The writing on the wall is fading now, and some of the sad inscriptions are almost invisible.
“Hearts should be similar in size and no larger than an adult hand,” instructs a notice at one end of the National Covid Memorial Wall – but broken hearts don’t fit into regulation spaces.
A number of the bereaved have broken rules in ways they never did during the pandemic, taking extra space to commemorate their loved ones.
The most audacious breach is a tribute 100 times the size of the others and is an anguished broadside at the handling of the pandemic.
“I know your life they could have saved, The government, if they’d behaved,” observes the writer in a bitter poem dedicated to a lost partner. Apparently, only 17 mourners attended his funeral (“200’s what it should have been”) and she was not allowed to say a final farewell.
“They wouldn’t let me see your face,” she laments. “I ask is this the way to say goodbye, and not let me look and cry?”
Harry Dowdall was one of the earliest victims of the pandemic in London. It should have been possible for his devastated partner to be with him as he lay dying, and to see his body at the funeral parlour. Was it wise to limit funeral attendance at that time? Probably. It is just one of many questions the public inquiry into the pandemic must consider.
Just one problem - we may have to wait many years before it reaches any conclusions. That’s why I’ve decided to release this sensational cache of private communications - because we absolutely cannot wait any longer for answers.
Already, the inquiry is mired in a secrecy row, as lawyers busy themselves redacting civil servants’ names from thousands of documents. By the time all those being paid vast sums of taxpayers’ money to protect reputations have finished, it is hard not to imagine the whole thing may become a colossal whitewash.
It is far more illuminating to read these extraordinary messages. They provide an unrivalled insight into when, why and how the Government made critical decisions during the crisis, which is exactly what we all deserve to know. No sanitised Civil Service-approved documents can compare with the rawness of this real-time record.
There’s no secret about how I came to be in possession of this communications treasure trove. The common thread is Matt Hancock, the former health secretary.
Throughout the pandemic, he used the messaging service WhatsApp to communicate with colleagues practically every minute of every day. Following his resignation in June 2021, he downloaded the records from his phone and shared them with various people, including me. I was helping him to write his book about the crisis, and we drew heavily from the material to reconstruct his day-by-day account. Suffice to say there was plenty of important material left over.
Precisely what needed to be done as the virus began its deadly rampage at the beginning of 2020, and how the response should have evolved as the nature of the threat was better understood, is a debate that has only intensified with the passage of time. While most people can forgive early mistakes by politicians and policymakers, bitter divisions remain over whether some of the measures that caused the most lasting hurt and damage - and the unprecedented assault on civil liberties - were ever justified. We need urgent answers.
Sweden wrapped up its investigation a year ago. The verdict, delivered in a neat 800-page report, was that avoiding mandatory lockdowns – an approach that made Sweden a global outlier – ultimately worked out quite well. After an early wobble over spiralling infection rates, Swedish ministers doubled down. They were rewarded with one of the lowest levels of excess mortality in Europe.
The French didn’t hang around with their public inquiry either. It began in July 2020, quickly involving police and prosecutors. In Oct 2020, officers raided the homes of senior government and health officials, presumably searching for sensitive documents. Among the properties targeted were those of Olivier Veran, the then health minister, and the director of France’s national health agency. It might seem extreme, but at least it shows they mean business. In Italy, the early epicentre of the outbreak in Europe, the formal inquiry has also made considerable progress.
As for the UK? It took the best part of 18 months just to agree terms of reference.
Announced in May 2021, our public inquiry – which has already cost up to £85 million - has yet to begin formal hearings. Alarmingly, it does not appear to have any specific timeframe or deadline.
We all know what this means - it will drag on forever. After all, the investigation into Bloody Sunday took 10 years and was nowhere near as daunting a task.
Public interest
The hopelessly open-ended nature of the formal process makes these WhatsApp files all the more important. Amid the ever-present threat of another pandemic, perhaps more deadly than the last, we emphatically cannot afford to wait until the mid-2030s or even beyond to learn lessons. Those who have information in the public interest need to put it out there right now.
The communications treasure trove includes exchanges with Boris Johnson, the then prime minister; Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor; Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary; Priti Patel, the then home secretary; and, indeed, almost every other member of the Cabinet.
There are lengthy discussions with Professor Sir Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer; conversations with Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser; umpteen messages with vaccines tsar Nadhim Zahawi and Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former adviser; not to mention pages and pages of communications with Baroness Harding as she tried to get a grip of the multi-billion-pound test and trace operation. There are even messages with Sir Tony Blair, the former prime minister.
The communications shed new light on almost all the most bitterly contested aspects of the government response, including the handling of care homes, PPE contracts, vaccine policy and face masks.
Taken together, the messages reveal the turmoil inside Downing Street and the Department of Health and Social Care as infection rates spiralled and ministers and their advisers flailed around trying to figure out how to respond.
They expose the fear and frustrations of a vacillating prime minister as he lurched from optimism and lockdown scepticism to pessimism and lockdown zealotry; the behind the scenes battles to establish the testing and contact tracing systems required to tackle the virus; the political headaches associated with geographic and demographic variations in case rates; the way the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon ran rings around No 10; and all manner of other minor and major triumphs and mistakes.
