The war on private conversations serves neither politician nor private individual
In the early hours of Friday June 21 2019, neighbours of Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson, who was campaigning to be the leader of the Conservative Party at the time, overheard a heated argument between the couple, which they recorded. After knocking on the door without receiving an answer, they also called 999. Within minutes, two police cars and a van arrived. Officers quickly visited the couple, determined that all occupants of the house were ‘safe and well,’ and concluded that there was no need for further investigation.
Nevertheless, the Guardian published the transcript of the recording on its front page. Under the headline ‘Boris Johnson: police called to loud altercation at potential PM's home,’ the article reported that a woman could be heard complaining that a white sofa had been damaged with red wine: "You just don't care for anything because you're spoilt. You have no care for money or anything." She was also heard saying, "Get out of my flat." Johnson was heard refusing to leave and telling Symonds to "get off my fucking laptop."
I was reminded of this sordid episode last week as the Cabinet Office lost its challenge over the Covid-19 Inquiry’s request for Johnson's unredacted WhatsApp messages, notebooks and diaries. The inquiry had demanded this material from the former Prime Minister, but the Cabinet Office declined. Having already handed over 55,000 documents, 24 personal witness statements, and eight corporate statements, it argued that it should not be required to provide material that is ‘unambiguously irrelevant.’ The Cabinet Office claimed that the material was not in the public interest because it is of a ‘private’ and ‘personal’ nature, giving the example of a mention of a child’s schooling arrangements.
I have some sympathy with the government in this case. At its core lies a fundamental principle: the necessity for public figures to engage in unfettered discussions during times of crisis, shielded from immediate scrutiny. In the midst of a life-threatening pandemic, privacy becomes their refuge, where they can freely explore and evaluate the ramifications of potential decisions, and consider scenarios that may never come to pass. Yet this is increasingly difficult in an age that venerates transparency above all else, and views any attempts to maintain privacy with suspicion.
However, my sympathy for the government is tested in this specific case.
Firstly, what were ministers doing conducting so much of their business on the ephemeral platform that is WhatsApp? Yes, they were dealing with a contagious disease, and needed to be in touch and all times, but WhatsApp is fundamentally a quick-fire messaging service unsuited to consideration of complex policy discussions that may be matters of life and death. One leaked message from the period reveals that Hancock took a while to read a message informing him that excess care-home deaths had risen to a staggering 10,000. His response, "Aargh sorry — just got this," appears unserious.
WhatsApp is a method of communication that lacks gravity and solemnity. Decisions of the magnitude they were making, such as implementing lockdown measures and attempts to protect the vulnerable, are too important to be handled while multitasking with household chores. Such pivotal choices deserve a singular focus, for all involved, untangled from the distractions of day to day life.
The Transparent Society
And of course it was Johnson himself who had given Baroness Hallett free rein to decide the parameters of the inquiry thereby empowering her to requisition any WhatsApp messages, diaries and notebooks as she deemed fit. The same senior politician whose personal mobile phone number had been freely available on the internet for the past 15 years, throughout his tenures as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, which was a careless oversight, fraught with potential security vulnerabilities. These actions suggest that the Prime Minister and his cabinet have at best an inconsistent sense themselves of what information should be kept private or made public.
After all, around 100,000 WhatsApp messages, including one by Matt Hancock stating the government should ‘frighten the pants off everyone,’ had already been leaked to the Telegraph by journalist Isabel Oakeshott. While it is true that Oakeshott violated a Non-Disclosure Agreement to do so, it was Hancock himself who willingly furnished her with said missives during their collaborative effort in crafting his Pandemic Diaries. - his own ‘candid’ autobiographical account of the pandemic and his role in its mitigation, published one month after he appeared on the reality TV programme, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
It’s hard to believe that the former Heath Secretary with an eye always on the TV cameras would not have contemplated the possibility that Oakeshott, a seasoned journalist— and vocal critic of the lockdown measures— might expose the contents of those very messages. By the time Hancock handed over the messages he himself had been brought down by leaked CCTV footage that captured him in his office cheating on his wife.
