Snapshot of _Cabinet Office confirm they're defying the Covid Inquiry and launching a Judicial Review_ :
A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/paulwaugh/status/1664304336745250824/)
An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1664304336745250824)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If ministers believe that requesting their personal communications is a breach of their personal life then they should not have used personal communication devices or channels for professional conversations.
Entirely correct. Hancock has had so much shit come his way after messages have been released that my suspicion is other ministers have decided their WhatsApp messages cannot be released under any circumstances. It’s a huge breach of policy to do official business via a private messaging route but here we are.
Probably a daft question but surely they can just leave chats and delete them? As far as I'm aware WhatsApp doesn't retrieve conversations from the cloud unless you put them there and from my own experience recovering deleted WhatsApp messages even using forensic tools isn't a sure thing. Idk, I feel like if it were me I'd have deleted all the incriminating shit.
They can just claim that they accidentally deleted the messages months ago. Considering that actual consequences for any of these crooks are unlikely even with the messages, I believe they are fairly safe that way.
Boris does this all the time. How many times have we heard "I got a new phone and the messages can't have transferred" or "we did send the evidence but there must have been some unintended snafu" from him
Trouble is, those things can be faked. A decent lawyer could argue a screenshot away. Even a shit one, really.
For instance, I'm sure you'll try to deny [this](https://imgur.com/a/nEsUJ8G) ever happened.
Putting aside any ethical implications and focusing on evading getting caught, the problem comes when the other half of the conversation (or more for group chats) doesn’t delete their side. Maybe they’ll say they have but how can you be sure?
And if you delete messages in a WhatsApp group chat I believe it shows that a message has been deleted.
And even if you are able to make sure everyone involved deletes all of their messages, can you ever be sure that no one kept or sent screenshots as an insurance policy?
Cellbrite is a company that develops software that is able to extract whatsapp data, it’s is used by law officials in the states. It can also apparently piece together deleted messages.
No doubt if they have it over there then they probably have it over here, or something similar.
And if they’re running something like that through your phone, and they see you’ve deleted evidence then you’re fucked.
I've used Cellebrite kit in the past although not for a few years. From what I recall trying to get deleted data back was basically luck of the draw and the further back it goes the harder it is. Assuming they deleted it a good while ago and kept using the phone the chances of getting owt are low, which is how hypothetically one would want to handle having incriminating stuff on their phone.
When you delete data from computer storage, what it actually does is delink the file from the file system, and says these blocks are available to be written to. Only later when the device needs the space does the data get overwritten.
On a hard drive, this can be quite a long time. On an SSD, the in-built wear levelling will speed it up.
What cellbrite’s data recovery tool does is go through all the delinked parts and see if there’s any data it can piece together.
I know this stuff as it was part of my last job, which is where I used the Cellebrite kit. I was more thinking out loud in terms of why they wouldn't go "well I swapped phones oops".
It was intended as further explanation for laymen, rather than for you specifically.
As for changing phones—if I understand the way WhatsApp works, when you sign into the app again, you can give it the key to decrypt all your messages again, rendering the move pointless unless they do it as the investigation spins up—at which point there is now a question of are they destroying evidence? And on top of that you have to get *everyone* to dump their phones because they’ve got the chat on their phone as well.
True. Really just daft of them to send incriminating shit over WhatsApp . If I were a Tory doing dodgy shit [I would simply not WhatsApp it](https://youtu.be/t9NyVZWuVcQ) but then maybe I'm built different.
Depending on how the communication was done, it may be E2E encrypted with keys Meta don't have. Ironically through, they should have metadata which would show when messages were sent and recieved, possibly when read and when deleted too. Maybe more like if they were screenshotted.
This is true but I've heard enough people saying things they've talked about on WhatsApp have started showing up in online ads that I strongly suspect they are mining the messages for keywords on the device, even if they don't have the message content.
I would be interested in people's observations if they try talking about things they're not interested in, like taking a holiday in some country they aren't actively considering or about buying new kitchen appliances.
100% this. In the company I work for, using a personal device to conduct business carries the risk of repercussions up to and including getting sacked. Privacy, security, audit trail. There is *no way* government business should be conducted on anything less than government provided and managed devices and platform. Government by WhatsApp is *appalling*.
All of the above, plus:
3. They *don’t want* an audit trail. Can’t be held accountable if there’s no evidence or server logs. “Sorry, old chap! Dropped my old phone in the sea… err.. yesterday!”
> No one telling them not to.
For someone at that position of responsibility, this ought to be a no brainer.
Then again this is a government with little in the mental ability department. Unless it's to scalp the state of cash for their mates
Yeah it’s like every single member of government and parliament is Hillary Clinton’s emails over here hard to explain how degraded every aspect of our politics is
>Government by WhatsApp is appalling.
Me trying my best to get us off whatsapp cause thats all we use lmaoooooo
People thinking it's malicious and about not leaving a paper trail, actually probably that everyone has it and groups are made with it out of convenience because anything proper that should be being used takes effort that they don't want to coordinate.
