Who is Isabel Oakeshott? The controversial reporter Matt Hancock trusted with 100,000 Whatsapp messages

Matt Hancock is not the first politician to have reason to question having placed his trust in Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist at the centre of the Covid Whatsapp leak.

The reporter turned writer has courted controversy before, by revealing information with far reaching consequences.

In 2013 Vicky Pryce, former wife of ex-Liberal Democrat Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne, was jailed after telling Oakeshott how she conspired to help him avoid a fine for a motoring offence.

She admitted telling Pryce there was little chance of her being prosecuted for helping her with the story.

But she denied failing in her duty of care to Pryce for publishing the story which ultimately led to her - and her former husband - being jailed.

Then, as now, Oakeshott, defended her conduct on public interest grounds.

Oakeshott faced more controversy over an extraordinary claim that David Cameron ‘had sex with the head of a dead pig’ in a student escapade.

Cameron denied the allegation which appeared in a 2015 unauthorised biography of the former PM Oakeshott co authored with Tory peer Lord Ashcroft.

In 2019 Britain’s ambassador in Washington Sir Kim Darroch had to resign after a cache of emails sent by him criticising Donald Trump were leaked to Oakeshott.

Oakeshott is now at the centre of another political storm after The Daily Telegraph accused Mr Hancock of rejecting scientific advice to Covidtest people going into care homes during the pandemic.

The paper claimed it has obtained more than 100,000 Whatsapp messages sent between the former health secretary, other ministers and advisers in what it has described as the ‘Lockdown Files’.

The communications were leaked to The Telegraph by Oakeshott after she collaborated with Hancock for his controversial Pandemic Diaries memoir, which was published in December last year ahead of a public inquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic.

Ms Oakeshott is a right-wing political journalist, author and commentator, who currently works as TalkTV’s international editor.

She was an outspoken critic of lockdowns during the pandemic and often criticised government guidance on measures such as mask-wearing.

“Let’s be honest - masks are political,” she said on GB News in March last year - two years on from the start of the pandemic.

“Unless you happen to work in a hospital or a laboratory they’re frankly nothing to do with medicine or genuine infection control,” she added. “They are completely unnecessary symbols of fear and repression.”

Masks were a hotly debated topic during the Covid pandemic.

Ms Oakeshott was born in Westminster, London and attended St George’s School, Edinburgh and Gordonstoun School in Moray, Scotland before graduating with a degree in history from the University of Bristol.

An award-winning journalist, she started her career on local and regional newspapers in Scotland, before moving to England and eventually working her way up to being the politics editor of The Sunday Times and the Daily Mail’s political editor at large - a post she held until February 2016.

It was in 2010, during her stint at the Times, that Oakeshott broke the Huhne story that led to his dismissal from the government and jail sentences for him and his ex-wife Pryce.

According to her website, Oakeshott left journalism to “write books but I have never stopped breaking big stories”.

She has co-authored or ghost written ten political books and biographies, “all of which have attracted extensive media coverage”.

Oakeshott says she is interested in defence, the state of the health service and “the true cost of cheap meat”.

She writes for magazines as well as newspapers and has appeared on the BBC’s Question Time and Radio 4’s Any Questions.