At best, the naïveté of ministers like Hancock is striking. A sense of bewilderment clearly permeates the ranks of public figures, who themselves appear unable draw a demarcation between what should be public and what should remain shrouded in the folds of privacy and how to keep it so.
Indeed it was Tony Blair who is partly responsible, in the shape of the Freedom of Information Act (2000) (FOI), for promoting an ethos of transparency as essential for trust in politics and by inference the withholding of information as suspicious. In opposition, Blair said he believed such an act would: ‘signal a new relationship between government and people: a relationship which sees the public as legitimate stakeholders in the running of the country’. It was only later, after he became Prime Minister and saw the consequences, that he realised his folly. He came to see it as a law that was ‘utterly undermining of sensible government’; ‘I quake at the imbecility of it’. ‘It is a dangerous act,’ he reflected in his memoirs, ‘because governments need to be able to debate and decide issues in confidence.’
Well too late. Journalists spend much of their working lives making FOI requests, while politicians have resorted to alternative means of communication that seemingly circumvent its parameters: post-it notes and emerging technologies that sit within a nebulous realm, much like WhatsApp.
Meanwhile, leaking has emerged as a means to an end, a political stratagem employed with increasing frequency by journalists, civil servants and the politicians themselves. We only became privy to the parties hosted within the confines of No. 10 during lockdown because attendees and colleagues leaked that information to journalists who in some cases were also partying. Lockdown skeptics point out the flaws in the government’s policy by leaking. And although we can’t know for sure, it’s improbable that the neighbours who surreptitiously recorded and subsequently divulged the altercation between Boris and Carrie to the Guardian harboured sentiments of unwavering admiration for Johnson.
People do not always follow the rules behind closed doors or behave well and rather than defeat one’s opponents through argument or the ballot box it’s easier to tell on them. Exposure of hypocrisy or bad behaviour has become an end in and of itself, bypassing other more rigorous, and indeed political, forms of accountability.
The War on Private Conversation
My sympathy with the government’s arguments regarding the importance of private conversations was also tested in light of other recent events. The Online Safety Bill has just passed through all its Commons stages and sits in the report stage in the Lords. The Bill, which could be law in a month, poses a considerable threat to the integrity of private conversations.
The Online Safety Bill would give Ofcom, the communications regulator, the power to require messaging platforms to adopt ‘accredited technology’ to detect and potentially block and report illegal images, on the laudable grounds of protecting children from abuse. But iI will mean authorities could force communication providers like WhatsApp to scan online messages sent in the UK in order to detect criminal activity. Apple has explained that the Bill poses ‘a serious threat’ to end-to-end encryption which it described as ‘a critical capability protection’.
Seven tech companies have warned that the Online Safety Bill poses:
The very same government that argued that some messages should remain private and outside of the Covid inquiry is passing a law that will dismantle privacy protections for online messages.
As it happens, the Communications Act 2003 already makes it a crime in the UK to post anything ‘grossly offensive’ on a ‘communications system’. As a consequence, in 2022, two policemen were jailed after sharing vile posts on a WhatsApp group, including jokes about rape and sexual assault. They aren’t the only ones to find themselves prosecuted for private comments. And in each case, it wasn’t the ending of encryption that gave them away, but people grassing each other up.
Private conversations have long been used against people. Take The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, in which the exiled Czech novelist describes how, by recording Jan Prochazka and Professor Vaclav Cerny’s private conversations and then broadcasting them as a radio serial, the police attempted to destroy important figures of the Prague Spring:
‘For the police it was an audacious, unprecedented act. And, surprisingly, it nearly succeeded; instantly Prochazka was discredited: because in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he’d never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we badmouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone’s most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house.'
Kundera continues:
‘It is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realise (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazka’s daring talk but the rape of his life; they realised (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free.’
According to Kundera, the achievement of a public and private sphere was a monumental achievement. One that, until recently, democratically elected governments have respected. But we are now on a perilous path, where the border between the two is being erased.
Until the late 1960s, privacy was so esteemed in the West that its erosion was the subject for countless dystopias, like 1984 and Brave New World. The accepted view was that we in the West preserved privacy and totalitarian states destroyed it. Warnings about where the erosion of privacy could lead were plentiful and powerful. But there is a shift away from this position. Formally and culturally.
