I’m trying to organise an event in Westminster with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and it’s proving a bit of a nightmare. So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think it might be jinxed. But we aren’t about to give up.
The original idea was for the two of us to have a conversation on stage in front of a live audience about Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. These are the messages – more than 100,000 in total, between the then health secretary and various politicians, civil servants and advisers – that he shared with Isabel when she was employed to ghost-write The Pandemic Diaries, Hancock’s memoir about the crisis. Convinced these messages contained important information about the government’s handling of the pandemic that was in the public interest, Isabel passed them to the Telegraph and they became the basis for some hair-raising news stories about Hancock and his colleagues.
So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think our event might be jinxed
In an effort to make the event a bit more fun, we arranged for a couple of actors to read out some of the more embarrassing WhatsApp exchanges. Tim Hudson, who appeared in Who’s The Daddy?, mine and Lloyd Evans’s play set at The Spectator in 2003-04, agreed to reprise his role as Boris, and Laurence Fox, the leader of the Reclaim party, said he’d be happy to play Hancock. So far, so good. We had a promising evening of entertainment on our hands.
Then the trouble started. When Isabel and I started promoting the event on social media, we got a lot of unpleasant responses. People accused us of being ‘grifters’ – in their eyes, we were trying to profit from the misery the government had inflicted on the population during the pandemic.
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