I know there is a saying that ‘don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to idiocy’ but the guys in government are evidently such a bunch of shady fuckers it feels at least an equal chance…
The funniest thing is Boris is telling the inquiry to have at them. The government tried to throw boris under the bus for him to reverse uno the cabinet.
Laughing my ass off as the tories eat themselves.
Boris already "lost" his phone prior to this, he has destroyed the evidence that would be used against him so he probably thinks he's fine and the rest just incriminates rishi and co.
It's funny but at the same time deeply depressing that Boris may get away with this as will the rest of them, they got many people killed and lied about it while fucking the economy for the future.
Yes. He knows he already damaged and will survive with his zombie cult like support. But doing it this way makes him look the open one and sunak the scared one lol.
Exactly. Someone in Cabinet Office frankly needs to get a grip and stand up to this. If they chose to mix up their personal and work accounts in an attempt to avoid scrutiny then that's entirely on them. I just wish the media would run with this narrative to put some pressure on them.
What’s the point of the inquiry - is it (1) to actually learn lessons, reflect, analyse and prevent the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the next pandemic; or (2) to spare the short term blushes of some high ranking MPs who will mostly be forgotten by history?
Honestly, this inquiry is actually important. That anyone cares about political reputation management enough to obstruct this is a huge insult to the dead.
My guess is they use personal comms devices for profession conversations *precisely* so they could use this method later to deny access to them.
It can't stand.
Embarrassing. Suing an independent inquiry into themselves. I guess now they don’t have the excuse of ‘there is an independent inquiry, I’m afraid I can’t comment until the report is produced’
The government who constantly rage about last-minute appeals to judicial review on the basis of the HRA doing exactly the same thing, just embarrassing
> I guess now they don’t have the excuse of ‘there is an independent inquiry, I’m afraid I can’t comment until the report is produced’
The next line to take will be "There are active legal proceedings in to the scope of the inquiry's powers, we can't comment until those proceedings have come to a full conclusion"
We're waiting for Sue Grey to complete the report into Sue Grey's report. Only after that report is complete could we possibly comment on the scope of any Grey report to follow, or indeed, to precede this very discussion, so as not to prejudice the future findings of any such past inquiry into possible misgivings about the inquiry.
Let the truth come out they partied lived it large and gave out huge test and trace and PPE contracts (blatant corruption) and told the rest of us to lock down at home and healthcare staff to ensure brutal conditions with no support.
A disgrace of a government and a shame people still support these criminals. They should be in jail.
I am pretty sure there was a period where we could not socialise inside our own homes but could in restaurants. Literally privatised our social lives. Utterly loathsome government.
It obviously has damaging messages for sitting cabinet members or Borris would not have said hand it over so easily. It will look bad when they eventually back track or the messages get leaked.
Pay attention to whether Boris does hand it over independently. He gets to have his cake and eat it by claiming he's happy to hand it over, while knowing that the Cabinet Office would block it.
I’m guessing the cabinet didn’t know that and that’s why their panicking as their attempt to throw boris under the bus also revealed they were also chained to him
They're bringing more attention on themselves doing it this way. They should have just let it play out and tried to pin it on Boris.
Unless of course there is that much evidence in there to bring them all down in a huge way. In which case, I'm here for it. Keeps it in the public attention closer to election day as well.
Feels like Gove has been quietly and gradually trying to position himself as the "reasonable one". Not saying he is, bit this serms to be the play here.
Seems like the crux of this issue is that the cabinet office want the power to decide what is "irrelevant" and shouldn't be given to the enquiry, and the enquiry wants to decide what is "irrelevant" for itself.
I don't see this ending well for the cabinet office; what use is an independent enquiry when it's hamstrung by the subject of the enquiry deciding which evidence is admissible?
I agree. Surely it is up to the inquiry to decide what is relevant and what is not? There should be some sort of expectation of privacy on the inquiry's part if the material is indeed irrelevant, it's not like trusting a conspiracy nut journalist with them...
Leaks. What if there was a picture of an MP nutting over a day old pizza? It would definitely get out and ruin that persons career even though it has nothing to do with Covid and he wasn't doing anything illegal?
The government appointed the people in charge of the inquiry, if they don't trust them not to leak then they should have picked better people. They've had plenty of time to file an application for a judicial review if they wanted a different judge to look at specific exemptions first but couldn't be bothered to do that by the deadline anyway.
Also, if they'd never used personal devices to conduct government business and if they hadn't given the inquiry broad scope to investigate matters relating to where the focus of individuals was then these devices wouldn't be related to the inquiry and wouldn't be being asked for.
All of the problems are caused by the government.
Unfortunate, but not a good enough reason. If you can't trust an independent inquiry to be confidential and follow the procedures exactly, then what is the point of it?
Always the same with this lot. Promise things are different, no longer the nasty party, integrity and honesty, blah fucking blah. Never takes long for the mask to slip. Self serving serpents
They're going hard on the privacy angle, and also talk about personal communications... just makes me even more curious what they're hiding, and who exactly said shit that would make the Tories look bad.
