Starmer’s disappearing messages erase public records

The hidden record that’s vanishing

The families waiting for decisions on their benefits do not know what was said about their cases. The Palestinians in Gaza cannot see the messages that determined whether British arms would continue flowing to Israel. The Windrush generation, already promised a scandal would never happen again, watch as the state erases its own paper trail for a second time.

On 2 June 2026, Number 10 confirmed what had long been suspected: Prime Minister Keir Starmer uses disappearing messages on his personal device. Every exchange with senior figures like Peter Mandelson has been automatically deleted. The government released a tranche of Mandelson’s emails. From Starmer, it yielded one page.

One page. That is the official record of the Prime Minister’s communications with one of the most powerful figures in British politics. Everything else has vanished.

What we are not allowed to see

The law since 2013 has been clear: substantive discussions and decisions by government ministers must be retained as official records. Not suggestions. Not guidance. The law says a record must be kept “if it is needed for substantive discussions or decisions.”

But now, the burden of proving that anything important was discussed falls on the public. We must demonstrate what was lost, without access to what was lost. We must prove the harm we cannot see.

FoxGlove, the campaign group that has spent years fighting for government transparency, put it plainly: “Once a text is gone, it’s gone. Vital evidence of government decision making is being lost. This is the modern equivalent of shredding documents.”

They are right. And the victims of this shredding are not in Westminster. They are in Birmingham, in Gaza, in the homes of disabled people waiting to see if their support will be cut.

The same wound, twice

The Post Office Horizon scandal gave us a window into what happens when evidence disappears. Alan Bates and thousands of sub-postmasters spent decades fighting to prove what officials knew about the faulty software destroying their lives. The records were incomplete, the trail cold. They were told to prove a negative. Many died waiting.

The Windrush scandal saw the Home Office literally destroy landing cards for Black British citizens. Paulette Wilson, who came to Britain as a child, was wrongly detained and deported. Her crime was being made invisible by a government that had made her invisible on paper. When the evidence emerged of what was done to her and hundreds of others, ministers expressed shock. But the destruction had been deliberate.

Now we are told that the Prime Minister’s messages with Mandelson, on Brexit, on Covid response, on the arms trade, on the cost of living crisis, have simply evaporated. The same road. The same erasure. The only difference is that this time it happens at the swipe of a finger, not the shredding of a cabinet.

The defender’s case

The government will say that disappearing messages are used only for “non-corporate communications” and are “in line with government advice.” They will note that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak used similar tools. They will argue that substantive decisions are still recorded through official channels.

This is the argument from the law as a floor. The government is technically correct: they are not breaking the law. But the law is the floor, not the ceiling. When the Post Office was destroying evidence, it was also technically operating within its own guidelines. So was the Home Office when it shredded Windrush cards.

The defence is that no specific decision has been proven to have been affected. But this is precisely the trap. The burden of proof has been inverted. The public must now prove harm from evidence they are forbidden from seeing.

What must be done

The Information Commissioner’s Office must launch a full investigation into the use of disappearing message functions across government. Every minister and senior official must be required to certify what substantive discussions occurred on these channels and when. The Cabinet Office guidance on non-corporate communications must be rewritten to make auto-deletion of any government-linked messages a disciplinary offence.

The victims of the decisions made in these vanished conversations deserve to know what was decided about their lives. The families of the Gaza dead deserve to know if Starmer discussed arms exports in messages that now cannot be retrieved. The claimants waiting for their benefits decision deserve a government that records what it does, not one that erases the trail.

This is not about Keir Starmer the individual. This is about a system of secrecy that the last Conservative government normalised and this Labour government has inherited without question. The people on the receiving end of power, the disabled, the poor, the marginalised, are owed an account.

The least the Prime Minister can do is make sure that account is kept.