Cabinet Office to take the Covid inquiry to court

The Cabinet Office has tonight launched a last-ditch legal effort to avoid handing over Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApps to the official Covid public inquiry. Officials released a strongly-worded statement confirming the department has requested a judicial review of the inquiry’s demands for material, having missed the revised 4 p.m deadline to pass on Johnson’s messages.

Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s chair, had demanded WhatsApp messages and notebooks from Johnson and texts from one of his No. 10 aides, Henry Cook. Johnson agreed to hand these over to the Cabinet Office but the department is resisting passing them to the inquiry, partly due to fears the inquiry could request the WhatsApp messages of serving ministers and officials.

In their statement, the government argues that ‘the request for unambiguously irrelevant material goes beyond the powers of the inquiry’. It ‘represents an unwarranted intrusion into other aspects of the work of government’ and a breach of staff and ministers’ ‘legitimate expectations of privacy and protection of their personal information.’