The Lockdown Files are a historian’s dream

For all that the Lockdown Files, as reported in the Telegraph, sometimes read like the screenplay of The Thick of It, they will be a wonderful resource for historians. Whatever one thinks of the morality of Isabel Oakeshott’s actions vis-à-vis Matt Hancock, we now have 2.3 million words of WhatsApp messages that offer a rare psychological profile of ministers acting with emergency powers in a swiftly unfolding global crisis.

Historians employ a number of different sources in their books, all of which have their internal strengths and weaknesses, but a download of text messages the length of the Bible sent by almost all the principal decision-makers during the worst peacetime national emergency in more than a century is on an entirely different scale from the ones that most historians are used to.

Every historical source must be judged through the prism of its author’s intention in writing it. Thousands of published pages of official government inquiries can be useful in digging into the nitty-gritty of a complex situation, but of course the ones that involve politics are often more concerned with how individuals or parties will emerge from them than with what had actually happened. On occasion a politician can emerge with his reputation enhanced, as Winston Churchill did from the Gallipoli Commission, but that tends to be rare. (Incidentally, that Commission reported the year after the last soldier was evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula, and it did it in wartime; a far cry from the Covid inquiry.)

Verbatim court reports can also be very long but useful for historians, although once again there is always the inherent bias of the fact that the plaintiff is looking for a conviction and the defendant for an acquittal. Private correspondence, the staple of the historian’s trade, is invaluable for understanding what is going through one’s subject’s mind, but letters are often written in an atmosphere of calm reflection, sometimes for the record, and rarely at great length. They are the closest approximation to the Lockdown Files, but not very close.

Precious historical sources can also vanish. The curse of the fax machine, so ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s, was that the ink on its paper disappears over time, so fax paper needs to be photocopied for the information on it to survive. Historians of that period have experienced the frustration of opening boxes of correspondence with eager anticipation, only to find reams of blank paper. That is clearly not a danger with the Lockdown Files.

I often ask MPs whether they keep diaries. Only a small fraction say yes. A few will note down a couple of pages of reminiscences soon after a significant event – the fall of Margaret Thatcher, say, or the outbreak of the Iraq War – but usually they claim they are too tired at the end of a day to do so. (A rotten excuse, as the next morning is the best time to write diaries anyhow.) No prime minister has kept a daily diary since Harold Macmillan.

Diaries have the twin advantage of immediacy and privacy. Of course, historians need to choose whether they were written for posterity (Samuel Pepys), publication and mischief (Alan Clark), financial support for the author’s family (Woodrow Wyatt), one’s own amusement in later life (James Boswell and probably Chips Channon) or for any of the multifarious other reasons that people have recorded their daily activities and thoughts, including an attempt at immortality or a fear of being forgotten. Civil servants keep diaries for ministers, but they are deliberately devoid of the kind of delicious introspection and revealing insight that excite historians.

There is no greater excitement for a historian than to have unfettered access to a huge but important archive which no one else has mined for years. It happened to me with my last book when Lord Rothermere generously let me into his vast, multi-room family archive to research a life of Lord Northcliffe. One feels like an eight-year-old let loose in a sweet shop and encouraged to gorge. The dozen or so Telegraph journalists must have felt the same way when Ms Oakeshott gave them their Lockdown Files data dump.

Historians of the future will certainly savour this minute-by-minute unfolding of the great and terrible Covid drama as told by texts from the then prime minister downwards, but what will it mean for good government? Historians might loathe the ‘30-year rule’, after which government documents are released, but there is a good reason for it, in ensuring that advisers give their best advice rather than fearing what will appear on the front page of the Telegraph day after excruciating day. The fear of putting anything controversial on paper in the late 1990s led directly to Tony Blair’s sofa government, which for historians was the equivalent of disappearing fax paper.

Historians of the Lockdown Files will probably produce a kinder assessment of the Boris Johnson ministry’s response to Covid than we are presently getting from our (perfectly understandable) slavering for gotcha quotes. They will give the proper context of an utterly terrifying fast-moving crisis, when well-intentioned people were trying to do their best in unprecedented circumstances, inevitably getting it both right and wrong. Some people, such as Chris Whitty, George Osborne, Michael Gove and James Bethell, seem to have emerged from the Lockdown Files with their reputations enhanced, but part of the genius of history is that it is an argument without end, where reputations rise and fall, literally forever.

One day there will be a young revisionist historian who tries to make his name by rehabilitating Matt Hancock. The Lockdown Files will be his primary source, just as they are for Hancock’s present-day detractors. In the meantime, we can only gasp at the sheer extent – in size as well as import – of the Telegraph’s scoop, regardless of the means by which it came about.