Limited Hangout Files
A case for careful scrutiny of The Telegraph's so-called "Lockdown Files"
Rounding the Earth
The following article serves as the show notes for the video presentation of the same name released through the Rounding the News series, presented by Rounding the Earth. It is provided to allow RTE listeners to verify my sources and conduct their own due diligence, and is intended as a supplement to the video. As such, I highly encourage readers of this Substack to watch the full episode and support Rounding the Earth, whose founder Mathew Crawford has provided me the platform and resources to conduct this important work. Thank you, Rounding the Earth!
Limited Hangout Files
Is anyone else picking up on a trend?
On February 28, British new outlet The Daily Telegraph kicked off a new series of articles titled “The Lockdown Files”. The series is centred around a set of 100,000+ WhatsApp messages provided to the Telegraph, purporting to demonstrate the many failures of key British Government officials during the course of the COVID-19 era — in particular, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Chief Scientific Adviser Chris Witty.
The supposed revelations are exciting, affirming the emerging consensus that the response to the declared pandemic caused far more harm than good. From the government’s use of “nudge” units to govern by fear, to the outright rejection of evidence-based scientific advice, to conflicts of interest linking together bureaucrats and lobbyists, the Lockdown Files have it all. Topped off, of course, with nods to sex scandals and Bill Gates.
Despite the appearance of a full-on revelation of wrongdoing, The Lockdown Files are far from a tell-all exposé. In fact, I am concerned that behind the flashy headlines lies an effort to misdirect and mislead believers and dissidents alike.
Defining a Limited Hangout
At the risk of telling readers what they already know, allow me to introduce the concept of the “limited hangout.” For this, I will borrow the words of Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency:1
A "limited hangout" is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.
It goes without saying that the general public is much more openminded to the idea that the last few years have not only resulted in policy decisions that didn’t work for their stated purpose, but actually caused significant harm. Certain topics are starting to seep into mainstream publications, including the reality that all-cause mortality is soaring in countries all around the world — in other words, more people are dying from all causes, including so-called “COVID-19”, after COVID-19 measures were implemented in 2020.
Of course, few of them are outright blaming pandemic policies. Specifically, there is a long list of reasons why decision-makers at all levels would aggressively want to redirect focus away from the ever-clearer reality that all available COVID-19 vaccines are injuring and killing people en masse. The legal and spiritual liability on those who promoted, coerced and forced needles into arms is immense and is increasingly difficult to avoid. As such, it’s no surprise that as news of vaccine injury and death continues to spread, so too will stories focusing on other causes that are equally or less likely to explain the global state of affairs. In the end, it was the totality of institutional actions that led to this widespread harm, and all must be examined with precision and depth for accountability to be possible. Nothing must be left out.
And as the reality of the illness and death worldwide continues to take hold in the public consciousness, “we don’t know” will quickly lose its validity as an explanation.
Here are a few examples:
March 7, 2023: Nova Scotia tight-lipped about spike in deaths - CBC News
February 9, 2023: ‘Severely damaged’ and abandoned: Australian victims of COVID-19 vaccine injuries feel they are ‘not being heard’ by Australian Government - Sky News
November 7, 2022: Child speech delays increase following lockdowns - BBC News
With this in mind, let’s examine The Lockdown Files.
The Lockdown Files
On February 28, 2023, the first article in The Lockdown Files was published. Titled “The Lockdown Files: How WhatsApp messages offer an unprecedented view of government failings,” the Telegraph article explained that the revelations to follow “will help people form their own conclusions about what the UK went through in the darkest days of the pandemic.”2
No author was listed on the debut article. In fact, the vast majority of articles in the series would be credited to the pseudonymous “Lockdown Files Team” with accompanying commentary inserted as opinion pieces by Telegraph writers, columnists and editors.
