The Covid inquiry has a fiendishly tough question on its hands: Can it trust Boris Johnson?

Who would ever be a politician ever again if all of your private messages are just going to be sent to a public inquiry and then published, presumably to great embarrassment?

Boris Johnson is still causing problems for Rishi Sunak (Reuters)

In her more than half a century-long career as one of the country’s most distinguished criminal lawyers, you have to suspect that the Covid inquiry chair Baroness Hallett has had to contend with rather trickier conundrums than the one she currently faces. Which is this: do you trust Boris Johnson?

This is the question that’s making life difficult in Downing Street, as well as in wherever Johnson himself is currently hanging out (he spent the weekend at a summer fete in Henley, where he continues to deny he intends to stand for election next year, a lie so ridiculous it’s barely even a lie, at least not on his scale). But it’s not, one has to think, making life very difficult for Baroness Hallett.

She has requested the prime minister and indeed other cabinet members’ WhatsApp messages be submitted to her inquiry in their entirety. But Johnson, and indeed others, do not want to comply. Large numbers of said messages have been ruled, by the Cabinet Office, which ultimately reports to the prime minister, to be “unambiguously irrelevant” and thus will not be submitted and be made public.

The chair takes a different view that it is up to the independent inquiry, not the politicians, to decide what is and isn’t irrelevant.

Again, you don’t necessarily need the Baroness’s razor-sharp criminal mind to pinpoint precisely what’s going on here. You don’t need half a century steeped in criminal law to see that it is somewhat suboptimal if the people who, let’s face it, are going to be found utterly bang to rights, get to decide for themselves what evidence is and isn’t submitted.

Naturally, they all think it’s terribly unfair. Who would ever be a politician ever again if all of your private messages are just going to be sent to a public inquiry and then published, presumably to great embarrassment?

To which we can only say, please, bore me later. March 2020 might seem like a long time ago, but you can still probably just about recall that, in the pandemic’s early days, the country had to essentially lock itself down while waiting for Boris Johnson to get round to it.

That by the time the pubs shut, almost no one was going to them anyway. And then there were those terrifying projections of half a million dead, and really it should have been rather obvious by that point that there was going to be a public inquiry, and that public inquiry is probably going to want to know what the prime minister has been saying to whom on his mobile phone.

Absolutely anyone with a bit of sense about them stopped sending potentially embarrassing messages over text message or email (and, more recently, WhatsApp) by about 2008, and so it is hardly surprising that a top criminal lawyer, whose been asked to get to the bottom of what happened and why with regard to the premature deaths of around 150,000 people, is not going to acquiesce to having her evidence sifted for her by civil servants answerable to the government, not to her.

It probably hasn’t escaped her wits that, just maybe, you know, that they might just be saying that all these “irrelevant” messages might actually, you know, actually be relevant, or even, potentially, extremely damaging. And that maybe the guy who has been sacked for lying from one job or another in more or less every decade since the 1980s might possibly not be telling the truth.

In the meantime, faced with a genuine legal showdown, the inquiry has now extended the deadline to hand the WhatsApps over by 48 hours, which it has concluded is preferable than having to take the Cabinet Office to court over what would constitute a criminal offence.

Rishi Sunak reckons there’s nothing to hide but, arguably to his credit, is a pathetically bad liar so is just making a fool of himself. Asked several times what he was going to do about it, he said, several times he was “looking at next steps” which, again to his credit, is as pathetic an answer as it sounds.

“Looking at next steps” is barely even a metaphor – it is precisely what it means. He’s been asked where he’s going and he’s replied that he is looking down at the pavement to watch where his feet head off to next.

He was also asked, again several times, whether he would indeed be instructing the Cabinet Office to hand over the WhatsApps they’ve asked for, and he replied, several times, that he has “already handed over tens of thousands of documents”. Which is, yet again, such an appallingly bad attempt at a politician’s non answer that it can only be concluded that he might be an in some ways decent person (but a terrible politician.)

Is it possible to feel slightly sorry for them? They have, almost certainly, conducted their private affairs with friends and family over WhatsApp on government phones, and now they are being requested to hand all of it over.

But there’s several reasons not to panic too much. To take but one example, all of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps were recently published by the Daily Telegraph and can anyone honestly say that Matt Hancock’s reputation suffered as a result? That the whole episode was embarrassing for him? The consequences were about as harmful as swimming down to the seabed and throwing a bucket of water over a passing fish.

With Johnson, it is precisely the same. It is surprising anyone, even Johnson himself, can be bothered to go through the required machinations to try and prevent the public inquiry concluding that he was hopelessly incompetent and serially dishonest, a conclusion that is always reached, either quickly or slowly, by everyone who has ever known the man.