The British government has declined to provide former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s text messages to a committee investigating the handling of the Covid pandemic. The government’s Cabinet Office refused to turn over unredacted text messages, diaries, and notebooks belonging to Mr. Johnson, arguing that doing so would compromise private exchanges between officials and establish a problematic precedent for future investigations. Historically, public inquiries in Britain have had broad scope to demand internal government communications, but this could become a political headache for current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The disclosure of embarrassing details could hurt his reputation and damage his Conservative Party before the general election. The perils of WhatsApp were illustrated in 2021 when over 100,000 text messages belonging to the former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, were handed to The Daily Telegraph by a journalist.