One of the 12 articles published on Day 1 was titled “I had to release Matt Hancock’s Covid WhatsApp messages to avoid a whitewash”, written by Isabel Oakeshott, the source of the “leaked” communications.3 She explains that she was provided copies of the 100,000 messages by Matt Hancock himself while the two collaborated on writing his memoir, titled The Pandemic Diaries. Specifically, she says that Hancock “downloaded the records from his phone and shared them with various people” following his June 2021 resignation from government. Hancock publicly confirmed this, stating they had “worked closely together for more than a year on [his] book, based on legal confidentiality and a process approved by the Cabinet Office.”4
Oakeshott immediately defended her decision to provide copies of these confidential messages to The Telegraph, expressing concern that the United Kingdom’s “Covid Inquiry” would “become a colossal whitewash.” After all, the inquiry had already spent nearly two years and tens of millions of pounds in taxpayer money, and has not yet even started in earnest.56
In order to fast-track the process, Oakeshott decided it would be the most ethical choice to tap The Telegraph to help her get what she feels is the real story to the public.
Format matters
This brings us to a very important question: if Oakeshott’s mission was full disclosure of the dark inner workings of the UK government’s COVID-19 decision-making, then why did she decide to selectively release the messages one-by-one through a third party news organization? Why introduce a gatekeeper into the process, when you’re claiming to be removing the gatekeeper from the equation?
In her article published in the British Medical Journal, writer Jacqui Wise points out that “Oakeshott has said she chose [The Telegraph] because of its anti-lockdown stance.”7 Surely she could have seen this coming as a criticism, and combatted it by inviting at least one so-called “pro-lockdown” outlet to balance out the public perception of Oakeshott’s good intentions of unbiased, transparent revelations of the truth. As noted in the BMJ article, “The BMJ, like other media outlets, has not seen or independently verified the messages.”
It gets even more suspect when you realize that so far, no actual WhatsApp messages have been produced.
Hear me out for a second on this.
We’re told that Hancock downloaded the 100,000 WhatsApp messages from his phone. There are a few ways for him to have done this. As outlined by this explainer published by data storage service Backblaze, there is an Export Chat feature that results in messages in .txt format, along with accompanying media files in their own specific format (.jpg, .mov, .mp4, .gif, and so on).8
Assuming Hancock wasn’t sending and receiving hundreds or thousands of videos or high-quality pictures, the resulting folder would be very small and easy to share, as he did with Oakeshott and others — especially when compressed into a .zip archive, which is a required step depending on how the files were shared. Alternatively, they may have been stored on a Google Drive or Dropbox account, reducing the need to repeatedly upload and download copies of the whole archive.
Here’s what I’m getting at: it would be very easy to include copies of the messages in their original format, complete with metadata for verifiability, to substantiate The Telegraph’s reporting. Why are they not doing this? If they are taking advantage of the trove to squeeze as much attention as possible, they could opt to release one message at a time as they are revealed in a given article.
If not this specific process, a near equivalent necessarily took place. At least for Android phones, message backups are stored in a folder called “Databases”, as shown on WhatsApp’s own website:
The database would need to be loaded up inside WhatsApp in order to actually read the messages, an option available to the general public and journalists alike. It seems to me less likely that Hancock would have shared the messages in this clunkier format, but even if it is the case that he did, the Database folder would still be easily published for the public to review and independently verify as real.
Your next thought might be: “But Liam, they are releasing the messages! Even better; they’re releasing screenshots, which could only have been taken by Hancock’s phone (or the recipient).” Actually, that’s not even true. Think about how overwhelmingly laborious it would be to take individual screenshots of every single message, let alone the limitations that would place on what else could be seen onscreen for context. It’s not a reasonable premise, and is logically baseless to think that Hancock would even try to sit down and take hundreds of thousands of screenshots as a backup, whether or not he intended to then hand them out to journalists. It would be far more reasonable to suggest he had captured screenshots of specific messages that he considered particularly notable — heck, I do that in the moment sometimes, with no specific intention to store or distribute them. But that’s not what we’re being told happened. We are told that 100,000 WhatsApp messages were downloaded from Hancock’s phone, which necessarily were not in the form of “images” generated by screenshots.
So why do we instinctually think of them as screenshots? Let’s take a closer look at the “messages” as they appear in The Telegraph articles.
The above image is a screenshot taken by me from the March 9 article titled “Ministers feared 'racist' label if they spoke about Covid spread”.9 For the purposes of this demonstration, you'll need to open up the article on your own computer (a smartphone should still work, but will be more finicky).
On first glance, the WhatsApp message thread looks like it was taken straight from Hancock’s phone, or perhaps his iPad or laptop (due to the width). But with the benefit of four seconds of thought, the reality begins to set in. Are we supposed to believe that those profile pictures are the photos selected by Hancock and/or Nadine Dorries? Look closely at Hancock’s face.