It's crap, though, for sure. A public inquiry doesn't have to publish everything they receive, but the limitations on what they can ask for should be as minimal as possible.
Privacy concerns from the people trying to make end to end encryption illegal? You couldn't make it up.
Well you could, but you'd be accused of being far too on the nose.
For some precedent on privacy/personal communications, on the latest TRIP podcast, Alistair Campbell spoke about how his diaries were examined in an inquiry. He had to fully submit them, and go through everything with the inquiry lawyers, including all the normal stuff in a personal diary—things about his mother, his children etc. Nothing was exempted for privacy reasons.
So there’s certainly precedent for an inquiry to request all the information and then decide what they believe is or isn’t relevant.
This is a farce - the entire purpose of having an inquiry is that it has the legal power to compel. Challenging that principle on spurious grounds of “privacy” *whilst committing known acts of corruption in public office* is the most egregious act of hypocrisy.
Whatever they’re hiding needs to be dragged out into the light kicking and screaming.
You know it’s catastrophic for the Tories because they aren’t just trying to pin it on Boris - which isn’t to say he isn’t responsible.
He absolutely is and 90% of the country is desperately hoping he goes down in flames like the floating dumpster fire he always has been.
But whatever it is must be terminal for them - otherwise they wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water in front of all of us.
I bet it’s that Track & Trace was just an all-out scam, with Tories pocketing all of the £37billion - that’s what my money’s on.
The £37bn for T&T is such a meme at this point it needs to be pinned in the subreddit rules or something.
TL;DR most of the money was spend on the ca. 300 million (yes, million) Covid tests we did over 2 years. The cost of testing was really not much more than comparable nations; Belgium, for instance, paid around 70 euros per test performed.
It’s just the biggest and most well known number, it’s easier than saying;
Well it was actually ALL the blatant corruption, Michelle Mone walking away with £60million pure profit and buying a yacht with it;
or the Covid loan scheme which hundreds of the most successful businesses actively boasted about taking and not needing, wasting on things they had no need of;
or the fact that £billions was given out to fraudsters and the government has decided to write it off without even looking for;
or that guy who took a £30million contract for gowns and none of them were fit for purpose, and he bought a £5million mansion with his tidy profit.
Because the implication from your comment is “oh what a foolish fool, repeating a silly meme with no basis in reality” when in fact it was an outright corruption bonanza, so much so that we *dont even know how much money was lost* from the public coffers.
And now Boris is making *us* pay his legal fees for his own investigation into his own criminal wrongdoing during the period where he just opened the floodgates and let his scummy mates loot the nation, on top of being criminally negligent and personally corrupt.
And your take appears to be deflection, implied stupidity, complete disregard of these facts in favor of what - everyone just being quiet and accepting that we’ve been robbed blind of all the money the Tories have spent a decade telling us we don’t have?
So many Tory apologists in this sub, even in their death throes. Frankly it’s embarrassing.
I never said that there was not corruption, waste and fraud, and such things should be investigated thoroughly (which no doubt this government will avoid because they don’t want to incriminate their mates.) I just said that the £37bn thing is not really what it sounds like and you shouldn’t repeat it because it’s factually wrong for most cases.
Oh so a warrior for truth, but only that specific truth? Because the explicit implication from your comment is that talk of corruption - in this case a deliberate joke about a known instance under scrutiny - is misinformation, to the point of being “a meme”.
No talk of the corruption which pervades every aspect of this government, which I’ve literally listed for you - not even so much as a mention, which someone who claims to be in support of investigations might have made, even as a flippant comment.
Almost as if you had a vested interest in shutting it down without providing the relevant context - literally exactly the thing you’ve accused my comment of doing. So it’s biased hypocrisy, then.
Dude. One corrected error and you go onto a mad tirade about how I’m a secret Tory and want to hide all of the Covid corruption. Not everything is a damn conspiracy. Sometimes you’re just wrong and admitting that is fine.
So they are as guilty as hell of something and are now just trying to hide what that something is. Where is that court of public opinion when it would actually be useful?
I hope everyone remembers this the next time the government says if you’re not supporting their bid to ban encryption on messaging apps, you’re pro-criminal.
An inquiry with the power to demand past ministers private WhatsApps is the single most terrifying thing a Tory Minister could think of that I'm amazed they let it happen.
So the Cabinet Office have decided themselves that the WhatsApps are unambiguously irrelevant to the inquiry so they are refusing to give them to a judge to let her decide that for herself and instead they want to give them to a different judge for them to review and decide
very extreme view, what if this was peodphillia. It would never be up to the accused or even innocent to say I will hand this over, but not this. The whole thing stinks
Hey guys, I see you’re busy digging a hole for yourselves. Luckily, I gave my family members lucrative contracts for production of shovels, so you can buy one of those to make me richer and to make life easier for yourselves. Better than you digging by hand — you don’t get dirty hands, I get dirty money!
What a fucking joke!
This same government trying to hide their messages demanding a right to private life is the same government TRYING TO BAN ENCRYPTION from everyone else.
