He was one of those fined over Partygate, while the benefits of the scheme he introduced as chancellor to boost the restaurant sector are so dubious, it might more accurately have been named Eat Out to Help Spread Covid. The latter has plenty to fear from the probing eye of the baroness. True, three of the key players – Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock – have left government, but two are still there: Michael Gove and Sunak himself. And, more self-interestedly still, the PM fears that Hallett is about to set a precedent for full disclosure – which means the investigators could soon demand to see every message on his phone.Īfter all, there is nothing historic about the Covid inquiry. He wants to keep to a minimum the embarrassments of the Covid era, because they remind many millions of voters exactly when and why they came to despise this government. Still, Sunak’s reticence has been exposed as self-interested. Sunak can no longer claim to be defending the privacy of a predecessor, because the predecessor is happy to let it all hang out – my apologies for that image – or at least to give that impression: in fact, the material Johnson has handed over is not from the phone he used in the crucial period. But now it is fatally undermined, politically if not legally.įor Johnson has stripped away the veneer of supposedly disinterested justification that Sunak had applied to his application for a judicial review, of Hallett’s insistence on seeing everything. Sunak’s legal challenge to Hallett’s demand was already looking shaky, with one minister publicly admitting that it was likely to fail, and a former Downing Street chief of staff arguing that it should never have been launched.
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