THE political crisis tearing the Tory government apart has assumed epic proportions over the release of Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and private notebooks to the independent public inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic.
The public inquiry, headed by Baroness Hallett, was set up in 2021 to inquire into the role of Tory ministers during the pandemic.
It was forced on the Tories by the massive wave of popular anger over the handling of the pandemic that led to 225,324 deaths from Covid in the UK.
Anger, fuelled by the revelation that while ordinary people were accepting the most stringent Covid rules Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson was breaking all the rules they had set down and was partying away.
At the same time as Johnson was hosting illegal parties, billions of taxpayers money was being handed out to buy useless medical supplies to companies with proven ties to Tory MPs.
Under this intense public pressure, the Tories were forced to set up the inquiry, which doesn’t officially open for two weeks, in the hope that with the disgraced Johnson dumped, the entire sordid episode could be consigned to the past.
Unfortunately for Sunak, the crisis has erupted over the insistence of Lady Hallett that all the thousands of Johnson’s WhatsApp messages, along with 24 A4 notebooks full of notes he made at government meetings during the pandemic, be released to the inquiry in an unredacted form. The full release would also involve messages from Sunak, who was Chancellor at the time, and other ministers and officials still in power exposing their role to the public.
Under the threat of revelations that would damage the Sunak government beyond repair, and destroy his claim to be a break from the disreputable law-breaking past of Johnson’s premiership, the Cabinet Office, which handles all the affairs of government, refused to hand over the unredacted documents. They claimed they didn’t have Johnson’s records to hand over.
With Lady Hallett threatening to go to court to legally force full disclosure the Cabinet Office dug their heels in, threatening their own legal action to support their refusal, on the grounds that it would set a harmful precedence if the public were made aware of all the dubious practices and corruption at the heart of the government.
If Sunak thought that Johnson would support keeping all his messages away from the public, especially now he is under further police investigation over Partygate, he was badly mistaken.
This week, Johnson exploded a bomb under Sunak when he announced he was ‘perfectly happy’ for all his messages to be disclosed in unredacted form and that the government should comply with the demand from the inquiry ‘urgently’. Johnson further revealed he had already supplied the Cabinet Office with all his notes and messages despite their denial.
Johnson and his MP allies, along with the equally resentful Liz Truss, are ripping into Sunak accusing him and his administration of a cover-up over their collusion in the Covid crisis that saw the Tories enact policies that put the profit of bosses and Tory donors before the lives of workers.
Like rats in a trap the Tories are tearing each other apart in bitter factional in-fighting, overwhelmed by the economic crisis propelling British capitalism into recession.
It is a crisis that the bosses and bankers are demanding the Tories inflict on the working class by enforcing wage cuts and mass unemployment as the only way out for a bankrupt capitalist system. What is clear, is that a Tory government imploding by the day, is too weak to carry out the class war capitalism demands.
Keir Starmer has made it clear that a Labour government, or coalition with the LibDems, will be ready to take up the civil war against the trade unions and working class on behalf of capitalism as the Tories disintegrate.
The powerful working class will never accept being driven to starvation by a corrupt collapsing Tory party or a treacherous Starmer government.
With the Tories collapsing, there has never been a better time for the working class to demand the TUC act by calling a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
The Tories have never been weaker. Now is the time for the trade unions to kick them out, and bar the way to a Starmer-Blairite government by forming a Workers Government to go forward to a nationalised and planned socialist economy!