DThe number of English schoolchildren who are constantly skipping classes has risen to almost 120,000 after the corona pandemic. That is, experts told the House of Commons Education Committee this week, almost doubling pre-2020 surveys. This is one of the enduring consequences of the Covid-19 state of emergency, which started later in England than in most other European countries countries, and the end of which was proclaimed comparatively early, more than a year ago. Face masks and distancing rules have long since disappeared completely from the London cityscape.
Another long-Covid phenomenon, the loss of confidence of the political public in its government, has only recently increased when the newspaper Daily Telegraph publishes many thousands of confidential Whatsapp messages in a kind of series every day, which during the days of the pandemic between Ministers of the then Boris Johnson government went back and forth.
Minister’s office photos revealed
Adding to interest is the fact that the source of these leaks is former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s mobile phone. Hancock’s ambitious political career ended abruptly in the summer of 2021, during a self-advocated lockdown, after photos from a surveillance camera in his ministerial office revealed him there – contrary to the current isolation rules – kissing his colleague and secret girlfriend.
The fact that the minister who was caught then struggled to find other roles on the public stage was now his undoing. Firstly, he lost his membership in the parliamentary group of the Conservative Party by participating in the British version of the self-portrayal series Jungle Camp, and secondly, his efforts to create a benevolent memory of himself by submitting a biography (“pandemic diaries”) resulted in the opposite. The journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who acted as co-author of the pandemic diaries, quickly found that the confidential Whatsapp messages that Hancock had made available to her were such important reading material in themselves that they were brought to the attention of the public unfiltered should.
The sum of these Whatsapp texts now brings to life the bitter months of Covid restrictions, including internal struggles within the ruling Conservative Party over the sense and duration of those isolation measures. At the time, the pandemic policy deepened internal rifts that Brexit enthusiasts and European cooperation advocates had already drawn between themselves. It turns out that Hancock and his Whatsapp cronies considered in at least one instance pressuring a recalcitrant MP by threatening to cut grants to a disability organization in his constituency.
It was also about Sunak
The fact that these inner-party struggles are now attracting new attention would in itself be a nuisance for the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who will have to wait in the few weeks until the next local elections and the year and a half until the next general election , wants to draw the British attention to the future.
But details of the two-year-old text messages also concern Sunak’s own government team. This applies above all to the top officials in the United Kingdom, the head of the “Cabinet Office”, the government headquarters. Simon Case, who once rowed in the Cambridge University lightweight eight, was involved in the Whatsapp groups in which details of current Covid measures were discussed, and occasionally communicated in the flippant tone that prevailed there. He noted on one occasion that then-Treasury Secretary (and Case’s current boss) Rishi Sunak would “freak out” if there were more restrictions that hurt the economy; on another occasion he characterized his then-boss and Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a “figure who is nationally distrusted”.
Personnel problem for the Premier
This has resulted in a current personnel problem for Sunak, with increasing advice that he should dismiss Case from office and speculation that the “Cabinet Secretary” might decide to leave of his own accord. Moreover, the shadow of Boris Johnson hanging over Sunak’s administration has become darker again as a result of the affair. In the text messages, Case tells Hancock that he is considered a fun killer for constantly highlighting the dangers of Covid to Johnson, while the latter loves to rave about the fantastic economic times ahead for the UK after Brexit is done.
The imaginative predecessor accompanies and burdens Sunaks’ everyday government life even without the Whatsapp indiscretions. It recently became known that Johnson, in the usual distribution of medals and honors on the occasion of his resignation, which was extraordinarily lavish anyway, would also like to consider his own father, Stanley Johnson, with a title of nobility. The award would bring Lord Johnson Senior into the British House of Lords – if the current government, despite the dismayed head-shaking, not only nods to this proposal from the opposition Labor Party. The chief official, Simon Case, through whose hands the roll of honor passes, would have to refrain from objecting, the current Prime Minister would have to let it pass.
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