LONDON — The U.K. government is taking legal action to avoid handing over sensitive material — including Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps — to the public inquiry into its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Cabinet Office announced Thursday that it is seeking a judicial review of the COVID-19 inquiry’s demands for Johnson’s notebooks, diaries and un-redacted WhatsApp messages with advisers and ministers.
It means a High Court judge will be asked to decide whether the inquiry has overreached its legal powers in demanding the evidence.
The action is an attempt by ministers to avoid submitting all the material the inquiry’s chair Heather Hallett has asked for. It includes messages Johnson exchanged with senior figures such as Rishi Sunak and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case during the pandemic.
It comes after a 10-day stand-off between the Cabinet Office — which has resisted the demands for the material on the basis it’s irrelevant to the inquiry’s remit — and Hallett, who says it is her job to deem whether it is relevant or not.
In a letter on Thursday, the Cabinet Office said it was seeking a judicial review “with regret and with an assurance that we will continue to cooperate fully with the inquiry” while this dispute is resolved in court.
It said it was in the process of submitting Johnson’s WhatsApp messages to the inquiry on Thursday while excluding ones concerning “national security and unambiguously irrelevant material.” It said it was also providing messages involving Johnson’s former aide Henry Cook, excluding ones it deems “unambiguously irrelevant.”
Johnson piled pressure on the Cabinet Office by handing it all the documents that had been requested by the inquiry on Wednesday. He has claimed he would hand them directly the inquiry himself “if asked.”
But the WhatsApp messages handed to the Cabinet Office by Johnson only date from May 2021 onwards, more than a year after the pandemic began. Johnson changed mobile numbers after a security breach at that time and, according to Cabinet Office documents published Thursday, has not handed in any of the messages from his old phone despite being in possession of it.
A spokesperson for the inquiry said: “At 16:00 today the Chair of the UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry was served a copy of a claim form by the Cabinet Office seeking to commence judicial review proceedings against the Chair’s Ruling of 22 May 2023.”
There will be a preliminary hearing on June 6.
Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner took a dig at the current U.K. prime minister, saying in a statement: “Instead of digging himself further into a hole by pursuing doomed legal battles to conceal the truth, Rishi Sunak must comply with the COVID inquiry’s requests for evidence in full. There can be no more excuses.”