The Lockdown Files: Episode 2, The Road to Lockdown

Chopper's Politics

The Telegraph

Brexit, Political, News, Uk, Coronavirus, Politics, Parliament

4.2 • 864 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Investigations team looks back on the early days of the pandemic. How prepared was the government? Was lockdown inevitable? But they hit a stumbling block - they may have 100,000 messages, but there’s a gap in March.

So the team decide that if they can’t read where those key decisions were made, they’d do the next best thing: speak to people who were in the room where it happened

Read more about the Lockdown Files here: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/lockdown-files |

For 30 days’ free access to The Telegraph: www.telegraph.co.uk/lockdownfilespodcast |

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I was heading to the Telegraph offices to sit down with Isabelle Ockshot who had handed
0:11.1	over Matt Hancock's leaked Watts apps. In March this year the
0:16.2	Telegraph began publishing its explosive investigation into these
0:20.1	messages, the lockdown files. But no leak is ever perfect. When the
0:26.8	Telegraph exposed MPs expenses in 2009, some claims were missing, including some parts of Tony Blair's and it was the same
0:37.4	here so it's only when you look down the margin of the date that you realize that
0:42.3	there is a lot of material that is not there.
0:45.6	That's Isabel.
0:46.6	It makes no sense for the messages just to suddenly tail off at the beginning of March 2020 and then pick back up again at the beginning of April.
0:58.6	Even though we had a hundred thousand messages, there was a gap.
1:03.0	And that is March.
1:04.0	That's Tony Diver, the Telegraph's Whitehall correspondent, who joined our team for the investigation.
1:09.0	And March really is the crucial month he would want to read because it is where a lot of the key decisions
1:14.0	around the first lockdown were taken.
1:19.0	We didn't have a complete picture and if that doesn't raise enough questions.
1:24.0	Cabinet Office announced that it's to launch a legal battle with the official COVID
1:29.4	inquiry over Boris Johnson's WhatsApp messages, diaries and notebooks.
1:34.9	It makes you wonder, is there something the government don't want us to see from the early days
1:39.9	of the pandemic?
1:41.7	Families who lost loved ones during the pandemic claim the government's
1:45.0	refusal to hand over all the material the inquiry wants is an insult. Boris Johnson
1:51.3	ended up handing those messages over himself, but only ones from May 2021.
	...

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