In March 2021, the SNP, the governing party in Scotland, put an end to the sanctity of private conversations in a Scottish person’s own home. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act abolished the common law offence of blasphemy. It also criminalised speech if it was deemed to be ‘stirring up hatred’ against groups of people with ‘protected characteristics’: age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics.
Unlike all other regulations on speech in the West, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act has no ‘dwelling defence’. That means that what one says in the privacy of one’s own home, say at a drunken dinner party or shouted in anger from the sofa, is subject to prosecution. Punishable by up to seven years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both. ( Thought it has never been clear either to the police or the courts what ‘stirring up’ actually means, and the law has yet to be enforced three years after it was passed.)
Significantly, Humza Yousaf, then Justice Secretary, now the First Minister, justified removing the dwelling defence in this way: Children, family and house guests, he said, must be ‘protected’ from hate speech within the home. Introducing the Bill to the Scottish parliament’s Justice Committee, he asked MSPs (bold italics are my emphasis):
‘Are we comfortable giving a defence to somebody whose behaviour is threatening or abusive which is intentionally stirring up hatred against, for example, Muslims? Are we saying that that is justified because that is in the home? . . . If your intention was to stir up hatred against Jews . . . then I think that deserves criminal sanction.’
That is, Yousaf made no distinction between saying something at home and saying something in public. He further argued that a dwelling defence would draw an ‘entirely artificial distinction’ between public and private speech.
This amounts to a historic change in attitudes towards the private sphere. Since the seventeenth century, it has been accepted that there is a crucial distinction between what a person says in private and their public speech, a demarcation private life and public life.
It is not just the government that is suspicious of what we say to each other when they cannot hear us— it is the mood music of our times. In an article titled ‘What’s wrong with WhatsApp, the sociologist William Davis summed up the threat posed by private conversation on the app:
‘It’s understandable that in order to relax, users need to know they’re not being overheard – though there is a less playful side to this. If groups are perceived as a place to say what you really think, away from the constraints of public judgement or “political correctness”, then it follows that they are also where people turn to share prejudices or more hateful expressions, that are unacceptable (or even illegal) elsewhere. Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox, has defined his party as one willing to ‘defend what Spaniards say on WhatsApp’.’
Davis continues:
“…what makes WhatsApp potentially more dangerous than public social media are the higher levels of trust and honesty that are often present in private groups.”
He has a point. A space of honesty and trust is the threat, but also the value, of privacy.
The Value of Privacy
In private we reveal ourselves distinct from our public personas. We engage in foolish, impulsive discussions and let loose the frustrations that weight heavily on our hearts. We jest, vent, and dare to utter the unthinkable. In these unguarded moments, we raise our voices and, at times, behave horribly towards one another. But this provides an important function, and not having such a space is a denial of autonomy and freedom.
Privacy serves not only as an outlet for emotional release, it is a fertile ground for introspection and the cultivation of our inner lives. It’s an essential space for the individual to grow. Without the opportunity to express ourselves candidly within the confines of privacy, we are deprived of the means to explore, test, and untangle the complexities of our thoughts and emotions.
A person without privacy would be stunted. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt eloquently puts it:
‘A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.’
Privacy is also essential for intimacy. It’s a realm where we unveil our vulnerable selves, a sanctuary in which we unwind and share our unguarded personality with those we trust: friends and loved ones. It’s where we develop bonds of affection and solidarity.
The private realm serves as an incubator for the self and for ideas that go on to play a vital role in civil society. All new ideas, promising and flawed, should undergo scrutiny and uninhibited inquiry before entering the public domain. In this sense, in nurturing an individual cut out for public life, and as acting as a testing bed for thoughts and knowledge, the private realm is essential for the public realm.
The contemporary drive to eliminate controversial and antisocial opinions and speech from the private realm and force them into the light, encourages people to conduct themselves as if they have a spy on their shoulder. It will lead to a world in which we filter everything we say through a kind of internalised show-trial, encouraging conformity and uniformity. And since everyone says awful, silly and strange things, it will lead to distrust and to a never ending search for hypocrites. In destroying private life, public life itself will be degraded.