Downing Street’s political advisers have never before attended meetings of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), according to a review of all publicly available minutes of meetings over the last decade.
The Guardian revealed on Friday that the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and another No 10 aide who worked with him on the Vote Leave campaign have been attending Sage meetings.
Downing Street has insisted it is “entirely right” for its political advisers to attend meetings of the group, which is supposed to provide the Cabinet Office with independent scientific advice on emergencies.
Sage, which is chaired by the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, was first convened to provide scientific advice on swine flu in 2009.
Since then, almost 50 Sage meetings have been held, including those convened to respond to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, 2013 winter flooding, the ebola outbreak, an earthquake in Nepal, the Zika outbreak and the near-collapse of a dam at the Toddbrook Reservoir last year.
There is no evidence in the publicly available minutes of those meetings of any Downing Street officials or political advisers attending. A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy did not dispute that Covid-19 Sage meetings marked the first time political advisers had attended.
“The nature and scale of this emergency, which is impacting the UK in a more direct manner, differs from those that Sage has been mobilised for in the past and, as such, the rotating expert attendance and list of government officials involves a broader set of representatives,” the spokesperson said. Downing Street did not dispute the minutes.
The government has been adopting an unusually combative approach to journalists in recent weeks after a slew of articles by investigative reporters raised questions about how ministers are responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Friday, when the Guardian revealed Cummings had attended Sage, Downing Street released a statement saying: “Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this.”
Last week, after the Sunday Times investigative report criticised Boris Johnson for failing take the pandemic seriously, the Department of Health published a blogpost saying the article contained “a series of falsehoods” and “actively misrepresents” the government’s response. The Sunday Times flatly denied the “kremlinesque” accusations from the government.
After the Financial Times last week exposed the “muddled thinking” behind the government’s ventilator procurement plan, the Cabinet Office reacted with an almost 3,000-word retaliation, which also took aim at the personal tweets by the newspaper’s journalist Peter Foster.
Reacting to Downing Street’s trenchant criticism of the Guardian’s reporting on Cummings and Sage over the weekend, Foster tweeted it was reminiscent of techniques used by Donald Trump’s White House to “muddy waters, create world of equal and alternative ‘facts’ and traduce media”.
