i went into telegraph towers — the headquarters of the telegraph — today.hown the bunker which is how they describe this kind of windowless room where about eight journalists, since the turn of the year, so for two months, sitting in a room not much bigger than the newscast studio, not much bigger than your average maybe bedroom in a house, where they are all sitting behind desktop computers that are not on the internet, that is where the data is. they're than having to if they are looking at a link that may have been shared in one of these whatsapps, they are having to type it out longhand in order to fire it up on their laptop — that is the data security that is going on — and they have been ploughing through it, all these different whatsapp groups with all of these different strands of stories that are coming out. and the journalist who is at the heart of that effort is isabel oakeshott, who has worked at a few newspapers but she is working with the telegraph on this. and crucially, she worked with matt hancock, helping to write his pandemic diaries book

we are at telegraph towers, the headquarters of the daily and sunday telegraph here. room full of computers that are not connected to the internet, i think that's right. yeah, that's right. where the cleaners haven't been in for two months and there is old takeaway forks on the floor and all the rest of it. our audience will be interested in how this has been assembled journalistically. talk us through that. the process has been extraordinarily energy intensive. the telegraph put an enormous team onto this. and it has been very methodical. you know, when you are doing a project like this, what you don't want is ten journalists or going off in different directions, you know, making notes in different formats and getting excited about different things but not telling each other. so the way this was managed has been utterly meticulous, extraordinarily professional, very formulaic. you know, there was a huge volume of material to go through so that had to be carved up between different whatsapp groups. some of them are very big groups. there is one whatsapp group in parti