Cummings ushered in secretive WhatsApp-encrypted ‘boys club’ style to government communications, say former Whitehall insiders

Claims of “government by WhatsApp” have been fuelled by former Whitehall insiders who told The Independent that the arrival in power of Boris Johnson and Vote Leave supremo Dominic Cummings brought a new more secretive style to Downing Street.

Overnight, communications which had previously been put on paper or in emails were moved to the encrypted WhatsApp message system, while some veterans of the Brexit campaign favoured the high-security Signal messaging app or Proton email, said one former insider.

And one person who worked in government communications during the Cummings era said the secrecy was used as a “power play” to exclude team members who were not trusted by the tight-knit Vote Leave group.

“There was a huge, huge distrust of civil servants when these people came in, and there probably still is to some extent,” said the individual, speaking under condition of anonymity.

“It was very boys’ club, there was a preference for people they already knew and had worked with, and against anybody they couldn’t immediately trust as being aligned with their view.”

Use of the encrypted apps was extended not only to private chats but also to routine parts of day-to-day work like preparing statements and news lines.

“The starkest immediate difference to working life when the Cummings team came in was that so much was no longer on email but on your phone,” said one former insider.

“Things were done in a much more cryptic way. There was an effort to make sure that conversations weren’t traceable as much as possible, unless there was a deliberate reason to make them traceable. Where they were quite clever was that if there was something they were OK with being leaked, that would go on email.”

One former insider speculated that that aversion to email was driven by an incident in 2011 when Michael Gove was forced to release messages sent on his wife’s email account under the Freedom of Information Act because they related to government business. 

A ruling at the time that all government information, even if transmitted by text message, private email or Twitter, is covered by the act, appeared to have convinced Mr Cummings – an adviser to the then education secretary – that alternative means of communication were needed that would not be liable to discovery by future inquiries.

While admitting that the notoriously poor phone signal within 10 Downing Street, which made voice calls patchy, contributed to the switch to WhatsApp, the former communications professional said other motivations were suspected.

“It was a way of maintaining power, because you can exclude people from engagement, unlike emails, where people can be looped in,” they said. “It was a real power play in terms of who could access what information when.”

Far from improving effectiveness, the new communications tools often slowed work down, as getting anything done would involve sharing messages with civil servants, who would want a formal paper chain recording discussions and decisions, resulting in a “messy and time-consuming” clash of cultures.

The practices also ensured the build-up of archives on people’s phones of material which was not on the public record, and which one insider told The Independent were always suspected to be being stored for use in future newspaper stories or memoirs.

“They’d all seen Benedict Cumberbatch playing Dominic on the TV and they wanted stuff that would make them look just as good if there were more films to be made.”

Some inside Downing Street were said to have been “spooked” when Tory MP Dominic Grieve tabled a motion in 2019 seeking to obtain communications on the threatened prorogation of parliament not only in emails and letters but also “messaging services including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Facebook Messenger, private email accounts both encrypted and unencrypted, text messaging and iMessage and the use of both official and personal mobile phones”.

But this attempt to ensure that modern communication technologies did not escape scrutiny does not seem to have halted the move towards what Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier this week described as “government by WhatsApp”.

And ministers’ use of phone messaging systems to maintain contact with business leaders – as Mr Johnson did with vacuum cleaner tycoon Sir James Dyson and chancellor Rishi Sunak with Greensill Capital adviser and former PM David Cameron – has been defended by others with a knowledge of the inner workings of government.

One special adviser from the Theresa May administration told The Independent that there was nothing new in ministers maintaining contacts with senior figures in business, charities and interest groups by text or WhatsApp.

“People have to build relationships with the people that they are dealing with,” said Salma Shah, who advised Sajid Javid in the Home Office. “All relationships are conducted in some way, at some level informally, that’s how you build relationships that are ultimately assets to the country.”

It was “unreasonable” to expect all communications to take place through formal channels, particularly in emergency situations where ministers need to unblock problems rapidly.

But she said it was wrong to believe that communications by mobile phone allow ministers to operate under the radar of civil servants.

“Everything does go by the civil service,” she said. “Even if you’re picking up the phone, it would go via the civil service, the civil servants would be aware. It’s informal, but it’s not private. There’s a really terrible suggestion that’s being created here that somehow these things are happening in secret. If you’re prime minister, nothing you do is secret from your civil servants.”

While there may be a “difference in style” between the May and Johnson administrations, the same processes of recording discussions and decision-making processes will be continuing in Whitehall, said Shah, who left government at the handover of power in 2019.

“If you want anything to be actioned it has to have a paper trail to it,” she said. “We live in a free society where things are transparent, things have to be presented to parliament, and there will be scrutiny on these things. Nothing could be hidden from the civil servants, because they also ask questions about propriety within the process.”

In some ways, Mr Cameron’s failure to secure financial support for Greensill showed the system working as it should, she said. “It showed that just because you have somebody’s phone number doesn’t make you any more likely to get the outcome that you want.”