Covid, WhatsApps and Boris: our accident-prone PM can’t catch a break
Rishi Sunak’s authority is tested at every turn by the sins of his predecessors, says John Rentoul
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The prime minister must feel again that the universe is against him. He never thought the government had much chance of winning the court case about Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages, but he is beginning to look accident-prone.
Last week the government lost in the Appeal Court over its plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda; today it lost in the High Court in the tussle with Baroness Hallett, chair of the Covid-19 inquiry, about who gets to decide what documents she sees.
As an anonymous cabinet minister said to The Sunday Times at the weekend: “In his mind, the deal he struck with the universe is not working out.” He thought he had rescued the party and the government from the disaster of the Liz Truss experiment, but he has been buffeted by an ungrateful party and bad luck.
Today’s court judgment is not really a terrible setback for Sunak. He had no interest in trying to decide which WhatsApp messages were handed over to the inquiry. The case was brought by civil servants and government lawyers, who needed to clarify what they are required to hand over to Lady Hallett – the civil service wanting to protect the privacy of personal communications of officials.
The case turned on the question of who gets to decide what is “unambiguously irrelevant” to the inquiry. The court today decided that it is Lady Hallett. The Cabinet Office is entitled to make an application to her saying that “it is unreasonable to produce material which does not relate to a matter in question at the inquiry”. But in the end, “it will be for the chair of the inquiry to rule on that application”.
None of this makes much difference to Johnson’s WhatsApps and his notebooks. Nor does it change my view that the Covid inquiry is a vast waste of money, time and legal firepower. That the civil service has succeeded in clarifying the precise powers of an inquiry set up under the Inquiries Act 2005 is pointless if you think that no such inquiries should ever be set up.
But today’s verdict matters politically, first, because “government loses in court” is never a good headline for a government, and second, because it adds to the circus surrounding the inquiry, adding to the impression that ministers or officials are trying to suppress information or obstruct the inquiry.
This is complicated by the internal politics of the Conservative Party. Sunak is trying to manage the unmanageable, namely his predecessor-but-one, and it is a hit-and-miss business. Johnson thinks the civil service machine, which he calls the “blob”, is out to get him. He feels vindicated by the decision by the police to call off further investigation of possible coronavirus regulation breaches at Chequers, after government lawyers going through material to hand over to the inquiry came across what they thought was evidence that the law had been broken.
I understand that this was why Sunak agreed to publish the internal report on Monday, which found that Sue Gray had broken the civil service code by talking to Sir Keir Starmer about going to work as his chief of staff. Normally an internal inquiry would be confidential, and senior officials would merely tut-tut about the minor damage she had done to the civil service’s reputation for impartiality.
But Johnson has developed an advanced conspiracy theory about Gray being the controlling genius behind the way the illegal gatherings in Downing Street became known to the public – which was what brought him down, even if Chris Pincher was the final straw. Sunak thought that giving Gray a public telling-off would appease Boris, the deposed child-king.
Nothing that the prime minister tries is working. He must feel that he has done everything he can in a difficult situation – and you can sense his frustration when criticised by Sir Keir: he thinks that Sir Keir would not be doing anything significantly different. Yet Labour is now reaching Tony Blair levels in the opinion polls, and the Tories face a total of five by-election defeats just to underline their unpopularity.
According to that anonymous cabinet minister, Sunak believes that “if you work hard and do the right thing, the universe will reward you”. Instead, the universe, the courts, the voters and Boris Johnson are mocking him.
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