Covid Inquiry: Dishy Rishi has turned into snippy Rishi who’s lost his memory and his WhatsApp messages

Polls at the time said 60% of voters thought that, as Chancellor, he was handling the Covid pandemic well, compared to just 31% who praised Sir Keir Starmer. He even got the nickname “Dishy Rishi” from tabloid newspapers and upmarket magazine Tatler.

Three-and-a-half years on, under the sharp lights at the Covid Inquiry, the now Prime Minister was facing questions about how he was referred to by scientists as “Dr Death”. Starmer’s Labour party is now around 20 points ahead in the polls and have been above the Conservatives for more than two years, and riotous backbenchers could be about to bring down Sunak’s flagship Rwanda legislation and potentially his government.

And as the day wore on you could see this was starting to eat away at Sunak as he was being grilled by the Inquiry’s counsel Hugo Keith KC. It started with a question about why Sunak was unable to provide his WhatsApp messages from much of the pandemic. Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street has been described as government by WhatsApp, and the Inquiry has already seen how many important conversations and decisions were taking place on the social media app.

Surely of all people Sunak would know how to back up his phone. He’s positioned himself as the most pro-tech PM ever, who had a chat with Elon Musk at his own AI safety summit. But no, the Prime Minister told the Inquiry: "I have changed phones multiple times in the years since then, and ... every time that's happened the messages wouldn't have come across.” He added he’s not a big user of WhatsApp anyway. OK then.

So if Sunak was unable to use his WhatsApp messages as a record of what was going on in government at the time, hopefully his memory would help him out. However, as the TUC has pointed out, Sunak was unable to recall 29 separate events, when asked about them during the Covid Inquiry.

These included conversations with officials about how he should back up his WhatsApp due to the impending statutory inquiry, the Cabinet meeting in which the first national lockdown was decided or the debate around how the NHS would collapse without restrictions.

Frequently, the inquiry counsel Hugo Keith had to ask Sunak to stay on track as his answers became more rambling and unrelated. At one point he told the PM “no, no, please” to get him to stop. Sunak did appear to have quite a vivid memory of why he brought in the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, but at the time didn’t mention it to the Health Secretary, Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Medical Officer. 

Sir Patrick Vallance, the CSO, had previously said: “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers.”

However Sunak said the scheme “had been designed specifically in the context of the safe lifting of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) that had already been signed off”. He added that not speaking to the Health Secretary “would be completely normal for all economic policy ahead of a fiscal event - like the VAT cut”. 

Except this wasn’t just a standard Treasury policy, it was encouraging millions of people to mix indoors in the midst of a pandemic, something which government scientists had already flagged as a major risk. This was when Rishi became even more snippy, responding to Keith’s questions "if I could just finish because it's important ... why would I raise it as a risk?" 

Sunak’s tetchiness when put under pressure has been a concern for advisers for a while. It’s only likely to get worse as this Tuesday of torment goes on.

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.