Leaked WhatsApps, embarrassing emails: it’s bad for British politics that privacy is now dead | Simon Jenkins

Politics The Guardian By Simon Jenkins 06 Jun 2026 05:00 1 min read

The principle underlying the release of the Mandelson papers is that officials are always ‘on the record’ – but our leaders must be able to speak their minds freely Did you know a Cabinet Office minister commiserated with Peter Mandelson on his being sacked as ambassador to Washington, saying that he was “so sorry”? How could Darren Jones possibly sympathise with a friend who lost his job? Yet his sympathy was not even on the public record, in the 1500 pages of new revelations about the Mandelso

The principle underlying the release of the Mandelson papers is that officials are always ‘on the record’ – but our leaders must be able to speak their minds freely

Did you know a Cabinet Office minister commiserated with Peter Mandelson on his being sacked as ambassador to Washington, saying that he was “so sorry”? How could Darren Jones possibly sympathise with a friend who lost his job? Yet his sympathy was not even on the public record, in the 1500 pages of new revelations about the Mandelson affair. It appears to have been leaked from within Jones’s own department.

So too was news of Keir Starmer’s own communications on WhatsApp. We learned that they are subject to an auto-delete function, erasing what he thinks or intends to do from hour to hour. It is an outrage against public accountability, so the thinking goes. When our leaders press send, we have the right to receive.

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