How much did the Government’s failed legal challenge over a Covid Inquiry request come to
The cost of an unsuccessful legal challenge, launched by Rishi Sunak’s Government to stop ministers from having to hand over all WhatsApp messages to the Covid Inquiry, has come to hundreds of thousands of pounds it has been revealed.
Nearly £200,000 was wasted on legal advice to the Government over its failed legal battle at the High Court, a lengthy Freedom of Information Act battle launched by Liberal Democrat spokesperson Ian Rex-Hawkes has exposed.
The Cabinet Office had disputed the inquiry’s demand to provide two years of WhatsApp messages, initiating a legal challenge under the grounds that some messages were personal and “unambiguously irrelevant”.
But its challenge was rejected and the government was forced to concede to the Covid Inquiry requests.
In its response to the FOI request, the Cabinet Office noted that “of November 2023 the total legal costs for the Judicial Review on the production of Government and Ministerial WhatsApp messages to the Inquiry were £192,739.”
However, despite the money spent and legal battle, both Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have claimed to have lost large chunks of WhatsApp messages during the pandemic period anyway.
Boris Johnson’s top adviser complained that he was having to ‘dodge stilettos’ from UK’s most senior female civil servant
Dominic Cummings called the UK’s most senior female civil servant a “c**t” in a misogynistic WhatsApp message sent to Boris Johnson and Lee Cain in August 2020.
He was referring to deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara, who had commissioned a report into poor behaviour within the Cabinet Office.
The message in full reads: “If I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit with PET [propriety and ethics] designed to waste huge amounts of my time so I can’t spend it on other stuff – I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I don’t care how it is done but that woman must be out of our hair – we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that c**t. [sic]”
Cummings was asked by Hugo Keith, counsel to the inquiry, whether he treated “individuals in Downing Street with offence and misogyny”.
“Certainly not,” the former chief adviser to the PM responded.
“Was that aggressive and foulmouthed and misogynistic approach the correct way to manage fellow professionals?” Keith asked.
Alluding to the ongoing chaos regarding changes in the Cabinet Office at the time, Cummings said: “My language about Helen is obviously appalling and actually I got on with Helen at a personal level. But a thousand times worse than my bad language is the underlying issue at stake.”
The inquiry heard yesterday that MacNamara had commissioned a report into the culture at Number 10 in May 2020, which – according to the lead counsel to the inquiry Hugo Keith KC – had painted a picture of “misogyny” and a “macho” culture.
The report, titled ‘How can No.10 and the CO [Cabinet Office] better support the PM in the next phase’, says that “bad behaviours from senior leaders [are] tolerated” and “No.10 [is] always at war with someone”.
The report also singled out misogynistic behaviour including “junior women being talked over or ignored”.
The report paints a chaotic picture of what No.10 was like in the first months of Covid. MacNamara wrote that it was “not clear what we are trying to achieve”, “no one listens to anyone else” and that it was a “superhero bunfight”.
Cummings had touched on this behaviour in his evidence earlier in the day.
Discussing the Cabinet Office, which he described as a “dumpster fire”, he said: “There was a core problem, which is that private secretaries in the PM’s office are generally quite junior officials. Quite a few of them are young women and, at that meeting on 15 May and on other occasions, some of the young women in the private office said to me that they thought there was a serious problem with senior people in the Cabinet Office not paying attention to what they were saying, talking over them – generally just a bad culture of a lot of the senior male leadership in the Cabinet Office, which is something I agree with.”
Cummings also told Johnson in August 2020 his authority was “seriously damaged”. Cummings referred to cabinet ministers as “feral” and “useless fuckpigs”.
In a WhatsApp message on 23 August 2020, Cummings urged Johnson to sack health secretary Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson.
“I also must stress I think leaving Hancock in post is a big mistake – he is a proven liar who nobody believes or shd [sic] believe on anything, and we face going into the autumn crisis with the cunt in charge of the NHS”, Cummings wrote.
Cummings also said: “Don’t think sustainable for GW [Gavin Williamson, then education secretary] to stay.” Boris Johnson responded saying: “Agree”. Williamson remained in post for over a year after this conversation.