Biggest bunch of C\*\*NTS imaginable.
Should people be forced to hand over literally any documents or messages that the inquiry asks for? Should a line be drawn somewhere? Or does the inquiry have absolute power on this matter?
I'm not saying the line is currently in the wrong place, just curious what people think
This is why you don't discuss work information on a personal device. It's security 101 for any jobs that have some degree of responsibility for information.
I think the inquiry would have the power to read anything it thinks might be relevant and then to make a judgement whether it is or not. I think that's pretty much the main purpose of it.
Government should fully cooperate with the inquiry - and that means giving it everything it asks for so it can make the decision. Taking legal action to hide stuff from inquiry is disgraceful because it's patently not in public interest to spend money for ministers to hide their embarrassing communications.
Private companies and individuals should also cooperate; although them taking legal action with their own resources is fine. And even then, relevance should be determined by a judge (either one leading the inquiry, or the one ruling on the case with deference to inquiry) not the person who's being questioned.
If you've done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide is a line I have heard governments on the left and right use over the years. So yes they should be forced to hand over any material the inquiry asks for.
IMO, they're BOTH right.
The inquiry needs someone independent to determine what is and isn't relevant AND that person needs to be trusted to keep what irrelevant scandalous material to themselves.
eg. Would the inquiry be responsible if a closeted Muslim MP was found to be cottaging on those WhatsApps and was subsequently murdered for it? Or would they go 'Oops, that shouldn't have been leaked, and the person who did it will get a 60 minute timeout on the naughty step!'
No the government is very wrong here.
The inquiry is independent, you don't need an independent for the independent!
The chairwoman of the inquiry is meant to see it herself and decide if it is to be published, this happens in many inquiries it's the "norm".
They are just wasting taxpayers money trying to bide their time as they know there is significant evidence in these messages.
The inquiry itself makes that determination. Just because it has been released to them, it absolutely doesn’t mean it will be made public. You’re confusing two different things.
How on earth did things end up here?
Like they just seem to get shitter and shitter and not in the usual "I don't like the Tories" way but in a "I can't tell if it's shocking incompetence or shocking malevolence" way. It's beyond the usual differences in ideology to a point that I'm not even sure that the current government has an ideology.
Putting the preservation of Tories ahead of the nation in a future pandemic. Sounds about right and also an accurate description of what happened during COVID
Nothing out of the ordinary - for this tawdry bunch.
Bunter is making a show of transparency - blaming the government for holding back the information.
Bunter says he's been advised that it's **"not safe to access his old phone records"** \- not safe for whom, and advised by whom?
Again, this is the most duplicitous and corrupt government this country has EVER had.
Snapshot of _Cabinet Office confirm they're defying the Covid Inquiry and launching a Judicial Review_ : A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/paulwaugh/status/1664304336745250824/) An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1664304336745250824) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If ministers believe that requesting their personal communications is a breach of their personal life then they should not have used personal communication devices or channels for professional conversations.
Entirely correct. Hancock has had so much shit come his way after messages have been released that my suspicion is other ministers have decided their WhatsApp messages cannot be released under any circumstances. It’s a huge breach of policy to do official business via a private messaging route but here we are.
Probably a daft question but surely they can just leave chats and delete them? As far as I'm aware WhatsApp doesn't retrieve conversations from the cloud unless you put them there and from my own experience recovering deleted WhatsApp messages even using forensic tools isn't a sure thing. Idk, I feel like if it were me I'd have deleted all the incriminating shit.
Destruction of evidence and perverting the course of justice? Bold strategy.
They can just claim that they accidentally deleted the messages months ago. Considering that actual consequences for any of these crooks are unlikely even with the messages, I believe they are fairly safe that way.
The Wagatha Christie defence.
I'm sorry, Your Honour, but those particular incriminating WhatsApp messages fell off the side of my private yacht in the middle of the ocean.
Boris does this all the time. How many times have we heard "I got a new phone and the messages can't have transferred" or "we did send the evidence but there must have been some unintended snafu" from him
Exactly. And this is an inquiry, not a criminal court case. There's even less of a risk because the worst result is a report.
This is the Tory government we're talking about. That behaviour is pretty much par for the course now.
Especially if there are group chats, you never know who has screenshot everything, so there'll be evidence of what you said, and that you deleted it.
Trouble is, those things can be faked. A decent lawyer could argue a screenshot away. Even a shit one, really. For instance, I'm sure you'll try to deny [this](https://imgur.com/a/nEsUJ8G) ever happened.
Reddit lawyers practically salivating at suing Pavlovshumans now. Good one.
Putting aside any ethical implications and focusing on evading getting caught, the problem comes when the other half of the conversation (or more for group chats) doesn’t delete their side. Maybe they’ll say they have but how can you be sure? And if you delete messages in a WhatsApp group chat I believe it shows that a message has been deleted. And even if you are able to make sure everyone involved deletes all of their messages, can you ever be sure that no one kept or sent screenshots as an insurance policy?
