![]() ![]() Her letter includes a clear signal she may investigate allegations that ministers including Mr Johnson were focusing on other matters than Covid. Lady Hallett said that it “may be necessary for reasons of context for me to understand the other (superficially unrelated) political matters” with which ministers were concerned at the time. In her letter, the Court of Appeal judge made plain that it was for her and her team to decide the relevance of documents, not the Government. Lady Hallett makes clear she is unhappy that the Cabinet Office failed to disclose “important passages” including “discussions between the Prime Minister and his advisers about the enforcement of Covid regulations by the Metropolitan Police during the public demonstrations following the murder of Sarah Everard”. ![]() The existence of hundreds of handwritten notes made by Mr Johnson throughout the pandemic has not previously been disclosed. Lady Hallett’s team also asked for the “clean unredacted form, save only for any redactions applied for reasons of national security sensitivity” of “the 24 notebooks containing contemporaneous notes made by the former Prime Minister”. The inquiry team has asked for Mr Johnson’s official diaries between the dates of 1 January 2020, when the first reports of the virus were emerging from Wuhan, China, and 24 February 2022, around the time his government stepped down its major response to the pandemic. ![]() The Cabinet Office refused the Lady Hallett’s request for uncensored documents but she has now dismissed its legal arguments and used her full statutory power to issue a so-called Section 21 notice demanding full access.įailure to comply with the notice is a criminal offence, subject to a fine not exceeding £1,000 or imprisonment for a maximum of 51 weeks. The content that has been redacted includes what was said inside government during the Sarah Everard protests and whether Mr Johnson was taking Covid seriously enough by missing Cobra meetings in February 2020, at the start of the outbreak. ![]()
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