The inquiry also heard yesterday that Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the country’s top scientific and medical officials respectively, resisted attempts by top political advisers to “strongarm” them into appearing at the Covid news conference on the same day Cummings was answering questions on the Barnard Castle scandal in the Downing Street garden.
Cummings had been accused of breaking lockdown regulations by driving his family to Durham in March 2020 while his wife had suspected Covid, before taking a family trip to the town of Barnard Castle days later. At the time, all non-essential travel was prohibited and people were allowed to take one short trip outside each day for the purposes of exercise. Cummings claimed at the time that he had been testing his eyesight ahead of the drive home, a suggestion that was widely ridiculed.
Vallance wrote in his diaries: “All highly political and dwarfed by DC [Dominic Cummings]. We tried to get out of it by suggesting that it was not the right day to announce new measures.”
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The prime minister’s ‘oscillating’ was partly to blame for a 10-day delay in announcing a national lockdown
Boris Johnson’s inability to make decisions “significantly impacted the pace and clarity of decision-making” in the early days of the pandemic, his former communications director told the Covid inquiry today.
Lee Cain, who worked for Johnson in 2020, said the then prime minister “oscillated” over whether to lock down for ten days after a meeting between senior government figures decided it was both essential and inevitable.
Attendees to the meeting, which took place on 14 March 2020, included Cain, Johnson, and Johnson’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings.
In his written evidence to the inquiry, Cain said: “The collective agreement in the room was that a full lockdown was the only strategy which could suppress the spread of Covid-19, save the NHS from collapse and ultimately buy the government more time.”
He continued: “It was only a matter of when, how hard, and how long the lockdown had to be.”
Johnson announced the first national lockdown on 23 March, ten days later. One factor in that delay, suggested Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel to the inquiry, was “indecison on the part of the prime minister”.
Quoting from Cain’s written evidence, O’Connor said: “The system works at its best when there’s clear direction from Number 10 and the prime minister, these moments of indecision significantly impacted the pace and clarity of decision-making across government.”
The inquiry was shown a WhatsApp message sent from Cain to Cummings on 19 March 2020, in which Cain complained he was “exhausted” by the prime minister. Asked by O’Connor why he was felt this way, Cain described Johnson as “challenging”.
Cain said: “Anyone who’s worked with the prime minister for a period of time will become exhausted with him sometimes. He can be quite a challenging character to work with, just because he will oscillate, he will take a decision from the last person in the room.”
O’Connor went on to ask Cain if he felt Johnson was “up to the job” of being prime minister in March 2020.
“It was the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skillset,” Cain said, adding: “If you look at something like Covid, you need quick decisions and you need people to hold the course, and you know, have that strength of mind to do that over a sustained period of time and not constantly unpick things.”
In an earlier WhatsApp, Cummings had described Johnson as being in “jaws wank mode” in a meeting with Sunak, a reference to Johnson’s frequent statements that he did not want to be compared to the mayor who closed the beaches in the film Jaws.
Cummings added: “I’ve literally said the same thing ten fucking times and he [Johnson] still won’t absorb it”.
The inquiry also saw messages from 3 March 2020, in which Cain told Cummings that Johnson “doesn’t think [the pandemic] is a big deal and he doesn’t think anything can be done and his focus is elsewhere, he thinks it’ll be like swine flu and he thinks his main danger is talking economy into a slump”.
Boris Johnson did not receive any updates about the escalating Covid crisis during a school half-term break just weeks before he announced the first lockdown.
The Covid inquiry today heard that over ten days between 14 February and 24 February 2020, the prime minister received no information from his staff, including from the two COBRA meetings that took place.
Johnson spent the break – during which parliament was in recess – at Chevening House, a grace-and-favour Kent mansion. He was labelled a “part-time prime minister” by then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and accused of “sulking in a mansion” while coronavirus unfolded and large parts of the UK were devastated by flooding. Johnson insisted the government had been working “flat out”.
When asked today why he did not update the PM with any information on Covid, Johnson’s former parliamentary private secretary (PPS) Martin Reynolds said he “could not recall”.
Hugo Keith, chief counsel to the inquiry, told him: “There were no emails. There were no notes put in his red box. You don’t appear to have been in touch with him about coronavirus, or anybody else.”
