If we all deleted our messages like politicians, the result would be carnage – Ian Johnston

Politicians’ excuses for deleting messages despite a request to keep them by the UK Covid Inquiry are hard to believe

Text me and your message will be deleted within minutes after reading. DM me on Twitter/X? It’s gone in 60 seconds. Send me an email? My “bed-time routine” isn’t just about cleaning my teeth and putting on my jim-jams, it’s about the sanitisation of all forms of communication. ‘A clean inbox is an empty inbox’ is my personal, unbreakable rule.

Except that, of course, this is all completely untrue. According to my Hotmail account (call me old-fashioned), I have 18,000 unread emails and I'm guessing anything up to 50,000 clicked-on ones, all sitting there taking up space and possibly slowing down my computer. My text messages appear to go back to May 2015 and I’m fairly sure they provide a comprehensive historic record, should anyone ever want to write a book about my slightly dull life.

Have I ever deleted a text? I don’t think so. Or, to give a more politically savvy reply, "I cannot recall ever having done so”. Who, after all, has the time to delete every message people send to them in this, the Information Age? Who can be bothered to go through all that hassle?

Scotland's WhatsApp-deleter-in-chief, Nicola Sturgeon, chairs her final Cabinet meeting in March last year (Picture: Andy Buchanan/pool/Getty Images)

Well, as we’ve been learning from the UK Covid Inquiry, lots of politicians in government can, although I was heartened to hear that former Scottish Health Secretary Jeane Freeman did not delete any of her WhatsApp messages during the pandemic because “it never occurred to me to do so”. Why would it?

What was that thing again?

The “why” question will be one that the Covid Inquiry will be asking itself, particularly as it requested that politicians retain their messages in 2021, an instruction that quite a few appear to have decided to ignore. Or perhaps they missed a WhatsApp, or deleted it too quickly and forgot what it said.

Certainly, if I was in the habit of binning every message anyone sent to me, that’s what would happen. All the time. If it was me, I’d end up sending lots of messages along the lines of: “What was that thing you said the other day? I remember there was something, but I’ve already deleted the message…” Then, after a few hours had gone by without a reply, I’d follow it up with “sorry, I know this is the umpteenth time, but if you can just help me out I’d be most grateful...” Then later: “Just checking you’ve seen my messages today about that message the other day.” Oh dear, I’ve been blocked.

However, perhaps the great and the good of the Scottish and UK governments never had this problem. All backed up in the corporate record or something. And, no, they were not hiding any information of any relevance at all to the Covid Inquiry.

A different story is told by former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps, which give an uncensored, fulsome and at times embarrassing insight into how ministers made decisions. These were cheekily leaked by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, after they worked together on a book. To Hancock’s credit, he has apparently handed them all over to the inquiry.

I’m not a Hancock fan, but I certainly prefer him to politicians who delete messages sought by a vital public inquiry and then expect me to believe there was absolutely nothing to see. Such obsessive ‘cleanliness’ feels more than a little dirty.