – and let’s hope it does.)

Now you can understand why BBC-style impartiality is for the birds. This MP wants us to leave Johnson alone because he’s got his missus up the duff yet again?

If that’s the criterion for abandoning justice these days, the courts could clear their backlog by allowing all suspects a night of “compassionate leave” but denying them the use of birth control.

I don’t think the victims of crime would be prepared to accept that – so we should be glad that Baroness Hallett isn’t about to, either.

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