Rishi Sunak’s administration refused a requirement from the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry handy over former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and pandemic diaries, organising a authorized battle that dangers amplifying accusations of a cover-up.

The Cabinet Office on Thursday mentioned it is submitting for a judicial assessment into the request for the unredacted paperwork by Heather Hallett, the retired choose appointed by the federal government itself to steer the inquiry. A spokesperson for the probe mentioned in an electronic mail {that a} preliminary listening to is scheduled for Tuesday.

The strategy will open Sunak as much as additional accusations that he’s trying to cowl up delicate data, provided that the requested paperwork are additionally more likely to embrace his personal correspondence with Johnson, as he was Chancellor of the Exchequer on the time.

The authorities has refused for days handy over the paperwork, arguing they’re “unambiguously irrelevant” to the official probe into how ministers and officers dealt with the coronavirus outbreak. But opposition politicians, households of Covid victims, medical doctors and even some members of his governing Conservative Party have urged him to conform.

“These latest smoke and mirror tactics serve only to undermine the Covid Inquiry,” Deputy Labour Party Leader Angela Rayner mentioned in an emailed assertion. “The public deserve answers, not another cover-up.

Shortly before the disclosure deadline on Thursday, Sunak told reporters he was “assured” in the government position. The Cabinet Office said in its submission that in any case, the WhatsApp messages provided by Johnson only cover the period after May 2021. The first lockdown began in March 2020.

Johnson wrote to the inquiry chair on Thursday evening offering to share the unredacted material with them, in a move that appeared designed to suggest Sunak wasn’t being fully transparent. That would include messages from the beginning of the pandemic stored on an old device that had been switched off on security advice, his spokesman said.

‘Politically Sensitive’

The Tories’ preferred line about the pandemic is to focus on the roll-out of vaccines that ended lockdowns and allowed the economy to re-open.

But that ignores more controversial aspects, including testing shortages, allegations of corruption and the deaths of thousands of older Britons in care homes despite government assurances that measures were in place to protect them.

Both Johnson and Sunak were fined for breaking rules imposed to slow the spread of Covid-19, while the former was also widely criticized for missing early emergency meetings about how the UK should respond to the crisis.

Meanwhile Sunak’s signature “Eat Out to Help Out” program  to encourage people back into restaurants in the summer of 2020 triggered a backlash from health experts, who said it helped to spread coronavirus.

Bloomberg reported this week that the government’s top lawyer, James Eadie, had advised it not to share information with the inquiry by default, and to block the release of “politically delicate” materials in regards to the pandemic.

The Cabinet Office argues that it has offered upwards of 55,000 paperwork, 24 private witness statements and eight company statements to the inquiry, and that Hallett doesn’t have the facility to request the knowledge she had demanded.

Hallett, although, says that every thing ought to be disclosed and it’s as much as her to determine what’s related to her work.