In a significant legal battle, the Cabinet Office has lost its bid to withhold Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks from the COVID-19 Inquiry. The High Court ruled in favour of the inquiry’s chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, who had issued a section 21 notice demanding the documents.
The court’s ruling stated that the fact that the section 21 notice may yield some irrelevant documents does not invalidate its lawfulness or the Cabinet Office’s obligation to comply with it.
The government has stated that it will fully comply with the judgment of the High Court. This marks a setback for the government’s opposition to releasing the requested materials.
Baroness Hallett had previously ordered the release of Boris Johnson’s documents in May, but the government had opposed the decision. Last month, the government took the unusual step of initiating a judicial review of Baroness Hallett’s order, aiming to prevent the release of the unredacted WhatsApp messages and notebooks.
The government’s decision to launch the judicial review was accompanied by arguments around privacy and the “important issues of principle” at stake. It questioned Baroness Hallett’s power to compel the production of documents and messages that it considered irrelevant to the inquiry’s work, viewing such a request as an unwarranted intrusion into government affairs.
However, Baroness Hallett maintained that it is within her purview to determine the relevance or potential relevance of the evidence in question. The legal dispute revolved around the former prime minister’s documents and their significance to the inquiry.
Subsequently, Boris Johnson chose to bypass the Cabinet Office by directly sending “all unredacted WhatsApps” to the COVID-19 inquiry. He expressed his willingness for the material to be inspected and indicated his intention to do the same with texts stored on an old mobile phone he stopped using due to security concerns in May 2021, over a year after the pandemic began. Mr Johnson sought the government’s assistance in securely accessing the device to hand over the requested texts.
