Case closed: the squirming of a reluctant whistleblower

There’s a perception about government – and there’s the reality they keep hidden away.

- JOE MURPHY

While Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were out weaving sunny fairytales to stage-managed crowds of worshippers, the ghastly truths about recent years at No 10 were being unpeeled in jawclenching, hideous detail in an austere room in Paddington.

Simon Case, the most unenthusiastic whistleblower ever, was on the witness stand at the Covid-19 Inquiry. And he hated it. Stress oozed from every limb. Eyes blinking, hands rubbing together, head lolling backwards when trying (and usually failing) to remember embarrassing details.

“A rat’s nest,” he had called the No 10 circle under Boris Johnson. “Crisis + pygmies = toxic behaviours,” he typed on WhatsApp another time. And another: “I’ve never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country.” He’s also described Mr Johnson and his inner circle as “basically feral”.

No wonder he looked ragged: the cabinet secretary is meant to be keeper of the national secrets, the consigliere who knows where all the bodies are buried and doesn’t breathe a word. The man who can discreetly look into a £58,000 fancy wallpaper makeover or smooth through an £800,000 loan. But Case turns out to have been an absolute blabbermouth on social media. Or as Hugo Keith, the inquiry QC, gently put it, “a prolific user”.

Case’s grilling was delayed from autumn by an undisclosed medical problem. He arrived with a walking stick. Behind his suit and pressed cuffs was a man who looked traumatised, like he’d just come home from the Somme.