As the pressure on politicians and policymakers mounted, tempers frayed. As the population was imprisoned and the sick lay dying, ministers and political operatives clashed egos, indulged in petty turf wars, sniped about their own colleagues and obsessed about how they appeared in the media.
WhatsApp messages are not subject to Freedom of Information requests and they would not necessarily have been mindful of the possibility of the correspondence ending up in the public domain. In any case, most of those involved were too preoccupied by the battle to save lives to worry about what anyone might think later.
Not unreasonably, Hancock was selective about how much of all this appeared in his book. His account does not purport to be objective - as Harry and Meghan might say, it is just his truth. To his credit, he generally leaned towards disclosure, even when he knew it would ruffle feathers.
Nonetheless, all sorts of interesting WhatsApp messages were left out - sometimes to spare his own blushes, sometimes to spare those of others, often just because we were constrained by space. Even more sensitive material was removed from the manuscript at the eleventh hour under pressure from the Cabinet Office. Government officials went through the draft line by line, as they are entitled to do when former Cabinet ministers write about their time in office soon after stepping down. This painstaking process culminated in almost 300 requests for deletions and amends on various grounds, including some fretting about diplomatic relations and – in a handful of cases - national security.
To his credit, Hancock pushed back hard. Following tortuous negotiations, we were able to save quite a lot, but on certain matters we were forced to give way. One way or another, a great deal of material that is overwhelmingly in the public interest and pertinent to the public inquiry was suppressed.
The public inquiry may already have been handed some of these files. In the prologue to his Pandemic Diaries, Hancock says he has made all the records from which we drew available to the judge and her team. His position has always been that he has nothing to hide.
Be that as it may, it cannot be assumed that the inquiry will be able to sift through it all. There are several million lines of text, often accompanied by links to other social media platforms, newspaper websites, PowerPoint presentation slides and graphs.
The sheer volume of this material and the complexity of cross-referencing messages between individuals and groups with what was being said elsewhere in government and indeed in public at the time makes extracting the most pertinent information a gargantuan mission. Who knows whether everything that is demonstrably in the public interest will end up where it should - in the public domain?
Hence the Telegraph investigation - because every single person in this country was affected by the pandemic and many are still suffering as a result. We were asked to make extraordinary sacrifices and generally did so more than willingly, to protect ourselves and each other. Doubtless lives were saved, but at a terrible price. The post-mortem is now urgent.
Messages short-circuit never-ending inquiry
In March, Baroness Hallett, who presided over the inquests into the victims of the 7/7 terror attacks, will finally begin hearing evidence from the first set of witnesses.
Following public pressure, her remit has been expanded to give due attention to one of the most important questions of all - how the pandemic affected children.
The rationale for shutting schools for long periods – profoundly affecting the education of an entire generation and cutting a lifeline for the most deprived and vulnerable young people – could hardly require more urgent examination. The decision to keep doing so in the full knowledge that the disease presented a low risk to most children had incalculable consequences, which the inquiry must nonetheless try to define and quantify, such that there can be no doubt about the implications of ever going down such a route again.
Charged with examining the entire public health and economic impact and response, the judge will look at how decisions were made, recorded, communicated and implemented; the way the devolved administrations, local authorities and the voluntary sector worked together and with the UK Government; the availability and use of data, research and expert evidence and how the law was used to enforce restrictions.
The inquiry will examine how the vulnerable were protected; the use of lockdowns, social distancing and masks; the contact tracing and testing system; how the pandemic affected mental health; the closure and reopening of businesses and what happened with hospitality, retail, sport, leisure and tourism.
The terms of reference go on and on, from what went on in care homes to the handling of PPE contracts and supply chains; how the pandemic affected housing and homelessness to its impact on the justice system; the management of travel and borders and the safeguarding of public funds and management of financial risks.
Each of these subject areas would seem to merit year-long inquiries in themselves. At the end of it all, Baroness Hallett must not only produce a “factual narrative account” but identify the lessons to be learned. What a task! Covering so much ground seems an almost impossible ask.
Most of those who played a key role in making critical decisions will genuinely want to help. Having given it their all, they will be keen to defend their contributions and record. Those who made mistakes can be expected to argue that they did their very best with the information available at the time – a legitimate defence to at least some of what went wrong.
Not all can be relied upon to volunteer unflattering information, however - which makes this minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour contemporaneous record of what was going on at the heart of government a critical reference point.
It is a uniquely rich historical source. Stripped of the formality and artifice of official Whitehall communications, and sprinkled with spelling mistakes, emojis and the occasional exasperated swear word, in these messages, we see it all laid bare - the Blitz spirit of colleagues fighting together in the trenches; the fear of failure and retribution; the frustration at inefficiencies and shortcomings; the weight of responsibility; the sheer exhaustion; the relief and pride when things went well. It is an amazing way to short-circuit a never-ending public inquiry, cutting straight to the truth.
Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.
Through these ghosts of communications past, they are doing us all a final public service.
