‘Ministers used private emails’ is the kind of absurdity that gave us President Trump

The farrago of nothing about Hillary Clinton’s emails may have lost her the election. John Rentoul says Labour shouldn’t pursue that nonsense here

Hillary Clinton, not checking her emails (AFP/Getty)

Should Labour be engaged in the sort of politics that gave us President Trump? For months US journalists ran huge stories about how Hillary Clinton, when she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state, used her personal email account for government business. The FBI investigated, found nothing wrong, and then Jim Comey, its director, reported – two weeks before the 2016 election – that his staff had found another cache of emails that needed to be investigated. Two days before the election, he announced there was nothing suspicious in them either.

The damage was done. I don’t know if Clinton would have beaten Trump if Comey had kept quiet, but the result was so close that anything could have tipped it. The fuss about her emails was so disproportionate that it cut through to voters, giving an impression that something untoward had been going on and was being covered up.

This is exactly the miasma of misunderstanding that Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is trying to conjure up with her campaign to “demand the truth on private email use”. Labour has seized on apparently contradictory statements by ministers and the prime minister’s spokesperson, and linked the use of personal email accounts to corners being cut in emergency coronavirus procurement, to suggest there is something shady going on.

Maybe there is, but using a personal email account is not evidence of it. There is no difference in principle between the prime minister exchanging WhatsApp messages with Dominic Cummings and his using a Gmail account for the same purpose. What is more, there is no difference in principle between his using an electronic means of communication and speaking, on the phone or in person.

The difference is that there is a record of an email, or a text or a WhatsApp message, whereas there might be no record of a phone call or a face-to-face conversation – depending on whether a civil servant is listening in or sitting in. Boris Johnson has learned about that difference from Cummings’s campaign of destruction and vengeance. If he had called Matt Hancock “totally effing hopeless” in conversation, we would have only Cummings’s unreliable recollection of it to go on. Indeed it is notable that Cummings’s claim that the prime minister said that in future he would rather “let the bodies pile high” when he returned to his office after agreeing to the second lockdown has not been substantiated by anyone else who might have heard it.

The question, as Rayner knows perfectly well, is not whether ministers sometimes use personal email accounts to discuss things that might count as government business, but whether relevant conversations are recorded so that ministers may be held accountable for their decisions. The principle is already well established that, if ministers do use unofficial means of communication on government business, those communications are subject to freedom of information law.

As a part-time historian of British governments, I am in favour of as much information as possible being published about their inner workings, and I am looking forward eagerly to the first official papers of the Blair administration expected later this year. But it is hard to sustain the argument that British governments are excessively secretive and that ministers make decisions without adequate scrutiny.

Thanks to Cummings’s excess of whistleblowing zeal, we have as much information about how the heart of government conducted itself during the coronavirus crisis as would ever have been unearthed by a public inquiry. And what is striking is that, whether one agrees or disagrees with decisions made, nothing has been revealed that suggests wrongdoing, unless wrongdoing is redefined as normal chaos and confusion.

Labour is right to ask questions about how contracts were handed out during some of that chaos and confusion. There was a danger of cronyism in granting contracts on the emergency basis of “anyone we already know”. But the idea that ministers using personal emails to communicate with each other, their advisers and their officials is sinister is as absurd as the farrago of nothing that handed over the presidency of the US to Donald Trump.