Isabel Oakeshott, Matt Hancock and the ethics of the Lockdown Files

At face value, Isabel Oakeshott’s leak of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages entrusted to her by Matt Hancock appears to “confirm the popular misconception that journalists cannot be trusted”, said Dominic Ponsford, Press Gazette’s editor-in-chief.

Hancock, the former health secretary, gave the journalist access to his conversations so she could help ghostwrite his memoirs, Pandemic Diaries, published in December.

Now she has “burned him” and apparently broken a confidentiality agreement by sharing them with The Telegraph, which has published The Lockdown Files, said Ponsford in the media trade magazine.

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Public interest

Hancock has accused Oakeshott of a “massive betrayal” and claimed there is “absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach” as the material for his book was given to the Covid-19 public inquiry.

Yes, it is a “clear breach of privacy”, said Ponsford, but Hancock “rather misses the wider context”. “In these particular circumstances it is difficult not to see how, ethically speaking, she is anything but a whistleblower who has acted in the public interest.”

This echoes the point Oakeshott made on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week. She said: “Not one journalist worth their salt would sit on a cache of information in such an important matter, such a historic matter, and cover that up.”

She also suggested the Covid inquiry would take “many years” and could be a “colossal whitewash”, allegations rejected by its chair, Heather Hallett. Oakeshott said she was not paid to help write Hancock’s book, nor did The Telegraph pay directly for the messages, but she has not revealed any payment she received for her articles written as part of the exposé.

Perhaps it would have been “more responsible” to hand the messages over to a “non-partisan broadcaster”, argued Steven Barnett, professor of communications at the University of Westminster, on The Conversation.

“Instead, we are now seeing cherrypicked messages published piecemeal to further support the Telegraph’s own editorial position,” he wrote. And Oakeshott’s “apparent readiness to betray her source – whatever her stated justification – is likely to generate even more cynicism about an industry that already struggles to command public confidence”.

Protecting sources

“Talk about shooting the messenger,” said Joanna Williams in The Spectator. “In what moral universe is Oakeshott the problem and Hancock the victim?” she asked.

Oakeshott has become a scapegoat for journalists’ own “failure to hold the government to account”, shortcomings that have been revealed through the WhatsApp leak, she said.

The Editors’ Code of Practice does state “that journalists have a moral obligation to protect confidential sources of information”, said media law consultant David Banks in The Guardian. But this “tends to be applied to people who fear being identified in relation to a story” rather than “government ministers who are writing a memoir of their time in office”.

The wider question, said Banks, is can you ever trust a journalist? “That depends on the journalist,” he said.

And Oakeshott has a “track record”, said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. “One of her previous sources went to jail; she is a lockdown sceptic and the partner of Richard Tice, leader of a pro-Brexit party that wants to ‘destroy’ the Conservatives.”

For Hancock, said Mance, “there are people who cannot read and write who would have been more appropriate ghostwriters”.