Senior Tory MP Caroline Nokes said the “reluctance” by Rishi Sunak’s government to provide Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and notebooks to the Covid inquiry “seems a nonsense”.
The chair of the equalities committee said it was important for the public inquiry to examine as much evidence as possible.
Ms Nokes told TalkTV that Covid inquiry chairwoman Lady Hallett “doesn’t look like a woman who’s about to roll over … probably rightly so”. She said would be “less pain for the government if they hand [the material] over quickly”.
Earlier the government was accused of withholding Mr Johnson’s WhatsApp messages from the inuiry to protect Rishi Sunak and other serving ministers.
The Cabinet Office is resisting requests from inquiry chair Lady Hallett to hand over the former prime minister’s unredacted messages and diaries from the pandemic.
It fears that giving in to the former judge would mean all other evidence from ministers, including Mr Sunak himself, would have to be submitted without redactions, The Guardian reported.
