Matt Hancock WhatsApp leaks reveal the dangers of absolute power given to men in charge - Jayne Dowle

Already, footage of coronavirus patients gasping for breath on hospital trollies in Northern Italy were sending shockwaves across the world. Some of us sought out apocalyptic disaster movies on Netflix and took notes.

But we were still in a state of ignorance, and relative bliss as it turns out, about how this deadly pandemic would impact the UK. And how would we behave, as a country?

Now, however, thanks to the publication of ‘The WhatsApp Files’, a record of private group chat messages given to journalist Isabel Oakeshott by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, we are in no doubt at all about how the government – the men in charge, and it was mostly men, sadly - behaved.

Despicably is one word for it. Whilst elderly and vulnerable people perished, terrified, alone in care homes because draconian Covid rules banned all visitors, businesses went bust and children missed months of school, ministers and government officials were not only flouting the rules themselves by attending parties and so-called ‘gatherings’, they were laughing at us whilst they did it.

Whatever you think of the morality of a journalist breaking the unwritten hack’s rule of never revealing your sources, or indeed, breaking the trust of your interviewee - Oakeshott’s betrayal of Hancock’s trust, as she compiled his book, The Pandemic Diaries, does not shine a particularly benevolent light on my own profession - you’ve got to admit this is sobering stuff.

Ministers apparently found it “brilliant” that some police forces took great delight in fining the public for Covid law breaches. Their tactics included swooping on young women drinking takeaway coffees because their hot drinks were deemed a ‘picnic’, dying a reservoir in Derbyshire black to deter strollers, deploying drones as spies and arresting one woman at Newcastle train station for ‘loitering’ between platforms.

Coronavirus regulations changed more than 60 times over the course of the pandemic. No wonder officers struggled to keep up with the latest iteration of the rules and fines were issued unlawfully.

In fact, after a series of reviews, in 2021, the Crown Prosecution Service found that every one of the 292 prosecutions brought to court under the Coronavirus Act had been wrongful, the Telegraph reported. Cases were withdrawn in court, or overturned because the powers allowing police to prosecute any “potentially infectious person refusing to comply with a lawful instruction” were wrongly applied in many of the cases.

This imposition of a de facto police state was bad enough. More deleterious has been the resulting lack of public trust in the police and a colossal backlog in the court system, now having a serious knock-on effect on the time it is taking to bring perpetuators of serious crimes, including murder, manslaughter and rape, to justice.

Yet the police were only the foot-soldiers for the closed cabal running the country, which daily made questionable decisions that affected the lives of millions of people whom MPs were elected democratically to serve.

In Opposition, Labour, to its eternal shame, simply rubber-stamped every new rule and edict.

Running a country along the lines of Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel by William Golding which sees a group of schoolboys marooned on an island turn savage and lose the ability to reason, should never have been allowed. But it happened, and if it hadn’t been for the publication of these WhatsApp exchanges, we might never have found out the true horror of what went on in Downing Street and all those Zoom and Teams meetings.

Matt Hancock, who, pandemic notwithstanding, left the NHS in a far worse state than when he found it - and after his stint in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity – and will be stepping down from politics at the next General Election, did us no favours whatsoever as politician. However, inadvertently, he has done the nation the biggest service of all. He’s shown us just how dangerous, and venal, a group of men in charge given absolute power can be. It must never happen again.