The row between the UK government and the official Covid-19 public inquiry escalated on Tuesday, as the probe’s legal team accused Whitehall departments of dragging their feet in providing a range of evidence.
Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel for the inquiry, said its analysis of ministers’ handling of the pandemic had been placed under “severe constraints of time” by delays on the part of officials, with witnesses due to begin giving oral evidence next week.
Among several hold-ups, he said deadlines had “passed unanswered” in relation to the government’s use of the Google Spaces messaging system and that there had been “unacceptable” problems in the disclosure of communications between London and the UK’s devolved administrations.
His claims follow Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision last week to launch legal action to block the release of former prime minister Boris Johnson’s unredacted messages on the WhatsApp platform. They were echoed by inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett, who said: “The more delay there is, the greater the pressure on everybody.”
Nicholas Chapman, representing the government, told the hearing the row over the unredacted messages had occurred despite “all best endeavours to reach agreement” and that it was a “regrettable but genuine difference in legal opinion”.
The judicial review to prevent the release of Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages is likely to take place in the High Court in London at the end of this month or shortly afterwards, the inquiry heard.
Chapman said the Cabinet Office had already provided more than 1,000 pages of WhatsApp messages, as well as details of Google Spaces groups, and was “prioritising its review of certain [Google Spaces] groups according to an agreed timescale”.
However, Keith said: “In respect of a number of entities, there’s been a failure to respond in good time . . . necessitating repeated extensions to deadlines.”
“I wish to emphasise the absolute need on the part of those government departments to comply with these final deadlines,” he added.
Keith also disclosed that the inquiry had struck a deal with the Cabinet Office for a compromised mobile phone used by Johnson between February 2020 and April 2021 to “be provided to the appropriate person in the government for its contents to be downloaded”.
Johnson stopped using the phone in April 2021 over a security breach, the inquiry heard, and his aides last week said he had been advised not to turn it on again.
The hearing heard that the Cabinet Office “wants to consider its position” before committing to handing any messages recovered from the compromised device to the inquiry. The messages provided so far by the ex-premier date from May 2021, almost a year after the pandemic began.
Thalia Maragh, barrister representing Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, a campaign group, said: “The conduct of the Cabinet Office rings of obfuscation.”
However, government insiders criticised Hallett’s recent demands for material that the Cabinet Office considers to be “unambiguously irrelevant”, saying that the inquiry had previously complained of too much irrelevant information being submitted.
In April, the inquiry chastised the Department for Levelling Up for making late submissions of “irrelevant” material whose “far too granular . . . nature” created “significant difficulties” in preparing for hearings.
The department subsequently identified 3,000 documents from its submission that more closely aligned with the inquiry’s request.
