Matt Hancock may be a complete idiot, but even idiots have rights. As the former health secretary charts his uncertain retreat from politics, he must suffer piles of ordure heaped on his head. Someone leaks CCTV footage of an office embrace to the Sun. Then his ghostwriter breaks a non-disclosure agreement not to divulge his private messages. Cue intense embarrassment to the image and reputation of the British government.
Any big organisation facing an unforeseen crisis is likely to show signs of disarray and panic. In the spring of 2020, Covid-19 presented European governments with agonising decisions. Scientists disagreed with each other. Politicians pitted ideology against expediency. Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, succumbed to the disease and decisions became chaotic. Judging by the recent leaks, it appears that business was conducted in chance meetings, on phone calls and, bizarrely, on WhatsApp.
Those leaked WhatsApp messages vividly convey the tensions at the heart of government as ministers with competing interests and ambitions thrashed out a policy for lockdown. Flip remarks, four-letter words and a seeming contempt for the public disseminate across Whitehall. The head of the civil service, Simon Case, dismisses his prime minister as “a nationally distrusted figure”, and accuses the then-chancellor, Rishi Sunak, of “going bonkers” over a contact-tracing policy. Hancock attacks the head of the NHS for “massively fucking up” and dismisses the vaccine tsar, Kate Bingham, as “wacky” and “totally unreliable”. The whole Mad Hatter’s tea party takes place while ministers claim to be led by the science while overruling scientists, fixing arbitrary targets and obsessing over press releases.
Hancock has protested that the WhatsApp leaker, the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, offers a biased and partial account of his office. In return she claims her revelations are in the public interest, as she must have known they would be when she signed her non-disclosure agreement. More to the point, if the material is of real public interest, it is already in the hands of the Covid inquiry, which should be the real judge of what it reveals about public policy. The scandal lies in the inquiry taking so long to do so. Sweden’s Covid report came out a year ago.
What is clear is that British policy was fully debated, often bitterly. In itself this was surely a virtue. The alternative approach was China’s, where disagreement meant disloyalty and disgrace, and a hugely damaging lockdown went unchallenged.
A different question is whether disclosing the minutiae of these arguments and conversations will encourage or restrict similar debate next time. There must be some way those in power can fight out policy without being exposed to subsequent trial and humiliation. The collapse of cabinet secrecy under Tony Blair led to argument retreating behind the closed door of “sofa government”. In his dystopian novel The Circle, Dave Eggers depicts a democracy in which every public figure is wired online for every waking hour in the name of “accountability”. It degenerates into mobocracy.
The use of hacking and other invasions of privacy in the 1980s and 90s led to the rise of common law defences of privacy, defences that are now considered fair. Since then, advances in electronic communication have left privacy floundering, be it personal, corporate or governmental. Whitehall must now invent conduits for enabling ministers and officials – subject to parliamentary accountability – to discuss and disagree on policy without fear of seeing their every word splashed over the media.
The best that can be said of Johnson’s regime is that at least his colleagues dared to say what they thought of him. I doubt if they would do that now, knowing the world might be listening.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
