“Disgusting and misogynistic” WhatsApp messages between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have been disclosed to the Covid inquiry, according to the former Conservative chancellor George Osborne.
Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser when Covid struck, is due to appear before the inquiry for the first time next Tuesday.
Speaking on his Political Currency podcast with Ed Balls, Osborne said he had been told that the latest messages shared with the inquiry contained foul and sexist language.
He said: “From what I understand, there are some pretty staggering things that have been said on those WhatsApp messages … not just by Boris Johnson, but key advisers like Dominic Cummings. Really pretty disgusting language and misogynistic language.”
…
Osborne suggested that worse language could emerge next week. He said: “I think we’re going to get some pretty astonishing and frankly shocking WhatsApp messages and the like being published from that Johnson period.”
He said the messages would show “just what a complete nightmare it was for many people working in 10 Downing Street and who worked at the top of government at the time, and potentially some things that are going to cause some real problems for individuals who were in charge at the time.”
They were fighting hard against giving access to their WhatsApp messages for a reason. Looks like we are going to find out why.
I don’t understand how they keep getting away by simply saying, “soz, my dog ate my WhatsApp messages!” I’m sure if they tried hard enough, they could be retrieved.
I read an article a while back that said data retrieval for forensic purposes was rarely impossible, it just got increasingly expensive and they were dealing with things like hard drives that had been “destroyed”. Encryption makes it trickier but there are often ways and means otherwise every wrong 'un would just claim to have forgotten their pin. With WhatsApp it’s probably just easier to access the other person’s phone they were talking to.
Sadly not enough of the population gives a crap about Cummings. His comeuppance will be short lived. 😞
Ironically run over by a short-sighted driver from Barnard Castle?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Disgusting and misogynistic” WhatsApp messages between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have been disclosed to the Covid inquiry, according to the former Conservative chancellor George Osborne.
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Speaking on his Political Currency podcast with Ed Balls, Osborne said he had been told that the latest messages shared with the inquiry contained foul and sexist language.
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Earlier this month, the inquiry heard that Angela McLean, now the government’s chief scientific adviser, referred to another leading scientist, Carl Heneghan, as a “fuckwit”.
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The Guardian revealed that Boris Johnson had told the inquiry he had been unable to access messages between 31 January and 7 June 2020, despite the phone being in action until the following spring.
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Other messages in a WhatsApp group containing Case, Cain and Cummings suggest the exasperation felt within Johnson’s inner circle at the government’s handling of the lockdowns.
According to the Times, Case said Johnson was keen to roll back social distancing regulations and announce: “We’re over Covid.” In one message, the then head of the civil service described this behaviour as “Trump Bolsonaro levels of mad and dangerous”.
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The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Try again - it’s straight to the Guardian website so should be pretty solid. I just checked it and it’s fine.
works perfectly fine from austria
It seems unlikely - does the link give a blank page or some kind of message?
Anyway, if run into issues like paywalls, etc, I just run it through archive.is which almost always gets through that nonsense. So here is the archived link for that article. I don’t usually add them for the Guardian, as they say they’ll remain free and open for everyone but, if this is a more widespread issue, I can start adding them.
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