Boris Johnson branded Matt Hancock 'hopeless' bombshell texts released by Dominic Cummings have revealed.
The PM's former advisor dropped a political hand-grenade just before PMQs on Wednesday by posting a stream of WhatsApp messages on his blog for paying subscribers.
In one, dated March 27 last year, Mr Cummings complains the government has been turning down ventilator offers because the "price has been marked up" - to which the PM replies: "It's Hancock. He has been hopeless."
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Less than an hour later, Mr Cummings complains about Matt Hancock and the lack of testing for NHS staff to which the PM replies: "Totally f***ing hopeless", the Mirror reports.
The screenshots also show three missed calls from the Prime Minister, which Mr Cummings says was the PM calling to inform him that he had tested positive for Covid-19.
In his accompanying blog, Mr Cummings wrote: "The missed calls are the PM calling me to say he’d tested positive and I couldn’t find my phone buzzing, we spoke minutes later."
A month later on April 27, the Prime Minister admits "on PPE it's a disaster" and adds: "I can't think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting Gove on".
Mr Cummings chose to publish the carefully-selected texts on his SubStack account after ignoring pleas from a Commons committee to send evidence formally to them.
Despite being cherry-picked by the ex-aide, some of the texts appear to undermine Mr Cummings' own arguments.
One on March 24 says he asked "how do we get as close to 100k [tests] per day as fast as this country can possibly manage it, almost regardless of cost".
In public, Mr Cummings had branded the 100,000-a-day target "stupid".
