Government seeks to build trust in public consultations, as complaints procedure takes too long
Ministers are struggling to trust the official Covid inquiry after it emerged that Matt Hancock had entrusted more than 100,000 official WhatsApp messages to a journalist recognised as a vocal critic of the lockdown.
The messages, delivered through the former fitness secretary to Isabel Oakeshott, who then relayed them to The Daily Telegraph, prompted calls from teams in the grieving family circle and Labour Party for the investigation to have more teeth and end quickly.
Both Hancock and an acting health minister insisted that what the Telegraph presented as the key revelation – this recommendation to screen anyone entering a nursing home for covid at the start of the pandemic – misrepresented and ignored other evidence.
Hancock reacted furiously to Oakeshott’s resolution to provide the Telegraph with the messages he had given him so he could write his memoir in Pandemic Diaries and reportedly questioned whether it violated a confidentiality agreement (NDA) between the two.
The Telegraph’s initial story about messages addressed to an April 2020 exchange in which Professor Chris Whitty, England’s leading medical officer, told Hancock that “all people entering nursing homes” should be tested, recommending “isolation pending outcome”.
According to the leaked message, Hancock rejected this, telling an aide that such a move “muddies the waters. “
Hancock, who was Boris Johnson’s fitness secretary at the peak of the pandemic, said the narrative had been “manipulated to create a false story”.
Helen Whately, the minister for social affairs, who held the same position at the start of the pandemic, also said the story was misleading. He said the UK only had access to a limited amount of testing and pointed to what he described as an email sent without delay after the exchange of messages requesting testing on hospitalised patients entering nursing homes.
However, the revelations so far, with the prospect of more stories in the coming days, are uncomfortable for Hancock and the government.
There is a parallel sense of perplexity among many MPs over Hancock’s resolve to entrust such a sensitive piece of data about the reaction to the pandemic to a journalist known for her anti-lockdown views. “I think Isabel is a wonderful journalist. She’s not a very smart friend. Former fitness minister James Bethell told the BBC.
Several ministers in Johnson’s government have privately expressed anger and frustration with Hancock over the “naivety” of his revelations, even though he drafted a confidentiality agreement with Oakeshott.
Other messages leaked to The Telegraph suggested: