What is behind Isabel Oakeshott and her role in the Matt Hancock WhatAapp leaks?

Some might say the former political journalist isn’t always a terribly reliable friend, says Sean O’Grady

Turncoat? Oakeshott claims anyone would be ‘utterly insane’ to think she did it for the money (Reuters)

Isabel Oakeshott has betrayed the trust of Matt Hancock and put a huge number of private messages between ministers and officials during the covid pandemic into the public domain. But there are huge questions over the timing of their release and why they have been made public ahead of the official inquiry.

Is there anything in these tales of the expected?

The Daily Telegraph, which has published Oakeshott’s trove of Hancock messages, markets them as a sequel to its MPs’ expenses revelations from 2009, but so far they are nowhere near as shocking. The WhatsApp messages certainly don’t reveal any dark conspiracies.

What they do show is that ministers sometimes say sweary, unkind and foolish things in private; that they tend to fight their departmental corners; that Boris Johnson is innumerate; and that the scientific advice really did drive policy to a large degree, constrained by practical and political judgements. Probably the most disappointing revelation is that department of health civil servants got a Covid test couriered to Jacob Rees-Mogg for one of his children despite a public shortage at the time.

Hasn’t Oakeshott done this before?

Yes. There’s an eerie echo of 2018 when Arron Banks, arch-Brexiteer and businessman, handed a large cache of emails from the Leave.EU referendum campaign over to Oakeshott and her small team of researchers to produce and co-write his memoir The Bad Boys of Brexit, billed as “tales of mischief, mayhem & guerilla warfare”. According to Oakeshott, her own email account was hacked and the emails leaked to The Observer. Subsequent to that, she and Banks released them to the Sunday Times. The communications were said to show that Banks had met Russian officials.

Another incident was when Vicky Pryce told Oakeshott she had taken the rap for a speeding ticket in place of estranged husband Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat cabinet minister (and former business editor of TheIndependent). The story was written up by Oakeshott, then political editor of the Sunday Times, and the end result was that both Huhne and Pryce served time for perverting the course of justice.

In 2019, another cache of emails came into Oakeshott’s possession. These were sent by the then ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch and were sharply critical of president Donald Trump, calling him “inept”, “insecure” and so on. As if to prove the point, Trump reacted badly and prime minister Theresa May was obliged to ask Darroch to stand down.

More salacious was the claim in her unauthorised biography of David Cameron, Call Me Dave, that in his student days he had inserted his honourable member into the head of a (dead) pig. There was no corroboration for the story, and the pig has been long since unable to offer any testimony. Oakeshott has conceded her source may have been “deranged”. Cameron vehemently denied the story but it has passed into urban legend. Oakeshott’s works are usually published by Michael Ashcroft, a Tory peer.

Some might say Oakeshott isn’t always a terribly reliable friend.

Has Oakeshott got an agenda?

Her critics say so. She’s made a reputation as a lockdown sceptic, which made her a strange choice for Matt Hancock, Mr Lockdown himself, to help write his Pandemic Diaries. Despite the title, they were not based on any contemporaneous diary entries in the accepted sense of the term, but cobbled together retrospectively, albeit from contemporaneous sources, principally some 100,000 WhatsApp messages. Oakeshott said that she sought to understand better why Hancock made the decisions he did and to understand his motivations. She seemed to be sympathetic.

However, she has now decided that she must publish the trove of messages immediately, and contrary to a non-disclosure agreement, because it is in the urgent public interest and she fears that the official inquiry by a senior judge, Baroness Heather Hallett, will prove a whitewash.

It has been unkindly suggested that she may have other motives. She does not seem to have been paid for her work on Hancock’s diaries project. She, and the Telegraph, were sitting on a vast quantity of journalistically useful and valuable material that would have needed to be turned over to the inquiry in due course. Oakeshott claimed anyone would be “utterly insane” to think she did it for the money but did not deny there was a financial dimension to publication.

What are her personal connections?

Entitled as she is to her own career and opinions, Oakeshott’s sincere Euroscepticism and doubts about the government’s Covid lockdown are closely aligned with those of her partner, Richard Tice, and of the Reform UK party he leads (formerly the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage). Tice may even have another tilt at becoming an MP in the next election. Since the pandemic, the Telegraph has also pursued an increasingly cranky line on vaccines, masks and lockdowns. It’s also a theme across output at Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, where Tice and Oakeshott present a kind of acrid, toxic version of Richard and Judy. The pair have also appeared on the anti-scientific conspiracist channel GB News, on which Farage has his own show.

A cynical analysis would suggest Oakeshott and Tice dislike lockdowns because they necessitate enormously expensive state support, funded, inevitably, by taxes. What drew her to Tice is hinted at in one of the striking pen portraits she painted in The Bad Boys of Brexit:

“Richard Tice (Mr Collegiate): The acceptable face of Leave.UK. The yin to Banks’s yang. Public school-educated property tycoon, sportsman and ridiculously handsome winner in life. The one they’d want speaking to the police if they were all in a car and pulled over.”

She is from the same family as the Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) and the Liberal Democrat peer and former investment manager and political adviser Matthew Oakeshott (b 1947) – a fervent pro-European and these days sympathetic to Labour.