A government convened inquiry, led by a well-respected judge, Lady Hallett, cannot be trusted to decide what is materially relevant to its investigation. Rishi Sunak’s cabinet office refuses to hand over evidence to Lady Hallett’s team without blocking out chunks of it. The stand off is such that the government is taking its own inquiry to court, so that a different judge can decide.
Boris has played a blinder. He has given his diaries, emails and phone messages, totally unredacted, to the Cabinet Office, passing a toxic parcel firmly into their hands. Of course, his current phone only dates from the point the inquiry was put in place. His previous phone’s number was published on a list accessible to the public. He was advised it was a security hazard, to turn it off and never turn it back on again. To add to the pressure, Boris has offered to send everything directly to Lady Hallett “if that helps”.
The legal challenge is on the question of who decides what is relevant and the principle of privacy. Having set the inquiry’s remit and appointed Lady Hallett themselves, you’d expect the government to lose on the the issue of relevancy. The whole of Westminster uses WhatsApp routinely and work often gets entangled with personal comments and revelations. Still, Lady Hallett’s team are more than capable of filtering the material sensibly. Besides, ministers should be more careful.
Of course, the real fear for the government is precedence. They came for Boris’s WhatsApp, who is next? They may have “nothing to hide” but they seem very afraid.
I’m betting the taxpayers pay for all the costs.
It feels strange to see Boris is on the side of openness and scrutiny.
BoJo was told by the security services to “turn off his old phone and never switch it on again”. So, he says, we can’t see the messages even if we wanted to, because it might be hacked and transmit all the secure data to the Ruskies.
Has anyone in Westminster heard of a Faraday cage? Apparently not.
Or he could bring it to South Cambs, where 4G reception is terrible.
Surely WhatsApp messages live on in the cloud, whatever happens to the phone? Mine did.
They’re end-to-end encrypted, so you need the device (or another device with the same login & password) to make sense of them.
Or an Enigma machine and a load of crossword-solving lovelies in starched uniforms working in Bletchley Park. Er… am I revealing too much?
The plaintext backups to Google used to be the weak link in the security chain. I assume that’s been fixed since I last looked/moved to Signal?
Wait. What…?
Ooh Tigger that was an interesting Whatsapp chat you had on 16th August 2018. Very saucy.
I doubt BoJo knows about Faraday’s cage. Did the ancient Greeks use one?
Boorish’s mobile phone number appeared at the bottom of a memo dated 2006 and remained accessible for anyone who saw it for the next 15 years.
Unfuckiingbelievable
I think I copied into my contacts list when it was published. Shall I try to ring* it?
*or hack it?
I’m guessing that Mr Hislop will have fun with this on tonights HIGNFY
“It feels strange to see Boris is on the side of openness and scrutiny”
The only side Johnson is on is his own; “openness and security” have nothing to do with it. The fact that Johnson is so willing to spill the beans and Number 10 is so reluctant to release the messages suggests to me that Sunak is not going to come out of this with his squeaky clean image intact. And that would suit Johnson down to the ground.
Is there a possibility Mr Johnson is deluded? Does he truly believe Rishi comes out of this worse than he does?
I doubt that Boris cares much about looking bad, at this stage of events. Besides, his monstrous ego tells him he can bounce back afterwards and perhaps he’s right.
The Government (reluctantly) commissioned the inquiry and set it’s terms of reference. Now they want to limit the material it will be allowed to examine. It is not their place to dictate what information is relevant or irrelevant to the inquiry, that’s the job of those working on the inquiry, not The Government’s.
Any personal information within the messages in question is subject to data protection legislation and the inquiry team have a duty of confidentiality regarding material that’s not relevant, so bleating about it is a red herring.
It’s just a power play.
I don’t really see how they can justify blocking the material from being examined, unless there is a specific part of the inquiry’s terms of reference that exempts it from scrutiny. If the courts are working as they should be, this can only be a delaying tactic while the “guilty parties” get their stories straight.
No. BJ got told by his legal team that Hallett will win, and he’s making a virtue out of necessity – or that’s what the legal bloggers I read are suggesting.
That’s plausible. He needs something out of this shitshow that makes him look at least a little bit good. And makes Rishi & co. look bad at the same time.
It surprises me that the Government/Cabinet Office are being so stupidly stubborn about holding onto the stuff. Obviously they weren’t expecting BoJo to cooperate with the inquiry.
From what I’ve heard, all he’s volunteering is to open his phone inn a safe place and forward the messages HE thinks are relevant. That’s not exactly full cooperation, it’s it?
Where did you get this information?
I thought he was hoping his old phone couldn’t be opened at all. Even so, he still appears to be more co-operative than the current PM.
This Telegraph article contains this quote:
I see 🤔
Of course we are paying for it. Just like my council tax helped to pay for the mountain of crap pushed through my letterbox every few days for months on end by the local Tories just before they lost control of my ‘local’ council.
My wife and I argue on two subjects –
1. Teams fielding weakened sides in Cup tournaments and,
2. Fat Boy Johnson – she wants him imprisoned – I want far worse for him and I believe if it happened, via a bus maybe, it would be the best thing to happen to this country for decades.
He’s utter scum and Eton, Oxbridge, his parents, and all his enablers should be ashamed of themselves. They should be also be prosecuted.
