Telegraph series raises issues of public trust, whistleblowing and source protection for journalists
Good evening,
The Telegraph's Lockdown Files investigation has featured on its front page every day this month and shows no sign of abating.
Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages, handed to the newspaper by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, have been described as an unprecedented "treasure trove" of documentation. The cache contains 2.3 million words of messages, "four times as large as War & Peace", noted her colleague Fraser Nelson.
Alongside the revelations from the former health secretary's phone, Oakeshott's decision to leak the messages in the first place has opened up a wealth of ethical questions.
| Hollie Clemence
Executive Editor |
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| talking point | | 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.
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." |
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GETTING TO GRIPS WITH . . . | | News that Israeli military reservists have refused to report for duty in protest against the government's plans to overhaul the judiciary has added to pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition.
Amid growing condemnation at home and abroad, it was reported that nearly all the reserve pilots in Israel's elite long-range bomber squadron and other key members of the military have joined a growing strike against the government's plans.
Netanyahu, who was reinstated as prime minister last December, "is quickly losing control of events", said Amos Harel, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, and faces a stark choice whether to push on or pull back from the brink. |
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TODAY'S BIG QUESTION | | China's new foreign minister warns of 'conflict and confrontation' with Washington while defending ties with Russia |
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WHAT THE SCIENTISTS ARE SAYING… | | A woman who was left partially paralysed by a series of strokes in 2012 has had the movement in her hand restored, thanks to electrodes implanted in her neck. By disrupting connections between the brain and the spinal cord, strokes often cause paralysis and muscle weakness in the arms in particular. Although some signals can still get through, they're too weak to trigger activity in the motor neurons that control movement of the muscles. In the journal Nature Medicine, a US team explained that they'd sought to restore movement by using electrodes to stimulate the sensory neurons that communicate with the motor neurons, and so make the latter more receptive to brain signals. Heather Rendulic said that since her stroke, aged 22, she had been "living one-handed in a two-handed world". But after being fitted with the minimally invasive electrodes, she could eat with a knife and fork again. |
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Statistics of the week | | One in 100 police officers in England and Wales faced a criminal charge last year.
The Observer |
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| PICTURE OF THE DAY | | Keanu Reeves attends the John Wick: Chapter 4 screening at Leicester Square in London.
Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images |
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Good week for... | Archaeologists in Egypt, who unearthed a Sphinx-like statue and the remains of a shrine in the temple of Dendera in Qena Province, 280 miles south of Cairo. | |
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Bad week for... | London renters, after Foxtons boss Guy Gittins warned that the lack of housing options in the capital is so "dramatic" people will need to move further out of the city. | |
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Puzzles | | Test your general knowledge with The Week's daily crossword, part of our puzzles section |
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instant opinion | | Your digest of analysis from the British and international press from the past seven days
Boris Johnson's pledge that the UK will be net zero by 2050 and have no fossil-fuel-powered cars after 2035 "made little account of whether or not the technology will actually be up to scratch by then", writes Andrew Tettenborn in The Spectator. Therefore now "is an ideal time for [Rishi] Sunak to announce that net zero by 2050, or any fixed date, is stone dead". Why? "For one thing, net zero by 2050 is probably already dead," says Tettenborn, citing a lack of belief that technology will be "reliable or affordable" in 25 years' time. And also: "Any party campaigning on a policy of forcing [net zero] policies on the just-about-managing now… will have no chance whatever," he writes. Voters want a government that thinks the same way as they do – "fossil or non-fossil, net zero when we can manage it but not before". Rather, they "worry about the need to keep the lights on, the heating humming, and themselves in work". |
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| Trip of the week | | Experience a unique insight into rural Bangladesh life with a new tour itinerary |
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DOWN TO BUSINESS | Tuesday afternoon markets | The FTSE 100 was steady today, while the pound dropped against the dollar. There was positive news in the UK property sector, as Halifax recorded a house price increase of 1.1% for February, well above forecasts of a 0.3% decline from the previous month.
FTSE 100: 7,922.75, down 0.09%
Dax: 15,568.50, down 0.54%
Dow: 33,255.94, down 0.52%
Dollar: £1 = $1.1974, down 0.39%
Euro: £1 = €1.1246, down 0.09%
Brent crude: $85.30, down 1.02%
Gold: $1,825.60, down 1.21% | |
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WIT & WISDOM | "It's like magic. When you live by yourself, all your annoying habits are gone!" | Writer Merrill Markoe, quoted in The Knowledge | |
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