From a distance, he’s not exactly portraying a sympathetic character, though a larger version of the same photo looks much more like a press shot. A reverse image search reveals that the photo has been used for a handful of news pieces starting with a March 31, 2020 BBC article about Hancock recovering from a “mild” case of COVID-19.
I suppose the implication here is that Hancock admired the Reuters-attributed picture so much that he decided to set it as his WhatsApp profile picture. Similar results are found by repeating the process for Dorries.
Alas, The Telegraph is not actually even pretending these are screenshots. If you look even closer, the messages are presented in a composite format of text, images, and interactive annotations.
In this image, I scrolled my cursor over the highlighted “Andy Burnham” text, which reveals an annotation explaining who Burnham is (the Mayor of Greater Manchester). Needless to say, these are useful elements that were added by The Telegraph. Hovering over the “i” icon beside a message results in a similar pop-up annotation, this time offering an interpretation of the message as opposed to adding simple biographic context.
My point is this: these are not the original messages, nor are they screenshots of the original messages. They are editorialized representations of .txt files, which were backed up and then exported from Hancock’s phone for easy distribution in bulk.
If this is such a monumental story, the effects of which are supposedly intended to dramatically alter the course of the United Kingdom’s post-COVID-19 inquiry in the court of public opinion, then why fail to provide the evidence required to independently verify the basis of the reporting?
Even if my wish were granted and the underlying messages were disclosed along with their accompanying articles, there’s still the matter of the selective disclosures. A narrative is being written by the team behind The Lockdown Files, and it is a biased one. It’s not possible to avoid gatekeeping, as the individual or collective bias of The Telegraph team working on the articles will result in some material being withheld so as to best support whichever “truth” they’re trying to architect — for better or worse.
What is being said?
At this point, I can confidently say that I feel it’s most likely that The Lockdown Files are an attempted “limited hangout” operation. It is an institutional campaign by all accounts; the WhatsApp messages were provided by a representative of the institution to an number of institutionally-sanctioned co-authors, who then provided those messages to an institutional media organization. At no point in this process were the messages “leaked”, and no “whistleblower” makes an appearance. These words are misleading, and do not represent the chain of events.
Heck, The Lockdown Files already has its own Wikipedia page. It doesn’t get much more institutionally-endorsed than that, especially in the context of COVID-19.
With that in mind, let’s summarize some of the primary “revelations” from The Lockdown Files.
Harm to elderly long-term care residents
In an article titled “Far from a ‘protective ring’, WhatsApp messages show care homes were cast adrift”, Hancock is accused of putting senior citizens in danger by failing to make COVID-19 tests mandatory for all entering long-term care facilities.10
This "widely criticised policy was blamed for care homes accounting for roughly half of all excess deaths (25,374) between March 7 and Sept 18 last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as coronavirus ripped through facilities caring for 400,000 residents in England.
All of this harm is blamed squarely on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which apparently would have been prevented if mandatory testing was, in fact, implemented. The article’s entire premise relies on the notion that diagnostic testing ever did, or ever could, provide any meaningful information with which to determine whether or not someone is contagious with a disease-causing virus.
It also entirely fails to mention the plethora of other reasons long-term care residents were dying in large numbers in 2020, not the least of which is the widespread use of “end-of-life” care to treat patients that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. What I would have expected The Telegraph to cover is the record-breaking increase in the use of powerful sedatives including midazolam and morphine, both of which depress breathing and essentially resulted in the systemic euthanizing of senior citizens.1112 Incredibly, there were even calls to loosen regulations to allow morphine to be deployed in even greater quantities for "relaxing patients who have acute shortness of breath."13
A second article describes Hancock’s concern that increasing the rate of testing at nursing homes would “get in the way of actually fulfilling the capacity in testing” — or, as The Telegraph put it, “put his personal goal in jeopardy.”14 Heaven forbid the campaign operate within its capacity to succeed!
February 28, 2023: The leaked WhatsApp messages that expose how Britain’s elderly were failed on Covid
February 28, 2023: I want to hit my target, Matt Hancock said as he called in a favour from George Osborne
February 28, 2023: The Lockdown Files: Matt Hancock rejected expert advice on care home testing, WhatsApp messages reveal
This was compounded by facilities that chose not to subject staff to testing, apparently out of concern they would be forced to operate with even less staff than their already-thin roster.
