RISHI SUNAK insisted today that he is helping the Covid-19 inquiry “expansively” after it was revealed that he could not provide potentially vital WhatsApp messages.

The Prime Minister, who was chancellor at the time and involved in major decisions about lockdowns, face masks and the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, claimed that he did not have access to messages sent and received during the pandemic.

He blamed changing handsets “a number of times” since the early days of the pandemic for being unable to provide potentially important evidence.

Mr Sunak claimed messages were not backed up and that no records remain.

Asked by the BBC at the Tory Party conference in Manchester whether it was true he no longer had the WhatsApp messages, Mr Sunak said: “What I can tell you — because, obviously, this is a legal process which is going on — is that I’m helping the Covid inquiry fully and very, very expansively with everything.”

The second stage of the independent public inquiry into government’s handling of the pandemic began today and will examine key decisions made by ministers between January 2020 and February 2022.

Lead counsel for the inquiry Hugo Keith KC told the hearing that the inquiry had received messages from more than 250 WhatsApp groups from 24 “custodians.”

He said this was in addition to thousands of pages of one-to-one WhatsApp threads.

“I should say that that material includes copies of WhatsApp groups to which Rishi Sunak MP was a participant,” he said.

“We also have multiple one-to-one threads of WhatsApps with him.”

He added that the inquiry now has material extracted from an old phone belonging to former PM Boris Johnson but it was “right to say, we’ve not received everyone’s WhatsApp texts or iMessages.”

“Some were apparently deleted accidentally, and we’ll be asking why that happened,” he said.

“However, in light of the very large number of messages and diary entries that we have received, we have, we believe, a very good picture of what happened.”

Mr Keith said the “disharmony” between No 10 and the Department of Health & Social Care is apparent from the WhatsApp messages and diary entries.

He said the messages between Mr Johnson, his adviser Dominic Cummings and others “betray a depressing picture of a toxic atmosphere” with “factional infighting” and attacks on colleagues.

“A text from Simon Case, then a senior civil servant yet to become cabinet secretary to [former health secretary] Matt Hancock on the 29th of April reads: ‘The Cabinet Office is a totally dysfunctional mess at present, so not a great place to be’.”

Mr Keith also quoted from the diary of former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, in which he said one Cabinet Office document had been made up of cherry-picked guidance.

In another note, Sir Patrick said: “Number 10 chaos as usual.”

In July 2020 when restrictions were lifted, Sir Patrick said: “The ridiculous flip-flopping is getting worse” and “the CMO [chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty] and I are both worried about the extreme inconsistency from the Prime Minister, lurching from ‘open everything’ to panic.”

Earlier, inquiry chairwoman Baroness Heather Hallett said families who had lost loved ones during the pandemic will not be ignored as the inquiry progresses.

She acknowledged calls for more bereaved people to be brought in as witnesses but said there was not enough time to hear more.

Shadow minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said: “Victims’ families and the public will be rightly angered to learn that the Prime Minister who promised integrity and accountability now appears to be putting his own political concerns ahead of the interests of the country by blocking evidence to the inquiry.”