Dom’s day out: Cummings blames PM for tens of thousands of Covid deaths as he reveals Number 10 chaos
Dominic Cummings has laid the blame for tens of thousands of Covid deaths at the feet of Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock in an explosive seven-hour hearing in which the former Number 10 aide pulled the curtain back on a year of chaos inside government.
Cummings told MPs that Johnson was “unfit” to be Prime Minister, that he said last February that Covid was a “scare story” and that he ignored advice from his top scientific officials to lock the country down last September.
The Prime Minister allegedly said on multiple occasions last year that the first lockdown was a mistake and that he should have been like “the mayor from Jaws who kept the beaches open”.
Cummings also agreed with media reports last month that Johnson did indeed say he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than plunge England into a third lockdown.
Cummings revealed the UK’s preparations for the pandemic were so bad that a senior civil servant told Cummings last March that “we are absolutely f***ed” after weeks of government incompetence and complacency as the pandemic hit the UK.
The explosive claims in full:
Hancock was also repeatedly skewered in the combined meeting of parliament’s health and science committees, with Cummings accusing him of lying on multiple occasions and of causing thousands of care home deaths.
He said the health secretary should have been fired “15 or 20 times” for incompetence.
He also apologised for the government’s poor early repsonse to the pandemic, saying “senior officials and advisers such as me fell disastrously short” of public expectations.
“Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die,” Cummings said.
Herd immunity?
Cummings claimed the UK’s initial strategy to fight the pandemic was to not impose tough restrictions and instead let the virus infect people to create herd immunity – an approach tried by Sweden.
He said the government rationale was that this approach would prevent a second peak later in the year, despite the potential for hundreds of thousands of deaths throughout 2020.
Cummings says this decision, made while other European countries were locking down, is a key reason behind the UK having one of the highest coronavirus death rates in Europe.
The government denies herd immunity was ever the official plan.
Cummings said there was no plan in Number 10 to fight the pandemic up to mid-March as cases began to rapidly rise and that deputy cabinet secretary Helen McNamara stormed into Number 10 at this time to say the response had been a disaster.
Cummings claims she said: “I’ve come here to tell you all I think we are absolutely f***ed, I think this country is heading for a disaster, I think we’re going to kill thousands of people”.
He blamed government “groupthink” for the early resistance to consider lockdown.
“Me and others realised the system was delaying [stricter Covid measures], because there’s not a proper plan in place,” he said.
“On the 14th we said ‘you are going to have to lockdown’, but there is no lockdown plan, it doesn’t exist. Sage hasn’t modeled it, the Department of Health don’t have a plan, we are going to figure it out and hack it together.”
Speaking 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.”
However, Johnson’s former confidant said the seeds for early failure were sown in February.
He said the government was not concerned about Covid, despite already being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) at this point, and that the Prime Minister wanted to get injected with the virus live on TV to demonstrate its harmlessness.
Cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, meanwhile, allegedly told the Prime Minister that he should tell people to have “chicken pox parties” for Covid to get more people infected.
Cummings said other top Downing Street advisers “were literally skiing in the middle of February” and that “it wasn’t until the last week of February that there was any sense of urgency across the Cabinet Office”.
Cummings said the chaos around Number 10 was welcomed by the Prime Minister as “chaos means that everybody has to look to me to see who is in charge”.
Testing woes
The former Number 10 adviser said Hancock botched the UK’s test and trace regime and that it should have been taken off him.
He said former cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill agreed with him and that Boris Johnson “came close to removing” the health secretary in April 2020.
Number 10 said today that it had “full confidence” in Hancock.
Cummings told MPs that Hancock diverted resources when setting up the country’s testing regime to meet his 100,000 tests a day target last April at the expense of having longer-term success.
NHS Test and Trace was widely considered a failure as it failed to prevent a second and third lockdown in October last year and January this year.
He also said the government took so long to set up a testing regime, because at first the plan was for the UK to get herd immunity and not to lockdown.
It finally became policy to set up mass testing in April 2020, with Hancock promising 100,000 tests a day by the end of that month.
Cummings claims “I said repeatedly from February to March, if we don’t fire the secretary of state and if we don’t get the testing into someone else’s hands we’re going to kill people and it’s going to be a catastrophe”.
“The whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundametally trying to operate in different ways,” he said.
“Completely because Hancock wanted to go on TV and say look at my 100k target. It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”
Johnson’s former top aide also accused Hancock of repeatedly lying about the UK’s supplies of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), about testing in care homes and on NHS treatment of non-Covid patients.
Cummings said people going from hospitals to care homes were not tested for Covid and that there was no “protective ring” around the elderly as the government continually claimed.
A spokesperson for Hancock said: “We absolutely reject Mr. Cummings’ claims about the health secretary.
“The health secretary will continue to work closely with the Prime Minister to deliver the vaccine rollout, tackle the risks posed by variants and support the NHS.”
September deja vu
Johnson reportedly had a “fundamentally different view” of Covid to Cummings during the second half of last year, with the Prime Minister unwilling to impose new restrictions despite rising cases and deaths.
Cummings told MPs that Johnson became very anti-lockdown after March 2020, despite almost dying from Covid-19 himself.
He said the Prime Minister “was cross at me and others for what he regarded as basically pushing him into the first lockdown”.
Cummings alleged 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.
Cummings 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 more than a month later to call the lockdown.
“[Johnson’s] argument after [he was hospitalised] was literally – I should have been the mayor of 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.”
He said he regretted not resigning in September and conducting an explosive press conference to try and bounce Johnson into a second lockdown.