Downing Street has admitted that messages are automatically deleted from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s mobile phone after critics pointed to what they said were gaping holes in the record of released documents pertaining to disgraced Labour Party grandee Peter Mandelson.
The British government published over 1,500 pages of emails and messages relating to Peter Mandelson, the former ambassador to the United States. While the government had not intended to make any such release, it was commanded to by a Parliamentary vote and promised to obey.
Yet critics from the Conservative Party said there were some glaring omissions in the document dump, among them the startling lack of messages from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to his political appointee to the Washington DC job, Mandelson. A Guardian report notes that while this may be in part down to the Prime Minister not personally writing and sending much of his own correspondence and having staff and colleagues for communications, it has now been acknowledged that at least part of the gap is simply down to mass-deletion.
Downing Street insisted it had obeyed the terms of Parliament’s command because it had been instructed to hand over all information it held. Yet naturally this did not include those deleted Whatsapp messages. A spokesman is reported by The Times to have said: “The prime minister does use disappearing messages. As you’ll be aware, some ministers do use that function in line with the government’s advice on non-corporate communications channels.”
The report further notes this could be considered to be within official government guidelines which permit disappearing messages to limit “the build up of messages on devices”, but that officials must “ensure that any such use does not impact on your recordkeeping or transparency responsibilities”.
The Prime Minister’s self-destructing of his own correspondence is the latest reason for gaps in the official record of messages missing from this week’s documents dump.
As previously reported Peter Mandelson himself simply refused to hand over his phone, and as he is no longer a government employee the state felt it had no power to compel him to comply. Another senior figure deeply involved in the swirling scandals around the Mandelson appointment, anti-Breitbart backroom censor Morgan McSweeney, also was unable to provide his work mobile phone to the investigation because he claimed it had been stolen.
Remarkably, a second minister’s phone records were also found to be absent after the documents were published on Monday, and yet again a stolen handset was claimed as the reason.
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