The first public hearings in the COVID-19 inquiry are set to begin on 13 June, in a six-week process that will examine the government’s Preparedness and response to the pandemic.
On Thursday, the government launched a legal fight over the inquiry’s demand to release Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages, diaries and personal notebooks – it is still being determined whether this will impact the start of the public hearings.
Presided over by former judge Heather Hallett, the investigation is due to evidence sessions with witnesses expected to include Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and George Osborne.
“The inquiry will analyse our state of preparedness for the global and the response to it … and to decide whether that level of loss about which we’ve just been returned was unavoidable, or whether an object could have been done better,” said Hallett, opening the inquiry in 2022.
The inquiry has been broken down into modules that look at specific aspects of the pandemic response, including resilience and Preparedness, decision-making and political governance and the crash of the pandemic on healthcare.
The hearings will be live-streamed on the Inquiry’s YouTube channel.
What questions will be asked?
The hearings that begin on 13 June are linked to module 1 of the inquiry: resilience and Preparedness, which opened on 21 July 2022. It aims to assess the region where the UK was ready for the pandemic.
When he announced the inquiry, Johnson said it would put the government “under the microscope,” adding, “We should be mindful of the plate of that promise and the resources required to do it properly”.
Topics are expected to be wide-ranging and include everything from how vulnerable people were protected, public lockdowns, the use of track and trace, and how WhatsApp was used for communications about developing coronavirus policies.
The knotty row over Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApps has been even more complicated by ministers launching legal action against the official Covid inquiry.
How did the row begin?
The Cabinet Office has refused to pass on Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApps and notebooks for two reasons. Senior Whitehall bosses primarily believe they should decide what information is and are irrelevant to the Covid inquiry.
But there is another issue at stake. There are said to be many personal and innocuous messages mishmashed in the jumble of potentially tens of thousands of texts.
The Cabinet Office argues that ministers’ privacy is essential and that forums should be protected where they can negotiate the pros and cons of policy in secret.
There is a third reason, which is not openly admitted to but talked of among high-level government insiders: They fear that handing over Johnson’s unredacted messages sets a precedent and that further requests would follow for other ministers, including the prime minister, Rishi Sunak.
How did the government try to avoid complying?
The Cabinet Office initially tried to argue that the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, did not have the right to demand the full, unredacted messages.
Government lawyers had vetted the documents, and officials decided those sections deemed “unambiguously irrelevant” should be withheld from the Covid inquiry.
To further sidestep the requirement to hand the files over, the Cabinet Office later said that after it vetted the documents and gave only redacted versions to the inquiry, it handed the entire contents back to Johnson and was no longer in possession.
To break the impasse, Johnson sent some of his WhatsApp messages to a handful of officials at the Cabinet Office and arranged for his notebooks to be collected. The letters, however, only date back to May 2021, and anything before then was stored on a separate phone, which the Cabinet Office said he had yet to hand over.
What will happen next?
A request must be made to the high court, which can be done quickly by the following day.
The Cabinet Office could seek urgent interim relief, which would, in effect, suspend Hallett’s notice demanding the documents while the entire case is decided. This temporary hearing could happen in days.
Hallett could decide instead to put the notice on ice, pending the court’s decision. The whole case, say experts, could be dealt with in weeks.
Senior officials would only proceed with the case if their legal advice indicated they could win.
However, Johnson’s decision to hand over the documents may suggest he thought such a battle was not winnable – and that taking the quicker and less painful route was, therefore, better.
Jonathan Jones, who used to run the government legal department, told the Guardian he thought the courts would ultimately favour Hallett if the government stuck to arguing on relevance grounds.