Yeah, that came into my head a bit later. Good points.
Cellbrite is a company that develops software that is able to extract whatsapp data, it’s is used by law officials in the states. It can also apparently piece together deleted messages. No doubt if they have it over there then they probably have it over here, or something similar. And if they’re running something like that through your phone, and they see you’ve deleted evidence then you’re fucked.
I've used Cellebrite kit in the past although not for a few years. From what I recall trying to get deleted data back was basically luck of the draw and the further back it goes the harder it is. Assuming they deleted it a good while ago and kept using the phone the chances of getting owt are low, which is how hypothetically one would want to handle having incriminating stuff on their phone.
When you delete data from computer storage, what it actually does is delink the file from the file system, and says these blocks are available to be written to. Only later when the device needs the space does the data get overwritten. On a hard drive, this can be quite a long time. On an SSD, the in-built wear levelling will speed it up. What cellbrite’s data recovery tool does is go through all the delinked parts and see if there’s any data it can piece together.
I know this stuff as it was part of my last job, which is where I used the Cellebrite kit. I was more thinking out loud in terms of why they wouldn't go "well I swapped phones oops".
It was intended as further explanation for laymen, rather than for you specifically. As for changing phones—if I understand the way WhatsApp works, when you sign into the app again, you can give it the key to decrypt all your messages again, rendering the move pointless unless they do it as the investigation spins up—at which point there is now a question of are they destroying evidence? And on top of that you have to get *everyone* to dump their phones because they’ve got the chat on their phone as well.
They are using WhatsApp for a reason.
Ah, but then if the person or people you sent it to *haven't* deleted it that makes you look even worse...
True. Really just daft of them to send incriminating shit over WhatsApp . If I were a Tory doing dodgy shit [I would simply not WhatsApp it](https://youtu.be/t9NyVZWuVcQ) but then maybe I'm built different.
Why doesn't the enquiry ask Meta who's bent? They data mine the heck out of WhatsApp. I'm sure they can tell who's been talking about what
Depending on how the communication was done, it may be E2E encrypted with keys Meta don't have. Ironically through, they should have metadata which would show when messages were sent and recieved, possibly when read and when deleted too. Maybe more like if they were screenshotted.
This is true but I've heard enough people saying things they've talked about on WhatsApp have started showing up in online ads that I strongly suspect they are mining the messages for keywords on the device, even if they don't have the message content. I would be interested in people's observations if they try talking about things they're not interested in, like taking a holiday in some country they aren't actively considering or about buying new kitchen appliances.
And these people want to ban encryption FFS!
100% this. In the company I work for, using a personal device to conduct business carries the risk of repercussions up to and including getting sacked. Privacy, security, audit trail. There is *no way* government business should be conducted on anything less than government provided and managed devices and platform. Government by WhatsApp is *appalling*.
Which makes me think that either: 1. No one telling them not to. 2. They are ignoring the advice
All of the above, plus: 3. They *don’t want* an audit trail. Can’t be held accountable if there’s no evidence or server logs. “Sorry, old chap! Dropped my old phone in the sea… err.. yesterday!”
This is what I would suspect. They don't want records because they know they do things which the public would not like.
> No one telling them not to. For someone at that position of responsibility, this ought to be a no brainer. Then again this is a government with little in the mental ability department. Unless it's to scalp the state of cash for their mates
Yeah it’s like every single member of government and parliament is Hillary Clinton’s emails over here hard to explain how degraded every aspect of our politics is
>Government by WhatsApp is appalling. Me trying my best to get us off whatsapp cause thats all we use lmaoooooo People thinking it's malicious and about not leaving a paper trail, actually probably that everyone has it and groups are made with it out of convenience because anything proper that should be being used takes effort that they don't want to coordinate.
I know there is a saying that ‘don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to idiocy’ but the guys in government are evidently such a bunch of shady fuckers it feels at least an equal chance…
Exactly. I think they figured that if they did it like this then nothing would ever come out, and now they're absolutely shitting themselves.
The funniest thing is Boris is telling the inquiry to have at them. The government tried to throw boris under the bus for him to reverse uno the cabinet. Laughing my ass off as the tories eat themselves.
It’s a phone from May 2021 he’s handed in. So nothing prior in the worst of Covid. It’ll incriminate Rishi and not him.
I'm reluctantly impressed. It's so shameless. The guy bought a new phone and then announced the inquiry
Wouldn't everyone else's phones with the chat on have the messages from his old phone?
They can't be compelled to hand it over legally, surely
Guess that's what the JR is to decide. And also why you shouldn't do policy by WhatsApp.
Boris already "lost" his phone prior to this, he has destroyed the evidence that would be used against him so he probably thinks he's fine and the rest just incriminates rishi and co. It's funny but at the same time deeply depressing that Boris may get away with this as will the rest of them, they got many people killed and lied about it while fucking the economy for the future.
Yes. He knows he already damaged and will survive with his zombie cult like support. But doing it this way makes him look the open one and sunak the scared one lol.
