Indecisive Boris Johnson a ‘shopping trolley smashing between aisles’, says Cummings
Dominic Cummings has hit out at Boris Johnson’s indecisiveness and described him as “a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other” as a part of a blistering attack on his apparent inability to lead the country as Prime Minister.
Cummings said that it was “crackers” Johnson was in office and that the Prime Minister once said chaos in government was a good thing, because “chaos means that everybody has to look to me to see who is in charge”.
The former Number 10 aide has been speaking for five hours at a marathon joint session of parliament’s health and science committees.
He has claimed the UK government’s response was a disaster that needlessly costs tens of thousands of lives, that Matt Hancock should have been fired multiple times and that Johnson is inept.
He said one example of this was the Prime Minister’s refusal to close the borders last year and ban inbound travel.
“Everybody was screaming on quarantine ‘have a policy and set it out clearly and stick to it’,” Cummings said.
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“‘We cannot keep changing your mind every time the Telegraph writes an editorial on the subject’ – everybody agreed with me about that. Regardless of what they thought the real policy should be.
“No one could find a way around the problem of the Prime Minister [being] just like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other.”
Earlier on Cummings was even more scathing in his attacks on Johnson, saying that he was unfit for office.
“Any system which ends up giving a choice between two people like [Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn] to lead is obviously a system that has gone extremely badly wrong,” he said.
“In any sensible, rational government it is complete crazy that I should have been in such a senior position in my personal opnion.
“I’m not smart, I’ve not built great things in the world, it’s completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there just the same as it was crackers Boris Johnson was in there.”
Cummings has claimed that after the first lockdown Johnson regretted the decision and that he was reluctant throughout the second half of last year to implement new restrictions.
“Fundamentally, the Prime Minister and I did not agree about Covid after March,” he said.
“After March he thought the lesson to be learnt is we shouldn’t have done the lockdown, we should have focused on the economy, it was all a disaster, I should have been the mayor from Jaws [who kept the beach open].
“I thought that perspective was completely mad.”