Penny Mordaunt says Boris Johnson’s Covid WhatsApp messages went missing

Government minister Penny Mordaunt is the latest witness in the government’s Covid inquiry to have an issue with missing WhatsApp messages.

The leader of the House of Commons said that two years of WhatsApp chats with Boris Johnson had disappeared.

Mr Johnson previously told the inquiry that he had lost about 5,000 messages.

His spokesperson told the BBC that he has “sent all relevant messages in his possession to the inquiry and has complied exactly with their requests”.

Many politicians have lost WhatsApp messages sent during the pandemic, including the prime minister Rishi Sunak, who was chancellor of the exchequer at the time, and former Stormont ministers.

Ms Mordaunt, who was paymaster general at the time, wrote in her witness statement: “I could find no WhatsApp messages between me and the PM between 20 March 2018 and 22 March 2020.”

She asked 14 times for a meeting with Boris Johnson’s chief of staff regarding the missing messages, “but had no response from his team”.

Later on, she was told that she would have to pay tens of thousands of pounds in order to have her phone forensically examined, because the device belonged to her and not the government.

She added that she had since discovered that a similar problem has occurred with WhatsApp messages exchanged with Michael Gove, who was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the time.

So can WhatsApp messages simply vanish?

Chats are stored separately on each person’s device.