Westminster’s WhatsApp deletion drive
When the history book comes to be written about Westminster’s WhatsApp culture, there should be an entire chapter on the “eyes” emoji. According to the website Emojipedia, it can be interpreted as “pervy eyes” to indicate approval of an attractive photo posted online; or “shifty eyes” to “convey a deceitful act”. But in Westminster, it means so much more. I have received WhatsApps from MPs in which the eyes convey anything from disbelief at breaking news to awkwardness at a colleague’s gaffe, to hinting that there may be more to a story than is being reported.
Sadly, I can’t offer examples of any of the above, because the MPs in my contact book have moved with the zeitgeist and turned on disappearing messages. Scrolling back through the past few years of political chit-chat is a surprisingly swift task: virtually nothing remains. One minister has switched settings without deleting everything that came before, so there lurks the ghost of a more transparent age, even if all future correspondence is destined to be digitally incinerated.
The WhatsApp deletion drive, like late-night drinking on the parliamentary estate and the complete lack of basic HR, makes perfect sense once you stop thinking of Westminster as a workplace and start thinking of it as a lifestyle. Normal communication-based jobs (aside from journalism, obviously) provide designated communication tools. In the white-collar world, everyone has a work phone and a personal phone. It is unambiguous which device is to be used for which type of correspondence. In Westminster, the line between work life and personal life is not so much blurred as nonexistent.
Of course, there are rules: about keeping appropriate records of communications, making sure officials are present at meetings in which government business is discussed, that sort of thing. But these are rules that existed long before the mobile phone (a newfangled technological fad with which Tony Blair never bothered as prime minister) and don’t fit a climate of 24/7 news, social media and the expectation that anyone tangentially involved in government will be contactable at all times in all circumstances. MPs and ministers know they’re not technically meant to use WhatsApp for official business. They also know their jobs would be impossible without it.
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Clashing against this back-office realpolitik, we must set a series of unfortunate events: the Covid Inquiry, which revealed “useless fuckpigs” as the insult of choice of Dominic Cummings; the Trigger Me Timbers scandal last February, which led to the suspension of two Labour MPs; now the Mandelson files. Belatedly, MPs and officials are learning that their definition of “private conversation” is not the same as the public’s. Online chit-chat they viewed as equivalent to blowing off steam over a pint at the (workplace) bar can be demanded by authorities, published and entered into the historical record, potentially ending their careers.
Cue panic. If any messages to anyone or about anything vaguely adjacent to their jobs are fair game, the safest thing is to delete everything as default – and if precious records of official business get lost in the digital sands of time as a result, so be it. Even the Prime Minister is doing it.
Once, the official record was all letters, speeches, memos and minutes. From the late Nineties, the state’s online comms footprint rapidly grew, with document dumps that ran to thousands of pages of emails and texts. That era is over. Instead of combing digital haystacks for needles of insight, future historians will have to dig, archaeologist-like, for scarce fragments of material that evaded the automated cull. Maybe they’ll encounter the odd eyes emoji, sent by an ambitious junior minister whose name no one now remembers, and debate its semiotics. Pervy, shifty or indicating a mysterious secret? They’ll never know.
[Further reading: The false promise that sparked the student loans crisis]
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