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

Government minister Penny Mordaunt is the newest witness within the authorities’s Covid inquiry to have a difficulty with lacking WhatsApp messages.

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

Mr Johnson beforehand advised the inquiry that he had misplaced about 5,000 messages.

His spokesperson advised 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 misplaced WhatsApp messages despatched throughout the pandemic, together with the prime minister Rishi Sunak, who was chancellor of the exchequer on the time, and former Stormont ministers.

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

She requested 14 occasions for a gathering with Boris Johnson’s chief of workers concerning the lacking messages, “but had no response from his team”.

Later on, she was advised that she must pay tens of 1000’s of kilos so as to have her cellphone forensically examined, as a result of the machine belonged to her and never the federal government.

She added that she had since found {that a} related downside has occurred with WhatsApp messages exchanged with Michael Gove, who was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on the time.

So can WhatsApp messages merely vanish?

Chats are saved individually on every individual’s machine.

So if Person A and Person B are exchanging messages, then each of their telephones could have a full, and separate, file of their dialog.

Messages can solely be deleted for everyone as much as 48 hours after they’re despatched – and a notice seems for all members saying this has occurred.

But any messages older than that may solely be deleted by somebody on their very own cellphone.

So if Person A deletes a message that’s greater than two days previous, Person B will nonetheless have it.

It can solely be deleted from Person B’s cellphone by somebody who bodily picks up that cellphone and will get into their WhatsApp account.

There’s additionally a characteristic referred to as disappearing messages.

But that characteristic solely launched within the UK in November 2020 and messages despatched earlier than this was switched on wouldn’t vanish.

Boris Johnson stated that he manufacturing unit reset his cellphone. This wouldn’t have an effect on the file of his dialog with Penny Mordaunt that was saved on her cellphone, even when he not had it.

He additionally stated he modified his quantity. Again – whether or not he began a brand new WhatsApp account or transferred his previous one to the brand new quantity, this could not have an effect on the information saved on Ms Mordaunt’s cellphone.

Finally, he talked about a WhatsApp server outage on the time. An outage at WhatsApp HQ may forestall message sending, however it will not have an effect on the content material of messages already despatched.

WhatsApp messages are by no means saved on WhatsApp servers.

If they’re backed up, they are going to be saved on both Apple or Google servers, relying on whether or not the cellphone is iPhone or Android.

And they’re saved utilizing end-to-end encryption, that means that solely the sender and recipient’s units can learn them.

Even if WhatsApp or another person have been to entry them, they might not have the ability to tamper with them.