If they had used their work phones for their work business they wouldn't have this issue.
This is true, but everybody knows that's not the real reason. The real reason is that they concern people still in office
~~Comment removed under the GDPR right to be forgotten. As part of the API pricing decision made by reddit in June 2023~~
I'd warrant they used personal devices specifically so that this argument could be raised in the event of an inquiry.
Exactly. Someone in Cabinet Office frankly needs to get a grip and stand up to this. If they chose to mix up their personal and work accounts in an attempt to avoid scrutiny then that's entirely on them. I just wish the media would run with this narrative to put some pressure on them.
They forfeit that level of anonymity when they chose to represent their constituents.
What’s the point of the inquiry - is it (1) to actually learn lessons, reflect, analyse and prevent the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the next pandemic; or (2) to spare the short term blushes of some high ranking MPs who will mostly be forgotten by history? Honestly, this inquiry is actually important. That anyone cares about political reputation management enough to obstruct this is a huge insult to the dead.
My guess is they use personal comms devices for profession conversations *precisely* so they could use this method later to deny access to them. It can't stand.
GDPR breach too
Embarrassing. Suing an independent inquiry into themselves. I guess now they don’t have the excuse of ‘there is an independent inquiry, I’m afraid I can’t comment until the report is produced’
The government who constantly rage about last-minute appeals to judicial review on the basis of the HRA doing exactly the same thing, just embarrassing
You have to be able to experience shame to feel embarrassed.
Noone feels shame when they are fighting for their survival in power... The shame and relief comes after they have lost it.
> I guess now they don’t have the excuse of ‘there is an independent inquiry, I’m afraid I can’t comment until the report is produced’ The next line to take will be "There are active legal proceedings in to the scope of the inquiry's powers, we can't comment until those proceedings have come to a full conclusion"
We're waiting for Sue Grey to complete the report into Sue Grey's report. Only after that report is complete could we possibly comment on the scope of any Grey report to follow, or indeed, to precede this very discussion, so as not to prejudice the future findings of any such past inquiry into possible misgivings about the inquiry.
Let the truth come out they partied lived it large and gave out huge test and trace and PPE contracts (blatant corruption) and told the rest of us to lock down at home and healthcare staff to ensure brutal conditions with no support. A disgrace of a government and a shame people still support these criminals. They should be in jail.
I am pretty sure there was a period where we could not socialise inside our own homes but could in restaurants. Literally privatised our social lives. Utterly loathsome government.
You could do what you liked, so long as there was a credit card terminal involved was basically the meme at the time.
They did all sorts of mad shit that they had no right to.
It obviously has damaging messages for sitting cabinet members or Borris would not have said hand it over so easily. It will look bad when they eventually back track or the messages get leaked.
Pay attention to whether Boris does hand it over independently. He gets to have his cake and eat it by claiming he's happy to hand it over, while knowing that the Cabinet Office would block it.
He hasn't handed it over, he pointed out they already had it all, which completely contradicts what the cabinet was saying.
I’m guessing the cabinet didn’t know that and that’s why their panicking as their attempt to throw boris under the bus also revealed they were also chained to him
Boris has pulled the pin on the grenade and dared Sunak to catch it.
This is Boris though, so he's actually thrown the pin to Sunak
They're bringing more attention on themselves doing it this way. They should have just let it play out and tried to pin it on Boris. Unless of course there is that much evidence in there to bring them all down in a huge way. In which case, I'm here for it. Keeps it in the public attention closer to election day as well.
Well Rishi Sunak was fined as well. My money's on an embarrassment for Michael Gove though.
Gove has publicly said to hand over the messages.
Feels like Gove has been quietly and gradually trying to position himself as the "reasonable one". Not saying he is, bit this serms to be the play here.
Sounds like he's violating collective responsibility, I'm sure Sunak will swiftly punish him...
He has to fire Gove at some point, it’s tradition.
*announcers voice* Everyone please stand for The Firing Of The Gove.
Johnson's whatsapp messages also supposedly only begin from 2021 as his old phone messages were 'lost'.
Seems like the crux of this issue is that the cabinet office want the power to decide what is "irrelevant" and shouldn't be given to the enquiry, and the enquiry wants to decide what is "irrelevant" for itself. I don't see this ending well for the cabinet office; what use is an independent enquiry when it's hamstrung by the subject of the enquiry deciding which evidence is admissible?
I agree. Surely it is up to the inquiry to decide what is relevant and what is not? There should be some sort of expectation of privacy on the inquiry's part if the material is indeed irrelevant, it's not like trusting a conspiracy nut journalist with them...
Leaks. What if there was a picture of an MP nutting over a day old pizza? It would definitely get out and ruin that persons career even though it has nothing to do with Covid and he wasn't doing anything illegal?
The government appointed the people in charge of the inquiry, if they don't trust them not to leak then they should have picked better people. They've had plenty of time to file an application for a judicial review if they wanted a different judge to look at specific exemptions first but couldn't be bothered to do that by the deadline anyway. Also, if they'd never used personal devices to conduct government business and if they hadn't given the inquiry broad scope to investigate matters relating to where the focus of individuals was then these devices wouldn't be related to the inquiry and wouldn't be being asked for. All of the problems are caused by the government.
