MPs and WhatsApp

May 2022

When you exchange written notes with someone, over the internet or otherwise, the text has a sort of formality that transcends the ephemeral nature of a chat in the corridor.  The corridor conversation vanishes once it’s over, but the written one does not drift away, it remains there to be read, re-read and passed around; it has some substance.

Or so I thought.  However, according to a recent court witness statement from Sarah Harrison, chief operating officer for the Cabinet Office, when politicians engage in a written exchange of views by WhatsApp, it’s officially of no consequence.  It should be treated as informal chatter, and not as proceedings to be noted, recorded and archived in the way that the Public Record Act 1958 requires of most Government business.

Of course, that Act did not envisage WhatsApp messages, and it seems that MPs are taking full advantage of this lack of a legislative crystal ball.  Apparently ministers, including the PM, routinely communicate with each other using private (that is, non-governmental) devices like phones and laptops using networks independent of government, none of which is subject to official scrutiny.  So, the record keeping that the 1958 Act requires for face-to-face meetings or physical memoranda just doesn’t happen.

Indeed, we know that many of these messages themselves have already vanished.  When it emerged in April 2021 that our Prime Minister’s phone number had been published on a website for many years, and anyone might have been able to access it, all his messages up to then were deleted.  However important they were, they are lost to the public record, and to any scrutiny by, for example, the Covid-19 Inquiry.

It gets worse; ministers and their officials are now being formally advised to ensure that their internet-based chat history is deleted.  If this is legal, it shouldn’t be, and is completely at odds with the requirements of government investigations, which usually expect that emails and the likes of Zoom chats be retained.

That’s bad enough, but now consider the simple matter of security.  If I run into the Foreign Secretary in a lift and have a chat, I can be very confident that it is indeed Miss Truss that I am talking to and I can also see who else is listening.  However, if I send a message to her phone, I have no way of knowing who, or how many, read it.  Many public figures have teams who manage their social media presence, including WhatsApp, and what I thought was a private word may well be passed around.

If we accept that WhatsApp it is a written record, and I don’t see how it can be regarded as anything else, then it should be treated as such and preserved.  Lawyers, for example, expect work devices to be used for work messages; thus ensuring that all communications take place within a secure environment and are retained there; this also creates a single, reliable, source of records.   Any discussions held outside that channel must be documented within it, perhaps by a file note.

How many MPs write file notes about their WhatsApp exchanges?  Not many, if any, I’ll be bound, and I really don’t see why our legislators should be held a lower ethical standard than those who apply the laws on their behalf.

Of course, our politicians should be able to communicate easily and quickly – that’s how government works.  But they should not be doing it furtively and without transparency.   The Public Record Act should be brought up to date, and MPs should use a single, secure, channel to communicate on government related matters.

In the meantime, I advise MPs to save their unscrutinised words for their memoirs; at least that way almost nobody will read them.