Dominic Cummings joked in a private message about taking his family to the countryside in March 2020, about a fortnight before he infamously did just that in apparent breach of lockdown laws.
In a near-augury of his infamous trip to Durham and then Barnard Castle, Cummings, then the chief aide to Boris Johnson, made the comment to Michael Gove as the two complained about a lack of action in tackling the Covid pandemic.
The messages, shown during Gove’s evidence to the Covid inquiry on Tuesday, began on 4 March when Gove, then the lead Cabinet Office minister, messaged Cummings: “We are fucking up as a government and missing golden opportunities … the whole situation is even worse than you think and action needs to be taken or we’ll regret it for a long time.”
Gove told the inquiry this was about a series of issues, not just Covid. But after a pause, during which he missed five voice calls from Cummings, the duo resumed a discussion on what Cummings called “corona hell”.
On 11 March, Cummings messaged Gove to say that the Cabinet Office was “a fucking joke”, saying: “They told us they had plan. Obv bollocks.”
After Gove replied: “Indeed”, Cummings went on to joke: “I’m tempted to take family to countryside and hold a press conference saying you’re on your own – the CabOff and parliament have fucked us all.” He added: “People should be shot,” to which Gove replied: “Who did you envisage first in line?”
Just 16 days later Cummings travelled to a property owned by his parents in Durham with his wife, who had contracted apparent Covid, and their young son.
The family were sighted there by several locals, including during the now-famed jaunt to Barnard Castle, a local beauty spot, on 12 April, when Robin Lees, a retired chemistry teacher, spotted Cummings and noted down the family car’s numberplate.
Such strong evidence of this visit led Downing Street, which had strongly denied any wrongdoing, to arrange a press conference in May 2020 in which Cummings claimed he drove to Durham for back-up childcare when he and his wife were sick, and that he only drove to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight.
Giving evidence to MPs a year later, Cummings said he had moved his family out of London for security reasons on the advice of police, which he had not been able to disclose at the time.
