When and why did you join WhatsApp? If you’re in America, the answer is you still probably haven’t. But in Britain, you likely joined years ago because it was easy and fast. Or because your friends and family gravitated towards it, and no one wants to be left out of the social network du jour. At some point over the last decade, critical mass was hit, and some three quarters of British internet users between 16 and 64 are now clattering away on it.
Within the corridors of power, it has become wholly ubiquitous. There is barely a single person in Westminster who isn’t hyperactive on the platform and doesn’t use it to conduct their work (and personal) life. For journalists, the arrival of the ability to anonymously screenshot exchanges between MPs has proven a goldmine for gossip and infighting. For aspirant highflyers, it is a simple way to form a virtual caucus of supporters. And for MPs, it is their main method for communicating with their colleagues.
WhatsApp’s prominence in Westminster is back in the news, thanks to the Covid inquiry and the litany of foul messages sent by Dominic Cummings about his colleagues. If it was ever in doubt, the inquiry has confirmed power lies between the green encrypted channels. But why did this particular platform become the place where critical national decisions are made? And more importantly, has it had a good, bad or indifferent effect on politics and policy-making?
There’s a very practical reason WhatsApp dominates: technology across Whitehall remains diabolical. While Google’s email and document platforms are the default for most offices, our decision-makers are stuck manually attaching documents to emails for collaborative editing. Mandarins complain about the security and integrity of outsourcing to the cloud. But as Cummings noted in his testimony, No 10 staffers just use their personal accounts instead because the internal systems are so clunky.
Any rapid-fire communication system across scores of people is naturally unavailable. Many organisations — including mine — use something similar to Slack for communicating with their colleagues when everyone is not in the same room. In most businesses, it is overseen centrally and records are kept for important information. But it is not the same in government, where WhatsApp is used freely on private phones without any consistent policies or standards for recordkeeping.
Ultimately, politicos adore WhatsApp for the same reason as the rest of the nation: it’s the cheapest (free!) way to communicate rapidly. When Boris Johnson became prime minister in the summer of 2019, the dump of inquiry evidence showed that he made or joined a plethora of groups to run the country — some for communications, others for co-ordination, some for debate and idle gossip. The social network suited Johnson’s style of governing: short, immediate, with a constant stream of surface level debate and little deeper context.
All these trends were exaggerated when Covid hit. In person meetings became nigh impossible, so the frenetic activity within the groups grew, falling into roughly two functions. Some of them were used to rapidly disseminate messages, faster than email. These remain in use by ministerial offices today for the same reason. Co-ordination via WhatsApp is by far its best political function, but it still needs to be integrated into the rest of Whitehall’s decision making apparatus. Cummings decided the existing official structures were kaput and circumvented with his own. Yet this cannot be a permanent solution, as the lack of accountability has demonstrated from the pandemic. Some folks kept their messages for posterity, others flipped on auto-delete and we will never know what was really said.
But the far more pernicious impact of WhatsApp has been when it is used for policy-making. Again, the transcripts from the Covid inquiry show that groups were used to lob around random mad ideas – Cummings claimed Johnson queried a YouTube video of someone blowing a hairdryer up their nose to try and kill the virus in one of the WhatAspp groups.
The same is true again for Johnson’s apparent misinterpretation of statistics of how lethal the coronavirus was. A free-flowing blue-sky atmosphere might work when dreaming up big ideas for the future, but not in the heat of the worst meltdown the British state has faced in a generation.
Some may scoff at the traditional schemes for policy-making: people sitting around big tables, debating detailed submissions, pondering all the possible options. In a stranger era, mandarins built a white room in the Treasury adorned with wall-to-wall whiteboards for thinking the unthinkable. But the very nature of WhatsApp has changed how we think about policy. It was a social media platform created for the here and now. It favours sharp exchanges, witty remarks, memes and videos. It thrives on noise, not nuance. It has shortened our attention spans and changed how we think about communication. When all this is applied to policy, it becomes easier to understand how so many bad decisions are made.
It is naive to think WhatsApp’s dominance can be reversed; it is too intrinsically embedded in our political system. But the way it underpins policy-making is a symptom of an ad hoc, inconsistent approach to solving the big structural problems — instead of executing a plan, we use WhatsApp to come up with a fudge.
With the year countdown to an election under way, it is likely too late to fundamentally shift how we govern. But as the next government looks to improve our state capacity, it should look beyond surface-level debates on working from home or Civil Service salaries and think ambitiously about smarter but modern ways to make decisions. If they don’t, we’ll still be stuck with white papers by WhatsApp group.
Sebastian Payne is director of the centre right think-tank Onward