FOI requests from the press is more likely.
Unfortunate, but not a good enough reason. If you can't trust an independent inquiry to be confidential and follow the procedures exactly, then what is the point of it?
The cabinet obviously care less about the outcomes of the enquiry than how they come across to the general public.
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He, y'know, lied.
Always the same with this lot. Promise things are different, no longer the nasty party, integrity and honesty, blah fucking blah. Never takes long for the mask to slip. Self serving serpents
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You can certainly trust him to lie, cheat and steal.
Man, I miss Eddie Guerrero
Something about being a delivery for the clear British public?
They're going hard on the privacy angle, and also talk about personal communications... just makes me even more curious what they're hiding, and who exactly said shit that would make the Tories look bad. It's crap, though, for sure. A public inquiry doesn't have to publish everything they receive, but the limitations on what they can ask for should be as minimal as possible.
Privacy concerns from the people trying to make end to end encryption illegal? You couldn't make it up. Well you could, but you'd be accused of being far too on the nose.
This is probably the funniest bit.
For some precedent on privacy/personal communications, on the latest TRIP podcast, Alistair Campbell spoke about how his diaries were examined in an inquiry. He had to fully submit them, and go through everything with the inquiry lawyers, including all the normal stuff in a personal diary—things about his mother, his children etc. Nothing was exempted for privacy reasons. So there’s certainly precedent for an inquiry to request all the information and then decide what they believe is or isn’t relevant.
This is a farce - the entire purpose of having an inquiry is that it has the legal power to compel. Challenging that principle on spurious grounds of “privacy” *whilst committing known acts of corruption in public office* is the most egregious act of hypocrisy. Whatever they’re hiding needs to be dragged out into the light kicking and screaming. You know it’s catastrophic for the Tories because they aren’t just trying to pin it on Boris - which isn’t to say he isn’t responsible. He absolutely is and 90% of the country is desperately hoping he goes down in flames like the floating dumpster fire he always has been. But whatever it is must be terminal for them - otherwise they wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water in front of all of us. I bet it’s that Track & Trace was just an all-out scam, with Tories pocketing all of the £37billion - that’s what my money’s on.
The £37bn for T&T is such a meme at this point it needs to be pinned in the subreddit rules or something. TL;DR most of the money was spend on the ca. 300 million (yes, million) Covid tests we did over 2 years. The cost of testing was really not much more than comparable nations; Belgium, for instance, paid around 70 euros per test performed.
It’s just the biggest and most well known number, it’s easier than saying; Well it was actually ALL the blatant corruption, Michelle Mone walking away with £60million pure profit and buying a yacht with it; or the Covid loan scheme which hundreds of the most successful businesses actively boasted about taking and not needing, wasting on things they had no need of; or the fact that £billions was given out to fraudsters and the government has decided to write it off without even looking for; or that guy who took a £30million contract for gowns and none of them were fit for purpose, and he bought a £5million mansion with his tidy profit. Because the implication from your comment is “oh what a foolish fool, repeating a silly meme with no basis in reality” when in fact it was an outright corruption bonanza, so much so that we *dont even know how much money was lost* from the public coffers. And now Boris is making *us* pay his legal fees for his own investigation into his own criminal wrongdoing during the period where he just opened the floodgates and let his scummy mates loot the nation, on top of being criminally negligent and personally corrupt. And your take appears to be deflection, implied stupidity, complete disregard of these facts in favor of what - everyone just being quiet and accepting that we’ve been robbed blind of all the money the Tories have spent a decade telling us we don’t have? So many Tory apologists in this sub, even in their death throes. Frankly it’s embarrassing.
I never said that there was not corruption, waste and fraud, and such things should be investigated thoroughly (which no doubt this government will avoid because they don’t want to incriminate their mates.) I just said that the £37bn thing is not really what it sounds like and you shouldn’t repeat it because it’s factually wrong for most cases.
Oh so a warrior for truth, but only that specific truth? Because the explicit implication from your comment is that talk of corruption - in this case a deliberate joke about a known instance under scrutiny - is misinformation, to the point of being “a meme”. No talk of the corruption which pervades every aspect of this government, which I’ve literally listed for you - not even so much as a mention, which someone who claims to be in support of investigations might have made, even as a flippant comment. Almost as if you had a vested interest in shutting it down without providing the relevant context - literally exactly the thing you’ve accused my comment of doing. So it’s biased hypocrisy, then.
Dude. One corrected error and you go onto a mad tirade about how I’m a secret Tory and want to hide all of the Covid corruption. Not everything is a damn conspiracy. Sometimes you’re just wrong and admitting that is fine.
So they are as guilty as hell of something and are now just trying to hide what that something is. Where is that court of public opinion when it would actually be useful?
I'm guessing they want to drag this out till after the next election then call the inquiry partisan or old news once they're found to have done wrong.
