What did we really learn from Dominic Cummings’s leaked WhatsApps?

It’ll be years before the Covid Inquiry reports back on what we can learn from the pandemic, but already there is one key lesson for us all: don’t write anything on WhatsApp that you wouldn’t want read out in court.

The vividly-phrased WhatsApp messages published, and very memorably read aloud, as part of the inquiry have brought some much-needed mirth to our troubled times. There is something inherently very funny about posh people in court quoting bad language and repeating insults like ‘useless f*** pigs’. Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, is one of those who carries the air of the headmaster’s study around with him. He has mastered the art of toneless reading out of offensive messages.

But the furore over four-letter words has meant that the substantive points of submissions to the inquiry – not least that of Dominic Cummings – have been entirely overshadowed. The miserable failure of the state’s antiquated architecture in an emergency has been blotted out by c words and f words and discussions about who said what when to whom about who.