30 May Messages dispute should not distract from the task of the Covid inquiry, says John Redwood
GOVERNMENT officials need to come to a quick agreement over handing over WhatsApp messages by Boris Johnson to the Covid inquiry, according to former Business Secretary John Redwood.
He was commenting on confusion over a deadline for the Cabinet Office to hand over WhatsApp messages from the former Prime Minister to the official UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
Mr Redwood told GB News: “There has to be an agreement, the public will want reassurance that the inquiry can have all relevant information. And the Cabinet Office and the ministers and senior officials involved will obviously want to make sure that details of their private lives or comments that aren’t really relevant to the inquiry are protected from wider public view
“One of the problems with the WhatsApp generation is that they seem to blur private observations, bits of their private life and their public duties, so there may well be things on their WhatsApp strand that are relevant to the inquiry.
“But there would also be things that people wouldn’t normally want to publish more widely. So I think there is a sort of sloppiness in the way that some things were handled.”
In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Dawn Neesom, he continued: “I hope it doesn’t detract from the really serious purposes of this inquiry. Which should be to explore how prepared was the NHS for this kind of thing? Could you be properly prepared for it?
“Did they respond quickly when they saw what was happening? How good was the science, how much diversity of thought was there in the science? Did ministers have the right information coming to them to make those very difficult decisions?”
He added: “I think it will be very interesting to see the details of the battle that was clearly going on with some ministers, seriously worried as I was from the outside about the economic damage and querying whether you needed such an intense and long lockdown.
“Those who are on the health side of the argument wanted to take the safety-first approach come what may and thought it was just better to lock down everybody for as long as possible.”
