Dominic Cummings says Boris Johnson was distracted at a crucial point in the Covid pandemic crisis by negative stories about Boris Johnson's fiancee's dog.
The former adviser, giving evidence to MPs this morning, said it became clear the UK was "heading for total catastrophe" by March 12, 2020 but aides were distracted as Carrie Symonds' "going completely crackers" about a story claiming their dog Dilyn would be re-homed.
National security chiefs were also trying to get answers about a request from Donald Trump for the UK to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East.
Hre said in February Boris Johnson had gone on holiday and 'many people were literally skiing'.
Mr Cummings told MPs: "So everything to do with Cobra that day on Covid was completely disrupted because you had these two parallel sets of meetings.
"You had the national security people running in and out taking about 'are we going to bomb the Middle East' and we had Cobra meeting delayed because we were trying to figure out what to do about household quarantine."
He went on: "That day the Times had run a huge story about the PM and his girlfriend and their dog and the PM's girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that.
"So we had this completely insane situation where parts of the building were saying, are we going to bomb Iraq, part of the building arguing about whether we are going to argue about are we going to do quarantine or not.
"The PM has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial and you have all these meetings going on through the course of the 12th."
Ms Symonds dismissed the story about her dog as "total crap".
She tweeted at the time: "There has never been a happier, healthier and more loved dog than our Dilyn.
"100% bs. The people behind this story should be ashamed of themselves.”
Mr Cummings told MPs he had been pressing for a tougher response to the virus in early March.
He said: "There was push back from within the system against advising the following day, i.e the 12th, to say stay at home if you've got symptoms.
"And me and others were realising at this point the system is basically delaying announcing all of these things because there's not a proper plan in place."
He added: "As far as I could tell from Sage, and as far as the minutes show, the fundamental assumption remained we can't do lockdown, we can't do suppression, because it just means a second peak."
