COVID inquiry chair Baroness Hallett ‘could should resign if ministers win WhatsApp battle’

The chair of the COVID inquiry has been warned the “only logical response” if she misplaced the WhatsApp battle with the federal government can be for her to resign.

Solicitor Elkan Abrahamson, who represents the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice marketing campaign group, spoke following the federal government’s choice to launch a judicial evaluation into Baroness Hallett’s bid for unredacted materials to be handed over.

Mr Abrahamson harassed he was not calling on her to give up however that she would face little selection if the courts sided with the federal government over the paperwork.

“I hope and expect that the inquiry will win that battle,” he informed a information convention.

“There is a priority that if they do not win – the chair having mentioned fairly clearly that she must see this materials with a purpose to have a correct inquiry – if the court docket says to her ‘properly, you possibly can’t see it’, it appears to me the one logical response of the chair is to resign as a result of she will’t correctly do her job.

“I’m not saying she should resign. I’m saying I expect that that might be the result.”

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The intervention got here as the federal government laid out its rationale for looking for the judicial evaluation in parliament.

Baroness Hallett, who was appointed chair in December 2021, needs the federal government to hand over paperwork, together with messages despatched by former prime minister Boris Johnson and his fellow ministers and advisers, in addition to modern diary entries.

The Cabinet Office has refused the order and sought a judicial evaluation over the matter, arguing there are “important issues of principle at stake” round privateness.

Paymaster General Jeremy Quin informed MPs the problem was a “matter of legal principle that will have an impact on this and all future governments” and never associated to “one individual’s personal information”.

He mentioned there was “no question that all internal discussions on COVID in any form requested by the inquiry will be made transparently available to it”.

But he added: “What has been redacted and so not provided in response to the notice is material which the Cabinet Office considers to be clearly and unambiguously irrelevant to that work.

“That materials contains, for instance, communications about purely private issues and about different elements of the federal government’s coverage and work, which don’t have anything to do with COVID.”

Read extra:
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Ex-PM to bypass Cabinet Office and hand over unredacted messages directly to inquiry

Mr Quin was criticised by MPs on his own side, including the Tory chair of the public administration and constitutional affairs committee William Wragg, who said: “The downside with that is if authorities enterprise is performed via WhatsApp, public inquiries will specific an curiosity in studying what was transacted.

“When he says that the questions over material [that] might be unambiguously irrelevant, it is for the chair surely to determine that?”

Former justice secretary Sir Robert Buckland additionally instructed the courts can be “very reluctant to get involved in second guessing the decision-making by Baroness Hallett”.

And Conservative former minister Sir Edward Leigh urged the federal government “let everything hang out and just co-operate with the inquiry”.

“Let them have what they want and let’s get to the truth.”