The Lockdown Files are a historian’s dream

For all that the Lockdown Files, as reported in the Telegraph, sometimes read like the screenplay of The Thick of It, they will be a wonderful resource for historians. Whatever one thinks of the morality of Isabel Oakeshott’s actions vis-à-vis Matt Hancock, we now have 2.3 million words of WhatsApp messages that offer a rare psychological profile of ministers acting with emergency powers in a swiftly unfolding global crisis.

Historians employ a number of different sources in their books, all of which have their internal strengths and weaknesses, but a download of text messages the length of the Bible sent by almost all the principal decision-makers during the worst peacetime national emergency in more than a century is on an entirely different scale from the ones that most historians are used to.

Every historical source must be judged through the prism of its author’s intention in writing it. Thousands of published pages of official government inquiries can be useful in digging into the nitty-gritty of a complex situation, but of course the ones that involve politics are often more concerned with how individuals or parties will emerge from them than with what had actually happened. On occasion a politician can emerge with his reputation enhanced, as Winston Churchill did from the Gallipoli Commission, but that tends to be rare. (Incidentally, that Commission reported the year after the last soldier was evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula, and it did it in wartime; a far cry from the Covid inquiry.)

Verbatim court reports can also be very long but useful for historians, although once again there is always the inherent bias of the fact that the plaintiff is looking for a conviction and the defendant for an acquittal. Private correspondence, the staple of the historian’s trade, is invaluable for understanding what is going through one’s subject’s mind, but letters are often written in an atmosphere of calm reflection, sometimes for the record, and rarely at great length.