March 1, 2023: Care homes refused to test staff they feared had Covid
Granted, a later article correctly emphasizes the “inhumane” decision to prevent friends and family from visiting care home residents. This is reminiscent of what my friend Dr. York Hsiang experienced with his mother here in British Columbia, Canada. Many elderly residents suffered due to these policies with no reason whatsoever to believe they would help. Former U.K. First Lady Rachel Johnson penned a guest piece for The Lockdown Files (yes, you read that right) sharing her mother’s own experience in “care home prison.”15
February 28, 2023: Matt Hancock was told care home Covid rules were ‘inhumane’ – but kept them
Discussion of senior citizens and long-term care facilities essentially ended after March 2, moving on to more sensational matters.
Preferential treatment for government officials
There are numerous examples provided of elected officials and bureaucrats receiving preferential treatment, “unfairly” getting a step up in the pandemic.
On what exactly? Testing.
February 28, 2023: Jacob Rees-Mogg's child got Covid test couriered to family home during huge shortage
Then there was the “Partygate” incident - or rather, a similar incident recounting government officials getting together to party while regular citizens were forced to stay isolated.16
The country’s “Quarantine Hotels” were a source of humour for Hancock and Permanent Secretary Simon Case.
Here are several more examples of the COVID chiefs enjoying themselves:
March 2, 2023: Top mandarin mocked holidaymakers ‘locked up’ in Covid quarantine hotel rooms
March 3, 2023: I broke the lockdown rules – and pipsqueak Matt Hancock couldn’t stop me by Nigel Farage
March 3, 2023: Matt Hancock said worst he and Gina could be accused of was kissing ‘before they legalised hugs’
March 5, 2023: Matt Hancock covered up inviting Gina Coladangelo to G7 dinners
Physical and psychological health damage from “shielding” policies
And yes, there is even mention of the harms caused by “shielding policies” - another way of describing “social distancing” or “lockdown” policies.
This is just a sampling of the dozen or so topics covered by The Lockdown Files. It is by no means exhaustive, but I have attempted to at least capture the headlines and archived versions of the articles as they appear daily; these can be seen on the Campfire Wiki on the page titled “Lockdown Files”.
The Telegraph themselves are also publishing all of the Lockdown Files articles on a special page for the series, which you can keep track of here.
What is the outcome?
Just as with our discussion of Canada’s Political Chaos last week, we must ask, qui bono? Who benefits from the selective release of these messages and the narrative architected out of it? Furthermore, what are the stated objectives of the mission?
We already know that The Telegraph’s source, Isabel Oakeshott, wants to sway public opinion to expedite the UK’s Covid Inquiry. But the Lockdown Files are beginning to also include headlines such as the following:
March 7, 2023: Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office by Allison Pearson
March 9, 2023: No 10 to consider Wuhan leak theory after backlash to 'entirely coincidental' remark
In other words, Matt Hancock is absolutely being painted as the patsy to be taken down in some form or another, perhaps even put in jail. Don’t get me wrong; I agree that Hancock is to blame for his actions, assuming it can be demonstrated that they resulted in harm (which is essentially a given). But to put the blame squarely and solely on him is absurd and transparently dumb.
Then there’s the matter of the “lab leak”, which the British Government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is apparently starting to take seriously just now. As my friend Jonathan Couey commented yesterday during his livestream of the U.S. Congress’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, this comes three years after critical thinking individuals like him were warning of the possibility of laboratory manipulation, and many months after those same people went one step further to warn that the “lab leak” premise was fundamentally impossible, arguing instead that the “lab leak vs. natural spillover” dichotomy is a trap that dooms humanity to biosecurity tyranny in either case. How convenient that the mainstream narrative is now catching up.
It’s a trap: COVID-19 variant “deployed”
Speaking of traps, I must bring up an example of how the Lockdown Files have already shown themselves able to trip up highly intelligent, critical thinking people.
On March 4, an article was published titled “‘Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant”. The headline is deceptive, and so is the body of the article. It reads:17
Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed. …
The previous month, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, appeared to suggest in one message that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would be helpful in preparing the ground for the looming lockdown, by scaring people into compliance.
