About 5,000 WhatsApp messages on Boris Johnson’s phone at the start of the Covid pandemic have gone missing, the inquiry into it was told on Wednesday.
The former prime minister was grilled on the first day of giving evidence to the inquiry over how they had disappeared.
Before the detailed probing started into the Government’s handling of coronavirus, Mr Johnson gave an apology to those who had lost loved ones and suffered during the pandemic.
He said: “I understand the feelings of these victims and their families and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and suffering of those victims.”
Praising the healthcare workers and other public servants who helped to “protect our country”, he added: “I do hope that this inquiry will help to get the answers to the very difficult questions that those victims and those families are rightly asking.”
The focus swiftly shifted onto his approach to the disclosure of his own Covid-related emails, WhatsApps and notes. Mr Johnson said: “I’ve done my best to give everything of any conceivable relevance.”
He was asked, though, about an exchange of messages from December 20, 2021 between Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and his former principal private secretary Martin Reynolds in which Mr Case wrote: “PM is mad if he doesn’t think his WhatsApps will become public via Covid inquiry — but he was clearly not in the mood for that discussion tonight!”
Mr Johnson said: “I don’t remember that conversation to which the Cabinet Secretary is referring and I’ve handed over all the relevant WhatsApps.”
About 5,000 WhatsApp messages on his phone from January 30, 2020 to June 2020 were unavailable to the inquiry. Pressed on this, Mr Johnson said: “I don’t know the exact reason, but it looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up.”
Inquiry counsel Hugo Keith KC said a technical report provided by Mr Johnson’s solicitors suggested there may have been a factory reset at the end of January 2020 followed by an attempt to reinstate the contents in June 2020, but the former prime minister denied knowledge of that. “I don’t remember any such thing,” he said.
Mr Johnson, who resigned as prime minister last year ahead of a Commons committee report which found he misled Parliament over the partygate scandal, confirmed he had made plain during the legal battle between the Cabinet Office and the inquiry that his messages should be disclosed.
He acknowledged that “we may have made mistakes” in handling the pandemic. He said: “Inevitably in the course of trying to handle a very, very difficult pandemic in which we had to balance appalling harms on either side of the decision, we may have made mistakes.”
But he added: “I think we were doing our best at the time, given what we knew, given the information I had available to me at the time, I think we did our level best. Were there things that we should have done differently? Unquestionably.”
He arrived three hours early at the inquiry in Paddington before protesters critical of the Government’s conduct during the pandemic had gathered. As he settled in to give evidence, Covid chairwoman Baroness Hallett complained about the briefings ahead of Mr Johnson’s appearance, saying that leaks of his witness statement undermined the process. She said: “Until a witness is called and appears at a hearing, or the inquiry publishes the witness’s statement, it’s meant to be confidential between the witness, the inquiry and the core participants. Failing to respect confidentiality undermines the inquiry’s ability to do its job fairly, effectively and independently.”
Mr Johnson admitted that some meetings at the heart of Government during the pandemic were “too male dominated”, as he was pressed over claims there was a “toxic” culture in No10. He said he was “not sure” if Government decision-making had led to “materially” a larger number of excess deaths as a result of the pandemic. Pressed repeatedly on this issue, he said: “Irrespective of Government action, we have an elderly population, extremely elderly population. We do suffer, sadly, from lots of Covid-related comorbidities and we are a very, very densely populated country. That did not help.”
The Cabinet was on the “whole more reluctant to impose” Covid restrictions that he was, Mr Johnson told the inquiry. He added that there were “strong arguments” against going too early in the first lockdown, including concerns over “behavioural fatigue”.
