As the country was hurtling towards the coronavirus lockdown, Boris Johnson's former chief adviser Dominic Cummings has been describing the "surreal" events going on behind the scenes at Downing Street.
Giving evidence to a committee set up to look the lessons that have been learnt from the pandemic, he described the events of what happened on March 12 and took a swipe at Prime Minister Boris Johnson's girlfriend Carrie Symonds, who he said was going "crackers" over a newspaper story about her dog.
The day was 10 days before the Prime Minister announced the national lockdown while the pandemic was mushrooming out of control.
Mr Cummings said that Downing Street should have been focusing on the need to force the pace on coroanvirus and stop the rapidly rising tide of infections but the pandemic got overshadowed by the dog story and President Trump wanting to get the UK involved in a bombing campaign in the Middle East.
Speaking to the Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee on Wednesday, Mr Cummings started his description of the day by explaining what he had written in a text message written at 7.48am.
It read: "We have got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly s***. No plans. Totally behind the pace. We must announce TODAY, not next week that if you feel ill with cold or fly symptoms stay home.
"Some around the system want to delay because they haven't done the work. We must force the pace. We are looking at 100 to 500,000 between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios."
He said the plans then got derailed when the national security team got in touch President Trump said he wanted the UK to join American in a bombing campaign in the Middle East that night.
Explaining how the day panned out, he said that rather than focusing on Covid the Government was consumed with a potential bombing campaign in the Middle East at the request of Donald Trump and a "trivial" story in the Times newspaper about Boris Johnson, his fiancee Carrie Symonds and their dog Dilyn
He said: "And then to add to ... it sounds so surreal couldn't possibly be true ... that day, the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog.
"The Prime Minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that.
"So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq? Part of the building was arguing about whether or not we're going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial."
Dominic Cummings said the situation in Downing Street in mid-March was like "a scene from Independence Day with Jeff Goldblum saying the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken and you need a new plan".
Mr Cummings said on March 14 Boris Johnson was told that models showing the peak was "weeks and weeks and weeks away" in June were "completely wrong".
He said the PM was warned: "The NHS is going to be smashed in weeks, really we've got days to act."
