There’s an old saying in politics: you should avoid watching sausages and policy being made. Both will put you off for life.

Thanks to Matt Hancock’s sharing of 100,000 WhatsApp messages, we now get to see how policy is made on the hoof. Its not a pretty sight.

Of course, making policy through a dynamic period is always going to be ugly, and there is no doubt that there was a lot of stress at the time. But the regular drip feed of leaks provided by the Telegraph is not pretty reading. The Covid pandemic, and the necessary response by No10 and wider policy makers, was always going to messy. But what we are seeing here is a series of lurid comments by people trying to find a way forward, safe in the knowledge that the messages were, for the time being at least, private.

The messages, and many more between other people involved, will all form the basis of the Covid enquiry. This is an incredibly important period of lesson learning. Other countries have conducted theirs already and we are taking quite a bit of time to get started. I’m not sure why this is the case, but what is important is to have well tested process of legal examination to ensure that decisions made, in the context of what was known at the time, were the right ones.

Matt Hancock’s decision to share these private messages with journalist Isabel Oakeshott was unwise. It was done in the context of him seeking to get out his lockdown memoirs (remember, he was Health Secretary during most of the pandemic) early, and he employed Oakeshott to write the book in his name. I understand that she signed an agreement with him that the sharing was done on the basis of information only, and that there was an agreement that they could never be shared. But it was always risky.

Oakeshott, however, now finds herself on the sharp end of journalistic criticism. Journalists get their stories based on the principle of keeping sources secret. That express agreement between source and writer means we get a lot public interest stories into the media. What Oakeshott has done completely undermines the principle of source protection. No one would now risk opening up, secretly, to a journalist.

Hancock has betrayed the confidence of his colleagues. Oakeshott has trashed the protected source principle. And every has preconceptions of the outcome of the official Covid enquiry. Everyone loses out.