Dominic Cummings says the government’s response to the COVID outbreak last year “fell disastrously short of standards required by the public”
Dominic Cummings has claimed that the health secretary, Matt Hancock, should have been sacked for lying, and that Prime Minister Boris Johnson thought that COVID-19 was a “scare story” like swine flu within the early days of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
In an explosive hearing on coronavirus in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister’s former chief adviser has told MPs that the government failed the British public in the early months of 2020.
Explaining why Boris Johnson had not attended the COBRA meetings at the beginning of last year, he said that: “The prime minister described it as the new swine flu, I certainly told him it wasn’t.
“The view from No 10 was if the PM chairs COBRA and says it’s just swine flu that would not help.”
This comes after ministers have backtracked over local travel advice for eight areas worst hit by the Indian Covid variant, after a change in advice led to confusion.
He added that Mr Johnson wanted to be injected with the coronavirus live on TV by the government’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty to show that it was not a harmful virus.
Lashing out at Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Dominic Cummings claimed that he and the cabinet secretary, as well as other senior officials had called for the Prime Minister to fire the health secretary for “at least 15-20 things, including lying”.
Cummings said that Boris Johnson “was close” to firing Mr Hancock back in April of 2020 “but wouldn’t do it”.
The Prime Minister’s former chief aide also said:
• It is “crackers” that people like the now Prime Minister and Jeremy Corbyn were the only two options at the last general election
• Rishi Sunak supported a nationwide lockdown, it was Boris Johnson who did not think the COVID-19 pandemic “was the big danger”
• “It is crazy I should have been in such a senior position, I’m not smart, I’ve not built great things in the world; neither is the PM” , and he said that he and Johnson let down brilliant junior colleagues
• There was no plans in place for financial help for the public and the Chancellor and his team had to create the whole financial scheme in just a few days
• There was no plan for the shielding of the vulnerable in the pandemic plan but some “brilliant” officials from within the Department of Health hacked together the plan in just two all-nighters
• “Groupthink” had prevented government ministers and officials from realising how severe the situation was going to get
• On telling the Prime Minister he was going to resign in December of 2020, Cummings claimed that Johnson told him: “I am more frightened that you have the power to stop the chaos, when everyone’s in chaos they have to look to me.”
• On Matt Hancock saying that people would be tested before they returned into care homes and there was a shield around care homes, Cummings said: “Quite the opposite, complete nonsense, we sent people with COVID back to care homes”
• He would rate the UK government’s response: “Some individual brilliant responses, overall system, total failure.”
• Dominic Cummings revealed that he had made the trip to Durham in order to take his family out of London following several death threats and a gang outside his house where both his wife and son, aged three, were.
This comes after failures within England’s test-and-trace system are partly responsible for a surge in the Indian variant, a report seen by the BBC has said. For three weeks within both April and May, eight local authorities in England did not have full access to the test-and-trace data on positive COVID tests in their area.
At the start of the session, Dominic Cummings said that the government had failed the UK public when they needed them most and also apologised to the families of those who had died in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Taking some of the blame himself, he said: “The truth is, senior minister, officials, advisers like me fell disastrously short of standards required by the public.
“When the public needed us the most, the government failed. I want to apologise to all those families who had people that died.
“I did think oh my god, is this what people have been warning about all this time?
“However, PHE, WHO, CDC, organisations across the western world were not ringing the alarm bells about it then.
“In retrospect, it’s completely obvious that many institutions failed.”