Why? Why field a weakened side – lower league club gets a plum draw at home to the big boys and they turn up with a bunch of Youth team players and long term injuries being eased back in. It’s a disgrace I tell you …
Yes.
Leeds lose at Sutton and it’s “INCREDIBLE”.
No, it’s a 5/2 shot and even then the bookies were hedging their bets.
Leicester winning the Premier League was 5,000/1.
The mother stealing a 99p can of beans v. £37 billion on PPE might be the bigger issue of the two!
I have one thing in common with Fat Boy and the tabloids, we both hate the general public. I can’t deny it, it’s the public’s fault, not Fat Boy’s. Why wouldn’t he be how he is? It pays every single time and I’m not wildly sure it isn’t going to pay again.
Let’s hope for that bus, he likes buses.
I would like to put him, not on a bus, but on a flatbed truck. He will be naked, and standing tethered hand and foot, like the Leonardo figure. The truck will tour the entire country so that the populace can chuck eggs, tomatoes, sausages, paint, not-fit-for-purpose PPE, whatever. No rocks – I’m not a complete monster. The movable stocks, if you like. But am I weird?
It’s just a continuation of the shitshow that we are still witnessing – or a “skip fire” as a Tory MP said, ironically on a leaked WhatsApp exchange.
I find myself kinda supporting the Government’s stance on this, amazingly. I would be hesitant- at the very least – to hand all my private messages and info to the police. I am as pure as the driven snow, honesht, but handing over my phone to the police? No. Get fucked.
I believe the police routinely confiscate phones to gather evidence. The inquiry is simply gathering evidence. The police don’t necessarily disclose everything that’s on the phone. Neither will Lady Hallett.
I have a radical idea. Don’t use your personal phone, and shitty apps, to conduct government business. That way you have nothing to worry about.
If lower level peons can work that out, surely it isn’t an unreasonable expectation for the PM et al to work out.
Which takes us back to comments on a recent thread about being wary of the volume of CCTV in this land.
Word is that while Fat Boy J. hasn’t remotely towed the line on this issue, Fat Boy J.’s wife (until it’s not convenient and/or another one’s up the duff) has.
Every single record apparently.
Hallett’s already been through them and has issued a statement: “They’re crap, they’re all by Abba.”
I’m warming to her.
I read earlier today that the Cabinet Office has threatened to withdraw their funding for BoJo’s defence, unless he turns everything over to them first, for redaction of what they don’t want the inquiry to see.
The plot thickens. It’s almost as thick as Nadine Dorries now.
He will lose the funding if he attempts to “frustrate or undermine” the government’s position on the inquiry.
The government’s position is “Suppose we’ll have to have this inquiry even though we’d really rather not. How dare they (or anyone, come to that) defy us! We’re the Government, dammit!!”
Boris was supposed to be thrown under the bus (not the big red one with the slogan on the side of it) but it looks like he might be the one driving it right now.
Yesterday’s evidence in the Inquiry delivered no real surprises. Cummings said that he knew Johnson wasn’t up to the job, but a Labour Government with Corbyn in charge would have been worse. It’s hard to imagine how.
Indeed it is. And yet I think quite a few AWers would agree with him.
Funny you should say that because there’s a great deal of shock about Johnson saying that COVID was “nature’s way of dealing with people who are going to die soon anyway”.
I am not shocked because a) it’s exactly the kind of thing he would say and b) a lot of people would agree wholeheartedly.
And a lot of people did agree wholeheartedly. I spent a lot of time during lockdown thanking people on Twitter for sentencing me to death.
@Black-Celebration
Just substitute jews for old people
I’ll get me bekeshe…
Really? You really believe that?
My mum, 85, refused a jab because she thought she wasn’t a priority.
That tugs on my heartstrings. Sounds like she should be first in the queue.
Had my mother not had dementia, and therefore had thr choice about vaccination removed, I suspect she might have agreed with Johnson. In the event, she caught Covid but recovered after about 2 days. Sadly, afew months later she died a slow and painful death from vulvar cancer, which went undiagnosed until very late in the day as the doctors wouldn’t see her in person.
Sounds very much like my own experience as our own mother was unable to see a doctor in the first COVID months, had her operation cancelled and took to her bed. Ironically she was a major campaigner for our local hospital. Only twelve of us allowed at the funeral.
It was all pretty unedifying tbh – pure Boris n Dom psychodrama, lots of people who understandably hate Boris Johnson acting temporarily as if Cummings and Cain, two absolute mediocrities, are temporarily worth listening to because they said fun things we want to hear about Boris Johnson and the cabinet. Tee hee, he said “cunt”, how terrific.
The real work will happen before and after, trying to find out if there’s any way we can prepare better for the next pandemic. This part just feels like soap opera.
Also – not for nothing – the most junior HMRC call centre worker understands professionalism better than to commit this kind of thing (“fuckpig” etc etc) to electronic writing. It’s pathetic.
Completely agree. I consider it basic stuff to never, ever, gossip or use offensive language at work about people. Particularly not in writing. The fact that they did this so freely is a sign that the culture was toxic as hell.
Of course, it’s not a soap opera, and frankly, if I were one of the protagonists who so badly let this country down, I’d be delighted at this opinion, and I’d be going out of my way to spread it far and wide.
‘Politicians… they’re all the same ain’t they!’