What Matt Hancock should have learnt from Ben Wallace

As Andrew Roberts argues in this week’s issue of The Spectator, it’s quite something for any journalist or historian to have access to so rich a resource as the Lockdown Files. Like the transcript of the Nixon tapes, the WhatsApp messages let you be a fly on the wall, listening to what leaders say when they think that no one will ever listen. I argue in my Daily Telegraph column today that the WhatsApp messages offer a fascinating psychological profile of a group of men who quickly became accustomed to ordering millions of people around like pieces on a chess board. A case study in mistakes made, which cannot be allowed to be made again.

But there are heroes, as well as villains. One hero is Helen Whately, who as social care minister was one of the very few (she might actually be the only one) to hammer