Welsh First Minister frontrunner admits ‘embarrassment’ over lost Covid WhatsApps

Vaughan Gething, vying to replace Mark Drakeford, tells Covid Inquiry phone messages were not made for ‘decision-making’

The frontrunner to become the next first minister of Wales has admitted it is a “real embarrassment” that his Covid WhatsApps were deleted.
Vaughan Gething, the health minister during the pandemic, told the Covid Inquiry it was a matter of regret his messages had not been kept.
Mr Gething is vying to replace Mark Drakeford, the Labour First Minister of Wales who announced his resignation in December, and will find out on Saturday if he has secured the leadership in a contest against Jeremy Miles.
On the final week of the Inquiry’s Welsh phase, Mr Gething, who is now the Minister for the Economy, defended the use of mobile phone messages.
Tom Poole KC, the lead counsel for the inquiry’s module examining decisions in Wales, started Monday’s hearing by asking Mr Gething about his use of WhatsApp messaging and why many were erased.
Mr Gething said: “It is a matter of real embarrassment, because if I’d been able to recover those messages then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
He blamed a “security rebuild” for their deletion and said he had spoken with the IT team at the Senedd on multiple occasions to try to get the messages back.
Mr Gething insisted that the messages were used in place of “conversations you have in the corridor” which were no longer possible during the pandemic and not for decision-making or to “circumvent processes within the Government”.
The inquiry was shown Welsh government advice, which said that “any and all” official business conducted through personal mobiles and email must be “summarised and saved”.
Mr Gething accepted that, having now looked into the rules “in much more detail”, he should not have used the messages in the way he did.
He said: “I think we need to have a review going forward about what we do need to capture in record keeping and what is incidental.
“I think when you look at the records that are available, they do reflect the way in which we made choices and the reasons for them.”
He added: “I certainly do regret the fact that all those messages aren’t available to you because you could see them and satisfy yourself that all of the information there is consistent with all the information in the records you do have in front of you.”
Mr Gething was asked about claims made by Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru that he had used disappearing messages.
The politician said he turned on disappearing messages with Kirsty Williams, the Lib Dem education minister who was then part of a coalition with Labour, but did not use the function widely.
“I wasn’t actually aware there was a disappearing messages function until much later,” he said.
Mr Gething later admitted he had made an “error” in his witness statement relating to minutes from a Cabinet meeting early in February 2020.
Asked about draft minutes where he said “the worldwide response was still in the containment stage and there had been no imported cases into the UK”, he said the minutes were incorrect.
He was then shown an extract from his witness statement where he said that “there were no imported cases” of Covid from the rest of the UK but told the Inquiry: “I plainly made an error there, counsel”.
The inquiry continues.