“To what extent did you think to yourself we’ve got…emails about a viral pandemic coming our way? Why was nothing done in terms of keeping the prime minister in the loop in those ten days?” he asked.
Reynolds responded: “I cannot recall why and whether there was any urgent business to transact over that period with the PM.”
When asked whether it was because it was half-term, Reynolds said he was “happy to accept it was half-term”.
The day before the PM’s ten-day information blackout, a cabinet reshuffle had taken place that saw the resignation of chancellor Sajid Javid, who was replaced by Rishi Sunak.
By 27 February, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies had discussed the “reasonable worst case scenario” in which 80% of the UK population became infected, with a 1% fatality rate – which would mean up to 500,000 deaths.
The PM’s top aide added he “probably should have done more” to keep the prime minister updated on the biggest crisis since the Second World War.
Reynolds agreed that “little had been done” between the middle of February and early March.
He also agreed that the ten-day gap in pandemic planning was an “untoward delay” which contributed to the virus being “out of control” by 13 March.
Image of Elmo (left) and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson (right)
A Cabinet Office scientist who raised concerns over ‘stay alert’ was told it was ‘too late’. SAGE was not even asked
The government’s scientific advisers said they were cut out of decisions on pandemic messaging and compared Boris Johnson to Donald Trump after he tweeted out new guidance before they could flag concerns.
The Covid inquiry today heard the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was not given the chance to advise on the ‘stay alert’ slogan before it was announced by the PM on social media in May 2020. The new messaging, which replaced the ‘stay home’ slogan as the first wave of the virus began to ease off, was heavily criticised at the time for being confusing.
An email was shown from Theresa Marteau, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), in which she told fellow members that the ‘stay alert’ messaging had “the potential to do much damage” and said “our advice has not been sought”.
Marteau said the proposed new guidance could increase the R number – the average number of secondary infections produced by a single infected person – bringing “all the expected negative health and economic consequences”.
She told colleagues that government officials should be urgently made aware of their “concerns” and they needed to “intervene” before the message went out to the public that evening.
But further emails showed the scientists’ responding to Johnson tweeting out the message before they were able to advise on it. They expressed concern about his decision and one wrote: “We have learnt so much from Donald Trump…”
Another email shown to the inquiry revealed that a behavioural scientist in the Cabinet Office who worked on government communications did raise concerns about the guidance after finding out about it, “only to be told it was too late”.
The official said, in another email shown to the inquiry, that their team had not been consulted. In the email to SAGE members, they wrote: “The messages are kept so elusive by a small group of mainly number 10 advisers”.
They added: “I am so sorry that despite being the behavioural scientists inside the government communications service we don’t have a handle on this either. It’s so often partially political and in this case I was also told they wanted to keep it deliberately small so that there’s not too many cooks, which is also a cultural issue.”
In another email, the head of the SPI-B group of behavioural scientists said chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had issued a warning that members of SAGE and SPI-B should avoid “getting drawn into a govt operational move and losing reputation as a response”.
The email also suggested those inside No.10 were “concerned about our correspondence”.
Lucy Yardley, co-chair of the SPI-B group and a behavioural science expert, said following this incident: “Things didn’t improve in terms of being consulted…on the whole the communications tended to go ahead with very little input from SPI-B.”
Days after the new messaging was announced, Johnson was accused of misleading Parliament by suggesting Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty had signed off on it.
James Rubin, who chaired the group alongside Yardley, earlier told the inquiry that their advice was not heeded and that it “seemed to disappear into a black hole”.
Rubin gave the example of explicitly advising the government against using fear in their messaging when a new variant of Covid arose in December 2020.
“We argued against [using fear] on multiple occasions,” he said.
The inquiry was then shown WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock, then health secretary, and Simon Case, cabinet secretary.
In the exchanges, Hancock and Case said they intended to “frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain” and that “ramping up..the fear/guilt factor [is] vital”.
Yardley also expressed her concern about the government’s Eat Out to Help Out campaign.
“The ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ slogan… that came at a really crucially problematic time, because it was during the summer and that was when there was a really missed opportunity. That was when the infections were low and we could have all hopefully kept them low”, she said.
