WhatsApp leak first skirmish of battle that will last all year

Political legacies at stake as Tory big-hitters give their version of pandemic response

The Hancock WhatsApp leak is merely the opening skirmish of a battle set to rage all year.

The main players in Britain’s fight against Covid will soon find themselves – like the characters in the famous Spiderman meme – all pointing at each other.

At stake is their political legacy and how history will judge them on one of the biggest issues in generations.

Many, including Matt Hancock, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, will be presenting their view of how coronavirus was handled, rightly or wrongly, to the official Covid inquiry.

Hearings are not expected to start for some time. But there could be blood on the floor by the time they have finished.

In a way Mr Hancock had got his narrative of events out first, in a book published last year. But that is what has triggered the latest scandal.

For it was co-authored by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott . In order to help him reconstruct his “diaries” she was given access to tens of thousands of WhatsApp messages. And it is these that have been leaked to The Telegraph.

Friends of Mr Hancock believe he choose Ms Oakeshott because she was a vocal lockdown sceptic. They insist it was the actions of someone who believed “he had nothing to hide”.

But some who worked with him in government see it as a “foolish” decision.

The point of the inquiry had been for a judge to assess the evidence of what did or did not happen and when. To be able to assess how well the UK rose to the challenge it faced fairly and decisively. And to offer answers to the those who lost loved ones in the pandemic and to everyone who had their lives affected by lockdown.

For now, however, the battle seems destined to play out first in the court of public opinion.