Who is Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who broke an NDA to leak Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps?

Isabel Oakeshott has admitted she didn’t tell Matt Hancock she was going to leak 100,000 of his WhatsApp messages before sharing them with the Daily Telegraph.

The Brexiteer journalist and political commentator has passed on more than 2.3 million words from exchanges the former health secretary and his colleagues had about COVID policy at the height of the pandemic.

Her leak broke the non-disclosure agreement she signed that promised she would only use the messages on background to ghost write Mr Hancock’s book, Pandemic Diaries.

She has vehemently defended her decision, which she claims is “overwhelmingly” in the public interest – as she believes the inquiry into the government response to the pandemic will take far too long to achieve genuine justice.

But her reported breach of contract has led to criticism from Conservative MPs and journalists – particularly in light of other controversies she has been involved in.

From King Charles’s school to political journalist

Ms Oakeshott was born in Westminster in the mid-1970s before moving to Scotland.

She attended fee-paying schools St George’s in Edinburgh and Gordonstoun in Moray – where both King Charles and his father the Duke of Edinburgh went.

After graduating with a history degree from the University of Bristol she moved back to Scotland to begin her journalism career in local newspapers.

In the early 2000s she moved to London to be the Evening Standard’s health correspondent.

Read more:
The key WhatsApp exchanges
Analysis: explosive message lay COVID policy bare

Three years later she took her first steps into political journalism and joined the Sunday Times, where in 2010 she was made political editor and in 2011 she was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Press Awards.

A year-long stint as the Daily Mail’s political editor-at-large followed before jobs at GB News presenting her show The Briefing with Isabel Oakeshott in 2021 and as TalkTV’s international editor from mid-2022.

She has three children and was previously married to the American Nigel Rosser. She has since been in a long-term relationship with Richard Tice, the leader of Reform UK, formerly known as the Brexit Party.

Matt Hancock’s book is the 10th she has worked on.

MP imprisoned and ambassador forced to resign

Following the publication of The Lockdown Files in The Telegraph, Mr Hancock accused Ms Oakeshott of a “massive betrayal and breach of trust”.

But many of his former Tory colleagues have questioned his decision to entrust her with the archive – even with legal protection.

What is an NDA?

In 2011 when she was working at The Sunday Times she agreed to write a story about Vicky Pryce – the ex-wife of former Liberal Democrat minister Chris Huhne, who Ms Pryce had separated from following an affair.

Ms Pryce told Ms Oakeshott she had taken points on her driving licence for a speeding offence Mr Huhne committed.

She discussed with Ms Oakeshott over email how they might report the story to discredit Mr Huhne.

But the front-page article that materialised led to the Crown Prosecution Service revisiting the incident, requesting the email exchanges, and ultimately both Ms Pryce and Mr Huhne being sentenced to eight months in prison for perverting the course of justice.

In 2015 she co-authored a biography of then-prime minister David Cameron with the Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft.

He had felt let down by Mr Cameron, having donated millions to the 2015 election campaign only to be denied a top job in his coalition government.

The book, Call Me Dave, failed to have major success and was largely remembered for the claim Mr Cameron engaged in a sex act with a dead pig while at Oxford University.

He fiercely denied it and Ms Oakeshott later admitted she only had one source to back the allegation up.

“It’s my judgment that the MP was not making it up, although I accept there was a possibility he could have been slightly deranged,” she told a book festival audience.

As an ardent Brexiteer, in 2016 she helped write Arron Banks’s book The Bad Boys of Brexit on his account of the EU referendum.

The Leave.EU founder gave her his texts and emails from the time, which Ms Oakeshott later published in the Sunday Times, revealing he had far more dealings with Russian officials than he had previously admitted.

Three years later in 2019 she wrote a series of articles in the Mail on Sunday that revealed the UK ambassador to the United States Sir Kim Darroch had described Donald Trump’s presidency as “inept” and “utterly dysfunctional”.

He was forced to resign, conceding his position had become untenable.

But following the saga there were claims the story had not been hers – and instead the work of a teenage freelance journalist called Steven Edginton – who was involved with the Brexit Party and had wanted to stay anonymous to avoid any repercussions.

Hancock and Oakeshott have ‘absolutely nothing in common’

During the pandemic, she quickly declared herself a lockdown-sceptic, claiming that outside of clinical environments face masks are merely “political” and “nothing to do with genuine infection control”.

After Mr Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair with aide Gina Coladangelo forced him to resign, Ms Oakeshott worked with him on his memoir for a year.

She has claimed she wasn’t paid for her work, saying it was “richly rewarding in other ways”.

But soon after its publication in December last year, Ms Oakeshott wrote a piece for The Spectator alluding to her motives in co-authoring the book.

In it she admitted the pair have “almost nothing in common” and that they “fundamentally disagree” over how COVID should have been dealt with.

‘I broke NDA, but it wasn’t personal’

She hinted: “Journalists don’t only interrogate people they disagree with. Quite the reverse.

“What better way to find out what really happened… than to align myself with the key player?”

Mr Hancock says his leaked messages have been “spun to fit an anti-lockdown agenda” and denies he “ignored” advice to test all people entering care homes in England.

When asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if Ms Oakeshott warned the former minister about her plans to leak the messages, she said: “I didn’t tell him.”

She added in a statement: “Hard though it may be for him to believe, this isn’t about Matt Hancock, or indeed any other individual politician. Nor is it about me.

“We were all let down by the response to the pandemic and repeated unnecessary lockdowns.

“I make no apology whatsoever for acting in the national interest: the worst betrayal of all would be to cover up these truths.”