Matt Hancock and the anatomy of a scandal

Last summer, Rishi Sunak told this magazine about what happened inside government during lockdown. The policy, he said, had been pursued with little consideration of the drawbacks. To even discuss the impact of lockdown – to acknowledge the damage being done to schools or NHS waiting lists – was seen as treachery. At the time, Sunak’s testimony was said to be an exaggerated ploy at the end of a bruising Tory leadership campaign. This week, documents have emerged that prove that government lockdown discussions were even worse than Sunak said.

Seldom do journalists come into possession of such rich material as the texts that are now in the hands of the Daily Telegraph. As health secretary, Matt Hancock was involved in all the important discussions, often taking place over the messaging service WhatsApp. The technology is encrypted and unhackable. This led to an unprecedented degree of candour; Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, and Chris Whitty all shared classified documents and made big decisions in text form via their phones. None worked out that while the messages couldn’t be hacked, they could be leaked instantly if any member of the group chose to pass them on to journalists.

‘Let’s use this when we need to move fast,’ said Hancock in one of the higher-powered WhatsApp groups he set up, whose members included Mr Johnson, ‘so we’re all on the same page at all times’. In doing so, he created a record of the modus operandi of a government in crisis.

Hancock needed a ghostwriter for his memoirs, so handed over all the private discussion threads, 2.3 million words in all, to the journalist Isabel Oakeshott. She duly ghosted his Pandemic Diaries but then decided, on balance, that these documents should be placed in the public domain.