Pressure grows on Gething as Welsh Government confirms it has no record of deleted messages

The Welsh Government has confirmed that it does not hold a record of the ministerial group chat messages created during the Covid-19 crisis that Vaughan Gething told colleagues he was deleting – suggesting that he did in fact delete them.

This intensifies pressure on the beleaguered First Minister, who is already reeling from double scandals – firstly from NationCymru’s revelation that he accepted donations totalling £200,000 for his Welsh Labour leadership campaign from a company owned by businessman David Neal, who received two suspended prison sentences for environmental pollution; and secondly because he mislead the UK Covid Inquiry by deleting messages, contrary to what he had said in evidence to it.

On May 7 we published a message from a screenshot leaked to us dated August 17 2020 in which Mr Gething – who was Health Minister at the time – wrote: “”I’m deleting the messages in this group. They can be captured in an FOI [freedom of information request] and I think we are all in the right place on the choice being made.”