Boris Johnson is yet to hand over any WhatsApp messages showing discussions he had during the 2020 Covid lockdowns, the government has said.
The UK Covid-19 Inquiry wants to see messages and notebooks kept by the former prime minister to build a picture of how decisions were taken in government.
But the former PM has only handed over a message archive dating to May 2021 or later, a witness statement published by the Cabinet Office on Thursday and sent to the inquiry says.
Mr Johnson is said to have the messages from before May 2021 on a different phone, which he no longer uses for security reasons. He was forced to change it when it emerged his number had been publicly available online for 15 years.
It comes after the Cabinet Office on Thursday announced that it would be launching a legal challenge against the inquiry’s request for the messages.
A statement from the senior civil servant in charge of the government’s response to the inquiry said the material passed to the Cabinet Office contained “no WhatsApp communications before May 2021”.
“I understand that this is because, in April 2021, in light of a well-publicised security breach, Mr Johnson implemented security advice relating to the mobile phone he had had up until that time.”
The statement adds: “It is my understanding that Mr Johnson has possession of that device, and that it is a personal device.
“On 31 May the Cabinet Office spoke to Mr Johnson’s legal representatives to ask them to check with Mr Johnson that he has possession of the phone, and to confirm this to the Cabinet Office.
“The Cabinet Office explained that if the phone could be passed to the government it could be assessed by security experts. On the morning of 1 June, the Cabinet Office emailed to chase for a response.
In a letter to the inquiry chair Baroness Hallett on Thursday, Mr Johnson said he was “more than happy” to hand over unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks directly to the inquiry.
He wrote: “This is of course without prejudice to the Judicial Review that the government has now launched. I agree with the Cabinet Office position that in principle advice to ministers should not be made public. That is clearly essential for the effective running of the country and for the impartiality of the civil service.
Boris Johnson only handed over messages to the Covid inquiry from 2021 or later
“I am simply making a practical point: that I see no reason why the inquiry should not be able to satisfy itself about the contents of my own Whatsapps (sic) and notebooks, and to check the relevant Whatsapp (sic) conversations (about 40 of them) for anything that it deems relevant to the Covid inquiry.
Mr Johnson did not address why the 2020 messages have not been released to the inquiry.
The government has said it only wants to give the inquiry redacted versions of the messages and that “unambiguously irrelevant” messages should not be passed over.
But retired judge who leads the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, has said it is for the inquiry to judge what is relevant and that such information could provide useful context – for example if the government was distracted by other matters.
The inquiry chair said “the entire contents of the specified documents are of potential relevance to the lines of investigation being pursued by the inquiry”.
It also emerged that Mr Johnson initially refused a request by the Cabinet Office to move his notebooks to a “secure location” in April.
The Cabinet Office said it would share some of Mr Johnson’s notebook material within days – but insisted they needed to be redacted to exclude “national security sensitivities and unambiguously irrelevant material”.
The government said the material would be shared with the Covid inquiry in batches as officials did not have enough time to redact them.
