Here’s the thing. The Downing Street wallpaper WhatsApp messages survived because Lord Brownlow kept hold of his own copy of the conversation on his phone.
But how many more have been lost?
How many pieces of evidence that would be vital to our understanding of what happened to our country during this catastrophic pandemic have been quietly deleted forever – along with the chance of holding the people who made the decisions, and then destroyed the evidence, to account?
This is why Foxglove is helping non-profit group the Citizens take the government to court – in a case to be heard on 22 March – to ban the use of these disappearing messages across government.
As part of the case, the government has disclosed policies that show it isn’t meant to be using WhatsApp, Signal and the rest for official business at all.
When a judge finally takes up the formal inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic, looking into the deaths of some 150,000 of our fellow Britons, a swathe of the public record could be missing.
That is unacceptable. If we are ever going to understand what happened during these awful past few years, when so many of us have lost so much, that cannot be allowed to stand.
We cannot begin to grieve – and, one day, try to move on together – if the essential evidence about the decisions that were made has been shredded into thin air.
If you’d like to support our case, you can sign our petition on Change.org here. Please share it with anyone you know who cares about the future of our democracy.