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 home moral arguments and say that ‘to prevent husbands seeing wives because they happen to live in care homes for months and months is inhumane’. In the gung-ho mood of these messages, exposing a toxic culture where even Alok Sharma was mocked for wanting restraint on business regulations, it was daring to voice any criticism to lockdown.

But perhaps the most honourable mention has to go to Ben Wallace – who, as Defence Secretary, has been through his fair share of emergencies. At one stage, Wallace is ‘added’ to one of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp decision-making groups but after working out what it is, he is horrified and refuses point-blank to have any part in this madness. He sends one of Hancock’s aide a message saying: ‘I am not entirely sure what I have been put on the chat… I shall continue to do things via POs [private offices] and speaking directly with your boss’. 

Hancock had thought that WhatsApp was appropriate for an emergency because it allows discussions at speed. Wallace, who has served in Bosnia and Northern Ireland as well as overseen the evacuation of Kabul, will know the danger of kicking away the normal safeguards of government. Had Simon Case reacted the same way, and told Hancock to forget this idea of government-by-WhatsApp, things would have been very different.