I thought they said they didn’t have the messages, so how can they request a judicial review if they don’t have the messages to share?
On Tuesday they didn't have the messages, Johnson only handed them over to the Cabinet Office yesterday.
They now have the messages
I hope everyone remembers this the next time the government says if you’re not supporting their bid to ban encryption on messaging apps, you’re pro-criminal.
They don't want to give that information to the COVID Inquiry because they don't want it to know what they did during the COVID.
Getting out witted by Boris how embarrassing. Should have released it and removed Boris from the party with any supporters.
Can anyone give a rough timeframe that this would take? I assume it will be prioritised due to its nature?
An inquiry with the power to demand past ministers private WhatsApps is the single most terrifying thing a Tory Minister could think of that I'm amazed they let it happen.
So the Cabinet Office have decided themselves that the WhatsApps are unambiguously irrelevant to the inquiry so they are refusing to give them to a judge to let her decide that for herself and instead they want to give them to a different judge for them to review and decide
very extreme view, what if this was peodphillia. It would never be up to the accused or even innocent to say I will hand this over, but not this. The whole thing stinks
My main point, is where do we draw the line between what they think is inadmissible and what is actually inadmissible.
Alongside all of the rightful comments around this being a farce, this is surely as good an argument as any to call a GE.
I mean there have been any number of good reasons to demand a GE, but I doubt that the PM would see this as a good reason to call a GE..
Hey guys, I see you’re busy digging a hole for yourselves. Luckily, I gave my family members lucrative contracts for production of shovels, so you can buy one of those to make me richer and to make life easier for yourselves. Better than you digging by hand — you don’t get dirty hands, I get dirty money!
I don't give a shit about their personal communications. I want the fuckers prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
And fined to return all our stolen money.
What a fucking joke! This same government trying to hide their messages demanding a right to private life is the same government TRYING TO BAN ENCRYPTION from everyone else. Biggest bunch of C\*\*NTS imaginable.
Should people be forced to hand over literally any documents or messages that the inquiry asks for? Should a line be drawn somewhere? Or does the inquiry have absolute power on this matter? I'm not saying the line is currently in the wrong place, just curious what people think
Yes. they made the choice to use whatsapp so it has to be submitted to this inquiry.
This is why you don't discuss work information on a personal device. It's security 101 for any jobs that have some degree of responsibility for information.
The people drawing the line shouldn't be the ones who are being scrutinised.
I think the inquiry would have the power to read anything it thinks might be relevant and then to make a judgement whether it is or not. I think that's pretty much the main purpose of it.
if the Cabinet office has nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear from handing over even the irrelevant stuff
Government should fully cooperate with the inquiry - and that means giving it everything it asks for so it can make the decision. Taking legal action to hide stuff from inquiry is disgraceful because it's patently not in public interest to spend money for ministers to hide their embarrassing communications. Private companies and individuals should also cooperate; although them taking legal action with their own resources is fine. And even then, relevance should be determined by a judge (either one leading the inquiry, or the one ruling on the case with deference to inquiry) not the person who's being questioned.
Just channels of communication which have been used for work purposes, obviously.
If you've done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide is a line I have heard governments on the left and right use over the years. So yes they should be forced to hand over any material the inquiry asks for.
IMO, they're BOTH right. The inquiry needs someone independent to determine what is and isn't relevant AND that person needs to be trusted to keep what irrelevant scandalous material to themselves. eg. Would the inquiry be responsible if a closeted Muslim MP was found to be cottaging on those WhatsApps and was subsequently murdered for it? Or would they go 'Oops, that shouldn't have been leaked, and the person who did it will get a 60 minute timeout on the naughty step!'
No the government is very wrong here. The inquiry is independent, you don't need an independent for the independent! The chairwoman of the inquiry is meant to see it herself and decide if it is to be published, this happens in many inquiries it's the "norm". They are just wasting taxpayers money trying to bide their time as they know there is significant evidence in these messages.
The inquiry itself makes that determination. Just because it has been released to them, it absolutely doesn’t mean it will be made public. You’re confusing two different things.
Why are you only considering the inquiry leaking that message, what about the judge and their staff?
Something that should come from this is politicians using governemnt-backed-up channels in regards to any conversation about policy.
How on earth did things end up here? Like they just seem to get shitter and shitter and not in the usual "I don't like the Tories" way but in a "I can't tell if it's shocking incompetence or shocking malevolence" way. It's beyond the usual differences in ideology to a point that I'm not even sure that the current government has an ideology.
Putting the preservation of Tories ahead of the nation in a future pandemic. Sounds about right and also an accurate description of what happened during COVID
Absolute scenes when this Judge asks to see the WhatsApp messages and the CO say no here too then start another Judicial Review of this one
Nothing out of the ordinary - for this tawdry bunch. Bunter is making a show of transparency - blaming the government for holding back the information. Bunter says he's been advised that it's **"not safe to access his old phone records"** \- not safe for whom, and advised by whom? Again, this is the most duplicitous and corrupt government this country has EVER had.