Government seeks to bolster confidence in public investigation amid claims process will take too long
Ministers are battling to maintain confidence in the official Covid inquiry after it emerged that Matt Hancock entrusted more than 100,000 official WhatsApp messages to a journalist renowned as an outspoken critic of lockdown.
The messages, given by the former health secretary to Isabel Oakeshott, who then passed them to the Daily Telegraph, prompted calls from bereaved families’ groups and Labour for the inquiry to be given more teeth and be completed swiftly.
Pupils in English schools were told to wear face masks despite limited evidence of the policy’s efficacy after Johnson was told by Whitty that it was probably “not worth an argument” with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, on the issue.
Hancock asked George Osborne, the Conservative ex-chancellor for whom he once worked, for favourable coverage in the Evening Standard newspaper, which Osborne edited at the time.
Whately, as care minister, warned that restrictions on visitors to care homes at the time were “inhumane”.
An adviser to Hancock helped send a Covid test to the home of the then leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, in September 2020 – amid a backlog in testing – for one of his children.
