Publisher Health

Britain’s top civil servant warned in October 2020 that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a “nationally distrusted” figure who should not announce new social-distancing rules in the depths of the coronavirus pandemic.

The health secretary at the time, Matt Hancock, disparaged an eminent medical researcher who had publicly criticized Britain’s handling of Covid as a “complete loudmouth.” Mr. Hancock also mocked “Eat Out to Help Out,” a program to lure people back to restaurants sponsored by Rishi Sunak, referring to it as “eat out to help the virus get about.”

Those and many other unfiltered remarks are in more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages exchanged among Mr. Hancock, other ministers and aides as they tried to control the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 and 2021. They were handed to The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, by Isabel Oakeshott, a journalist who obtained them while helping Mr. Hancock write a book, “Pandemic Diaries,” about those desperate days.

The Telegraph’s daily drip of disclosures in recent days has riveted Britain’s political classes, set off a nasty public row between Mr. Hancock and Ms. Oakeshott, and provided another telling reminder of how politicians can be tripped up by text messages that seem ephemeral in the moment but are forever preserved in cyberspace.

What is less clear is whether the leaks will advance the public’s understanding of how Britain handled the pandemic. Ms. Oakeshott said that there was an overwhelming public interest to release the messages. But critics, including Mr. Hancock, have argued that the Telegraph is publishing them selectively to propagate a narrative that the government overreacted in imposing lockdowns.

“What I found shocking was the callous nature of the messages — the banter, the humor, and how casual they were about making decisions that affected people and their lives,” said Prof. Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh.

The WhatsApp dump, she said, offered a revealing glimpse of government officials, under intense pressure, as they scrambled to formulate health policies amid rapidly changing, often conflicting information.

Still, for all the juicy nuggets, the disclosures have yet to produce any genuine surprises about the broader policy, she said.

“All this has done is make people retreat to their fixed positions,” said Professor Sridhar, who wrote her own book about the pandemic, “Preventable.” “What a shame, because they’ve stirred up a lot of anger and trauma. Because of the salacious nature of it, this has become very gossipy.”

Parliament had already begun an inquiry into the handling of the pandemic, which could shed light on these issues in a more deliberative manner. Mr. Hancock said that he had turned over the texts and other material to the committee, adding in a statement, “There is absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach.”

Fraser Nelson, a columnist for the Telegraph, disagreed, arguing that the texts show how politicians, operating with “complete power and no transparency,” can become blasé about huge decisions. “Pretty much every democracy in the world was locked down,” he said, “but only in Britain have we pulled back the curtain.”

To be sure, the flaws in the British pandemic response are well established: Mr. Johnson waited longer than other European countries to impose a lockdown, then kept the restrictions in place for months, prompting fierce internal debate among his ministers. Lack of testing was a huge early problem, most likely worsening the death toll among older people living in nursing homes. There were persistent tensions between scientists advising the government and ministers setting the policies.

What the messages do is flesh out the rivalries and alliances between ministers who were balancing public heath concerns with personal ambition. For Mr. Hancock and Mr. Johnson, the pandemic became a career-altering ordeal.

Mr. Johnson was forced out of office largely for violating his own social-distancing rules by attending Downing Street parties held during lockdowns. Mr. Hancock resigned after a tabloid paper published photos of him in a steamy embrace with one of his senior aides, also a violation of social-distancing guidelines. He later appeared on a reality TV show, “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” and has said that he will not run for re-election as a member of Parliament.

Mr. Hancock’s messages show an on-the-make politician who once hoped that the pandemic could vault his career to the next level. When a London paper published a plan to cut the approval time for a vaccine, he texted an aide, “I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO. This is a Hancock triumph!”

Yet at other times, Mr. Hancock seemed a determined policymaker, battling ministers who he believed were prioritizing the economy over public health. When Alok Sharma, who served as business secretary, proposed loosening the test-and-trace requirements for diners at restaurants, Mr. Hancock texted the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, to say that he could not understand “why Alok is against controlling the virus. Strange approach.”

“Pure Conservative ideology,” Mr. Case replied in a comment that drew fire from critics who said that it was improperly partisan for a civil servant. Mr. Case, who was appointed by Mr. Johnson, is also in hot water for arguing that trusted local officials, not the prime minister — whom he deemed untrustworthy — should roll out new guidelines.

In his statement, Mr. Hancock expressed chagrin about the embarrassment the leaks were causing his former colleagues. He said that he worked with Ms. Oakeshott for more than a year on the book, which was published last December and which drew heavily from the WhatsApp messages, as well as from other sources.

He claimed that she had broken a confidentiality agreement in publishing the texts and had distorted them by not providing context. “Releasing them in this way gives a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda,” he said.

Ms. Oakeshott, a former political editor of The Sunday Times, did not deny breaching a legal agreement. But she said that she had been willing to take that risk and denied that The Telegraph, which has editorialized against lockdowns, was publishing them selectively. Editors, she said, had assigned eight people to comb through 2.3 million words of texts, four times the length of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

“The paper has been extraordinarily careful not to cherry-pick bits of conversation,” she noted. “The team has been meticulous about the process.”

In the staticky world of London journalism, Ms. Oakeshott has long been a lightning rod. In 2019, she published confidential diplomatic cables in which Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump “radiates insecurity” and presided over a dysfunctional White House. Mr. Trump called him a “very stupid guy,” and Mr. Darroch was forced to resign.

The latest furor led Cathy Newman, an interviewer from a British station, Times Radio, to ask Ms. Oakeshott, “How can any source trust you again?” (Ms. Oakeshott abruptly ended the interview.) But others, like Julia Hartley-Brewer, a conservative columnist, have defended her. “Why are commentators so intent on killing the messenger, instead of focusing on the substance of the message?” Ms. Hartley-Brewer wrote in The Telegraph.

Even critics like Professor Sridhar said that the messages yielded useful, if irksome, details. The government, for example, once hand-delivered a Covid test to the home of Jacob Rees-Mogg, then leader of the House of Commons, so that one of his children could be tested, at a time when there was an acute nationwide shortage of tests.

Amid the pervasive sense of dread in the texts, there were also moments of gallows humor. Mr. Hancock once asked Michael Gove, a fellow minister, to explain the goals of a coming government meeting on the pandemic.

“Letting people express concerns in a therapeutic environment before you and I decide the policy,” Mr. Gove wrote.

“You are glorious,” Mr. Hancock replied.