In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole - one of Mr Hancock’s media advisers - informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “we can roll pitch with the new strain”.
The comment suggested that they believed the strain could be helpful in preparing the ground for a future lockdown and tougher restrictions in the run-up to Christmas 2020.
Mr Hancock then replied: “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”
Mr Poole agreed, saying: “Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change.”
The following day, Rounding the Earth’s own Mathew Crawford posted the following on Twitter:
I had some questions.
Others we know did, too.
The problem, as far as I see it, is that nothing in the article actually indicates, or even suggests, that there was any sort of “release” of anything — other than propaganda. However, I don’t blame Mathew for jumping from A to Z, filling in gaps with what is the most likely scenario based on his research outside of the Twitter thread. The result of this article is obviously that some people, like Mathew, will read this as a literal “deployment” of a new variant, rather than what the article actually says and provides as evidence, which is that the British Government sought to “deploy” propaganda to frighten to public into compliance.
Gain-of-function viruses are not the threat to our humanity. Fear is.
I’m not trying to be hard on Mathew. On the other hand, he is a role model of mine and a mentor, and I won’t hesitate to point out when I think he’s making mistakes. I did it before when he began his Chaos Agents series, and I have since come around to believe that he was much closer to reality than I was. This is the scientific method, and I look forward to learning more about his Omicron hypothesis — whether or not this article has anything to do with it after all.
In the end, I ask every one to question: what other “Insert-noun-here Files” have we recently experienced, and did they too fail to provide the underlying evidence behind their explosive revelations? And if so, why are we not holding such outlets and journalists to the same high standard to which we hold those we disagree with?
Marchetti, V. (1978, August 14). CIA To Admit Hunt Involvement In Kennedy Slaying. The Spotlight. https://archive.org/details/marchetti-victor-cia-to-admit-hunt-involvement-in-kennedy-slaying-the-spotlight-aug.-14-1978/mode/2up
Telegraph View. (2023, February 28). The Lockdown Files: How WhatsApp messages offer an unprecedented view of government failings. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/kXhG7
Oakeshott, I. (2023, February 28). I had to release Matt Hancock’s Covid WhatsApp messages to avoid a whitewash. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/3UXR7
Whannel, K. (2023, March 1). Covid messages leak a massive betrayal, says Matt Hancock. BBC News. https://archive.ph/QsLVA
Harrison, E. (2021, May 12). Covid: Lessons to be learned from spring 2022 public inquiry - PM. BBC News. https://archive.ph/Lrhq8
Rayner, G. (2022, June 27). Covid inquiry hires more than 60 barristers – and could cost £14m a year. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/UrBeM
Wise, J. (2023). Covid-19: Leaked messages reveal casual policy making—and love for Whitty. BMJ, p522. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p522
Kaufman, B. (2022, June 1). How to Back Up and Restore WhatsApp Messages and Files. Backblaze Blog. https://archive.ph/czL6U
The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, March 9). Ministers feared “racist” label if they spoke about Covid spread. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/DQQnZ
Tominey, C. (2023, February 28). Far from a “protective ring”, WhatsApp messages show care homes were cast adrift. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/u6XWC
Fuller, A. (2020, July 12). Care homes accused of using powerful sedatives to kill corona victims quickly. The Sun. https://archive.ph/C1dUc
Adams, S. (2020, July 12). Prescriptions for the drug midazolam doubled during the pandemic. Daily Mail Online. https://archive.ph/MiFZh
Nutt, D., & Hamilton, I. (2020, May 12). Coronavirus: why the law on morphine should be loosened. The Conversation. https://web.archive.org/web/20220812161740/https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-why-the-law-on-morphine-should-be-loosened-138055
The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, February 28). Matt Hancock feared care homes could “get in the way” of his ambitious Covid testing target. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/if9Za
Johnson, R. (2023, March 2). As police pursued my father during Covid lockdown, my lonely mother endured care home prison. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/SVdua
The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, March 2). Piers Morgan has quit – how about we celebrate, asked minister while parties were banned. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/M5ZMQ
The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, March 4). “Project Fear” authors discussed when to “deploy” new Covid variant. The Telegraph. https://archive.ph/26dLs
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