When former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock handed over a veritable treasure trove of personal WhatsApp correspondence – over 100,000 messages in all – to a journalist whom he had commissioned to co-author his Pandemic Diaries, it appears it did not cross his mind that she might go rogue on him and release his confidential correspondence into the public domain.
Whatever we might think of Isabel Oakeshott’s decision to break Hancock’s trust – here is her version of events, where she makes the case that the public deserves to know how their government messed up – this information will hopefully give us critical insights into the mindset of top civil servants and political leaders tasked with managing the pandemic response in Britain.
I have only seen a tiny fraction of these 100,000 WhatsApp messages, namely those published on the Lockdown Files page of The Telegraph. Based on what I have seen, things are not looking good for Mr Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries memoire. But more importantly, Isabel Oakeshott’s whistleblower revelations confirm the worst fears of lockdown critics, namely that government ministers and public health officials were not acting in good faith, but just propping up their own careers and trying to keep the population under the spell of fear and dread.
What the Lockdown Files reveal is not a government trying, in good faith, to do what is right for the people, or trying to carefully balance the good and bad consequences of their actions, or trying to make sure their interventions track the best available science, but rather, a government scrambling to save face, stay on the right side of public opinion, score PR points, and avoid political rows and divisions that could play out badly in the press.
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The Hancock Lockdown Files: A rare glimpse into the moral and political rot at the top of the UK government – Gript
The Hancock Lockdown Files: A rare glimpse into the moral and political rot at the top of the UK government – Gript
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