Off message: Hancock saga reveals central role of WhatsApp in UK politics

On Thursday, Matt Hancock apologised. The former UK health secretary was sorry, he said, to “political colleagues, civil servants and friends”. Not for anything he did in office, but because a national newspaper had obtained around 100,000 of his WhatsApp messages, covering his time in office at the peak of the pandemic.

Personal conversations and political discussion were now in the hands of journalists at the Daily Telegraph offering what Hancock called “a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda”.

The Hancock messages have been seized on by opponents of government pandemic restrictions as they seek to win over popular opinion ahead of the official Covid-19 inquiry entering a more public phase, as well as underlining the central place that WhatsApp plays in UK politics.

Among the revelations were Sir Gavin Williamson, then education secretary, quipping that some teachers complained about protective equipment shortages as “an excuse to avoid having to teach” during the first lockdown in May 2020.

Their unions, he said, “really, really do just hate work”. Hancock called them “absolute arses”. The government, struggling to deal with teacher strikes this week amid a wave of industrial unrest in the public sector, distanced itself from that sentiment.

The archive shows cabinet secretary Simon Case sharing jokes with Hancock about mandatory quarantines for arrivals from abroad in early 2021: “I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class [on aircraft] and into a premier inn shoe box.”

But the messages also raised some issues of significance: the published texts prove that, in April 2020, the government had wanted to test everyone moving into a care home for the coronavirus, but the policy was cut back because the state lacked the ability to do so. There were nearly 20,000 Covid-linked deaths in care homes in the first three months of the pandemic in England and Wales.

Jill Rutter, a former senior official and a fellow at King’s College London, said: “This is what policymaking looks like. You have your first-best policy but find you can’t do that, so have to go to your second- or third-best.”

The messages also reveal concern within government over the Treasury-led scheme from the summer of 2020 to encourage customers back into dining out. The scheme — “Eat out to help out” — was pushed by then-chancellor Rishi Sunak to subsidise restaurant meals

Hancock wrote to Case in August 2020 noting that it was “causing problems” in some areas. His department, he said, had been “protecting them [the Treasury] in the comms” and “kept it out of the news”. The policy was later linked by researchers to higher infection rates.

Alex Thomas, a former senior civil servant now at the Institute for Government, added: “It doesn’t tell us much new about the differences in government at the time.” The divisions between ministers — with Williamson keener to keep schooling in-person than Hancock — were reported as events were unfolding.

But Thomas said what was striking was “how ministers were, in these messages at least, actually pretty deferential to [chief medical officer] Chris Whitty and [chief scientific adviser] Patrick Vallance.” 

The manner in which the Telegraph obtained the messages has been a major topic of discussion in Westminster. “To be honest, the most astonishing thing was learning that Matt had voluntarily shared his WhatsApps with Isabel Oakeshott,” one former cabinet colleague said.

Hancock had given copies of his messages to Oakeshott, a journalist, so she could help him write his memoir, “Pandemic Diaries”, published at the end of last year. Oakeshott, an outspoken anti-lockdown activist, subsequently passed the archive to the Telegraph.

Hancock said he was upset by “the massive betrayal and breach of trust”. Oakeshott said it was in the “overwhelming national interest”. 

Hancock did not previously know that, in 2016, she had assisted Arron Banks, a Brexit campaigner, with a book. Then, in 2018, she revealed details about Banks’ relationship with Russia from the correspondence to which she had been given access. At the time Oakeshott again argued she had done so “in the national interest”.

WhatsApp is a key tool in UK politics; beyond being used as a tool to send out press releases and organise voting blocks of MPs, it also hosts highly sensitive discussions involving cabinet ministers, the leaks show.

Sir David Lidington, a former de facto deputy prime minister, told the FT that the modern role of instant messaging in cabinet discussion was the consequence of several factors — some of which long predate the pandemic’s limits on face-to-face contact.

Changes to parliamentary scheduling mean there is now “much less requirement for ministers to hang around in the House of Commons waiting for votes . . . ” Lidington said that when he was first elected in 1992, “there used to be more time in the average day when they could talk face-to-face”.

He added: “The 24-hour news cycle also demands immediate responses.” During the Brexit negotiations between 2017 and 2019, Lidington stayed in contact with Simon Coveney, then his opposite number in Dublin, in part by using WhatsApp. “Sometimes when things were moving very fast, you’d not want to wait until they were available on the phone.”

There is concern, however, about the impact the growing use of instant messaging might have on decision-making. One serving senior official said the WhatsApp group for his department’s senior management was “a perpetual, rolling meeting in the background”. 

Thomas added: “There is value to a meeting — especially in a crisis. Getting the right people in the room, following a set agenda and assigning actions is much more likely to happen calmly in a formal meeting. Although there’s nothing wrong with WhatsApp playing a supporting role.”

Furthermore, many people in Westminster — incorrectly — believe that information sent using instant messages is exempt from record-keeping requirements, transparency law or legal disclosures. Many use private channels to share documents in a bid to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act.

One former senior government lawyer said the use of instant messaging was a “nightmare . . . You’re preparing for action, and you ask people to hand over papers. And you find yourself struggling with the fact that in the gap between this email and that email you’ve possibly missed thousands and thousands of messages where a decision was actually made.” 

In the case of the Hancock archive, the messages are largely informal discussion, rather than decision-making. It has also been handed over to the public inquiry into the pandemic and the health department. The thousands of messages are likely to be officially preserved for posterity.

Hancock’s instant messaging may have caused him embarrassment this week but it could make him a historian’s favourite. Academics in the future will get to pore over day-to-day discussions during a crisis that would once have been undocumented chats in corridors — including the crass jokes.