Hallett talks tough on Boris

Stand by for legal action tomorrow

“I want to thank Baroness Hallett for agreeing to take on the position of chair of the Covid-19 inquiry,” said Boris Johnson. “I know [she] shares my determination that the inquiry examines in a forensic and thoroughgoing way the government’s response to the pandemic.”

That was then — December 2021, in fact — and this is now.

“I think it’s ridiculous that elements in my diary should be cherry-picked and handed over to the police, to the privileges committee without even anybody having the basic common sense to ask me what these entries referred to,” Johnson told the Sky News US correspondent who doorstepped him at Dulles airport at the weekend.

Not for the first time, there is more to the former prime minister’s comments than meets the eye.

Baroness Hallett DBE (Inner Temple)

Martin Smith, solicitor to the UK Covid-19 inquiry, told Johnson last week that the inquiry had been “corresponding with the Cabinet Office and Government Legal Department for a very considerable time in relation to requests for evidence” from Johnson and others.

“The inquiry understands that you were legally represented by the Government Legal Department at all times when the inquiry’s requests… were issued,” Smith added.

Of course, the inquiry team could not know how much information Johnson’s lawyers had passed on to him. But it strikes me as inconceivable that he would not have been told that Hallett had issued a formal notice to the Cabinet Office on 28 April “compelling the production”, unedited, of Johnson’s diaries and notebooks — as well as WhatsApp messages he exchanged with 40 named individuals.

Indeed, said Smith, “the Government Legal Department certainly told me it was making efforts to contact the individuals whose materials were identified in the notice to inform them as soon as possible when the notice was issued”.

So Johnson could certainly have told Hallett’s inquiry what his diary entries referred to. Today’s Times reports his claim that this would be a breach of national security. But this is unconvincing. Quite apart from the fact that Hallett and her team are security-cleared at a high level, lawyers acting for the government have said that only a “very small number of redactions” would be needed for “information which has been assessed to be national security-sensitive”.

What happens if the Cabinet Office does not comply with this formal notice and fails to hand over the material Hallett has demanded? I’ll consider the options later in this piece. First, though, we need to understand what the inquiry’s demand for information has got to do with the police and the Commons privileges committee.