Two UK inquiries land on the same day, and the state has answers for neither

On 15 July 2026 the UK Covid Inquiry published a module on the conduct of the Johnson administration, and within hours an unrelated inquiry into alleged SAS war crimes in Afghanistan heard that special-air-service troops dropped prisoners from a forklift "for fun." Two proceedings, two cohorts of victims, one government, and a single recurring pattern: the institutions under scrutiny are still being asked, after years of hearings, whether they can explain themselves.

That is the through-line. A pandemic-era cabinet that preferred WhatsApp to the formal record, and an elite regiment whose internal culture allegedly treated captured human beings as playthings, are not the same scandal. But they rhyme. Each inquiry is testing the same proposition: whether the British state, when it acts in the dark, is capable of producing a coherent account of what it did and why.

A WhatsApp state, exposed

The Covid Inquiry's latest findings centre on the Johnson government's use of informal messaging. Boris Johnson and senior ministers conducted business on WhatsApp and Signal, with the result that the documentary trail the inquiry needed to reconstruct decisions was often missing by design. The report characterises a culture in which the personal phone replaced the Cabinet Office box, and in which ministers regarded the preservation of official records as an inconvenience rather than a legal duty.

The unions and anti-corruption campaigners who reacted to the report on 15 July zeroed in on the accountability gap. Their case is straightforward: a government that cannot produce its own messages cannot be cross-examined on them, and a public inquiry that cannot see the documents it was set up to read is doing forensics on an empty drawer. The Johnson camp has long argued that the prime minister was balancing speed against procedure during an unprecedented emergency. The inquiry's response, in effect, is that emergencies are precisely when the rule on records matters most.

The regiment and the forklift

The SAS inquiry, sitting at roughly the same hour, was told by a former special-air-service operator that troops under investigation for war crimes in Afghanistan dropped detainees from a forklift "for fun." The testimony, reported on 15 July, describes conduct that, if accepted, sits well outside any plausible interpretation of the rules of engagement. The Ministry of Defence has previously acknowledged that investigations into the regiment are ongoing; the inquiry is examining whether the chain of command knew, or could reasonably have known, what was being done in its name.

The structural question here is older than Afghanistan. Specialised units operate with a degree of operational independence justified by the demands of their missions. That independence is meant to produce battlefield effect; the trade-off is supposed to be unusually tight internal discipline. When the discipline fails, the failure is harder to detect and harder to punish, because the evidence base is, by design, narrower than for conventional forces.

What the two inquiries share

Read separately, each module is a discrete institutional failure. Read together, they describe a state that has outsourced two of its core competencies, record-keeping in Whitehall and conduct on foreign battlefields, to small groups operating under minimal external supervision. The Covid module is about a cabinet that preferred not to be quoted. The SAS module is about a regiment that, on the evidence now being heard, preferred not to be watched.

There is a further rhyme. In both cases the inquiries are retrospective. The decisions are made, the messages are sent, the prisoners are dropped; years later, panels of judges ask whether anyone kept a copy. The answer, so far, is that the state itself did not. Private phones have been wiped. Witnesses have to be coaxed back into the room. The pattern is one in which the institution under investigation has had a long head start on the institution investigating it.

The government's position, and where it creaks

The government's public posture on the Covid Inquiry has been to co-operate while reserving position on the findings. On the SAS inquiry, the Ministry of Defence has emphasised that proceedings are ongoing, that those under investigation are presumed innocent, and that no conclusions should be drawn before the chair reports. Both positions are formally defensible, and the wire coverage carries them as the official line.

They creak for a related reason. The defence offered in both cases amounts to: trust the process, because the process is the state. But the Covid module is itself a finding that the state, in its previous incarnation, did not trust its own process enough to write things down. The SAS proceedings are testing whether the chain of command trusted its own process enough to look. The audience for both sets of hearings is being asked to accept, in 2026, the bona fides of institutions whose bona fides are the matter in dispute.

What remains uncertain

The Covid Inquiry's WhatsApp findings are descriptive; the module does not, on the reporting available on 15 July, recommend criminal referral against named individuals, and the government has not conceded the characterisation of a "culture" of informal messaging. The SAS inquiry is still taking evidence, and testimony about forklift drops is, at this stage, an account given under oath by one former operator, not a coronial or judicial finding of fact. The Ministry of Defence has not confirmed the conduct and has reiterated that investigations continue. Monexus flags both as live proceedings in which the institutional record is still being written.

What can be said without overreach is this. Two inquiries, sitting within hours of each other, are each testing whether the British state can account for its own conduct in operations, foreign and domestic, that the public was never meant to see in real time. The early answer is that accounting is harder than the acting was.

The next markers to watch: the Covid Inquiry's recommendations on a statutory duty to preserve ministerial messages, due in a later module, and the SAS inquiry's interim report on command responsibility, which is expected before the end of the year. Either document will tell the same reader how seriously Whitehall intends to take the lesson that, on 15 July 2026, was delivered twice.

Desk note: Monexus has framed the two inquiries as a single accountability story because the day's reporting makes the parallel unavoidable; the wire outlets have largely treated them as separate beats.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/s/TheCanaryUK
• https://t.me/s/TheCanaryUK
• https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-defence