Cummings: Boris Johnson DID say he would rather see ‘bodies pile high’ than lock down a third time
Dominic Cummings has claimed Boris Johnson did say last October that he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than plunge England into a third lockdown – the first person to publicly corroborate the story on-record.
It was widely reported last month that Johnson was so infuriated when he was forced to announce a second lockdown that he yelled the comment in his Number 10 study – a claim the Prime Minister denied.
He also said Johnson was not a “fit and proper person” to be Prime Minister.
Cummings told MPs at a marathon joint health and science committee meeting today that Johnson became very anti-lockdown after March 2020, despite almost dying from Covid-19 himself.
The former Number 10 aide said the Prime Minister “was cross at me and others for what he regarded as basically pushing him into the first lockdown”.
Cummings said Johnson eventually called a second lockdown after more than a month’s resistance on 31 October and that he did indeed say he would rather see the “bodies piled high in their thousands” than call a third lockdown.
The Prime Minister did anounce a third lockdown just months later.
“I heard that in the Prime Minister’s study,” Cummings said.
“That was not in September, that was immediately after the decision he made to do the lockdown on 31 October.”
Cummings said that he and other scientists from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) tried to get the Prime Minister to agree to a short lockdown in September 2020 when Covid cases were on the rise.
He said it was becoming clear that cases were rising at a pace that would soon overwhelm the NHS, but that Johnson “wasn’t persuaded by this” and that it took until Covid deaths were rising rapidly weeks later to call the lockdown.
“[Johnson’s] argument after [he was hospitalised] was literally – I should have been the mayor of [the movie] Jaws and kept the beaches open – he said that on many occasions,” Cummings said.
“The Prime Minister took the view in Jan-Feb that economic harm caused by action against Covid was going to be more damaging to the country than Covid.
“We could not persuade him that if you took the view of let it rip and not worry about Covid, you would get not just all the health disasters, but you would also then get a huge economic disaster.”
Cummings said he regretted not resigning in September and conducting an explosive press conference to try and bounce Johnson into a second lockdown ealier.
He said he could have saved “tens of thousands” of lives and avoided the subsequent lockdown if he had got the PM to call a second lockdown earlier.
In Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) today, Johnson said: “None of the decisions have been easy – to go into a lockdown is a traumatic thing for the country, to deal with a pandemic on this scale has been appalling difficult and we at every stage have tried to minimise the loss of life. We have followed the best scientific advice that we had.”