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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Andrew Sparrow

Dominic Cummings claims ‘tens of thousands’ died unnecessarily because of way Covid was handled – as it happened

Afternoon summary

That’s all from me for today. Our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog.

The Royal College of Nursing is also calling for the start date of the Covid inquiry to be brought forward in the light of Dominic Cummings’ evidence today. This is from the RCN’s chair, Dave Dawes.

Failures in planning, decision-making and accountability left nursing staff dangerously short of the protection they needed from the very beginning of the pandemic. But even today, we are continuing our demands for increased protection for health care workers as new variants emerge.

Hearing today’s proceedings will have been difficult for anyone who has lost a colleague, family member or friend to Covid-19.

We believe the formal public inquiry should be expedited as a matter of urgency.

My colleague Martin Kettle has filed his verdict on Dominic Cummings’s evidence. Here is an extract.

To understand what Cummings was doing it is important not just to be riveted by his hypocrisies and his U-turns. It is also necessary to grasp the larger significance of what he is up to. At times on Wednesday, as Cummings offered news story upon news story, that was difficult. The audacity of Cummings’s attempt, in Fintan O’Toole’s succulent Shakespearean metaphor, to transform himself from the amoral manipulator Iago into the wronged innocent Desdemona is at times breathtaking. But there is method in it too.

There is a backbone of consistency in Cummings’s political career. He has always engaged in a battle against a largely imaginary elite conspiracy to hold back iconoclastic innovators of the kind he sees in the shaving mirror each morning ...

The immediate political question is whether Cummings has knocked the government seriously off course in any way. The answer is no. The vaccine programme has got the government and the state off the hook. Johnson has kicked the official inquiry into the pandemic into the long grass. He has no interest in accelerating it, especially now.

That is a tragedy for reformers of all kinds. But Cummings will not be surprised. He tweeted last week that the “point of the inquiry is the opposite of learning, it is to delay scrutiny, preserve the broken system & distract public from real Qs”. The lone knight will be undeterred, because railing against the system is the way he likes it.

And here is the full column.

The latest edition of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast is out. Heather Stewart and Sonia Sodha discuss the rather dramatic revelations in Dominic Cummings’ marathon session giving evidence to a Commons select committee. Daniel Trilling and Lord David Blunkett talk about the problems in the Home Office. Plus, Peter Walker and Will Jennings look at the politics of levelling up.

Jeremy Hunt, chair of the health committee, and Greg Clark, chair of the science committee, have said their joint inquiry into coronavirus may publish documents from Dominic Cummings following the hearing today. Cummings said that he would provide the MPs with evidence to back up his claims about Matt Hancock being a liar.

Hunt and Clark said:

As part of our joint parliamentary inquiry into lessons learnt from the government’s response to the pandemic, it has been important to hear about decisions taken by Downing Street at the outset to deal with the threat from Covid-19.

We will review the evidence given by Dominic Cummings today and will publish relevant documents we accept as evidence in due course.

Matt Hancock will appear before us next month when we will have a further opportunity to explore steps taken by ministers and the outcomes.

Updated

Hancock says he rejects 'absolutely' Cummings' claims about him

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has issued a generalised statement rejecting Dominic Cummings claims about him. A spokesman for Hancock said:

At all times throughout this pandemic the secretary of state for health and social care and everyone in DHSC has worked incredibly hard in unprecedented circumstances to protect the NHS and save lives.

We absolutely reject Mr Cummings’ claims about the health secretary.

The health secretary will continue to work closely with the prime minister to deliver the vaccine rollout, tackle the risks posed by variants and support the NHS and social care sector to recover from this pandemic.

This statement does not address the specifics of the multiple allegations against Hancock (eg, see 11.04am, 12.27pm, or 1.06pm). But it is understood that Hancock will take the No 10 press conference tomorrow where he will be able to address these points in detail.

Updated

'Devastating' evidence from Cummings means Covid inquiry should start this summer, says Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is also saying what was said by Dominic Cummings strengthens the case for the inquiry starting early.

Boris Johnson has said the inquiry will start next spring (although he has not defined what he means by starting, and whether this means public evidence sessions will begin then).

Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, says Dominic Cummings’ evidence reinforces the need for the Covid public inquiry to start immediately.

Join a Guardian Live discussion with Guardian journalists, as they discuss the ongoing scandals engulfing the Conservative party. With Sonia Sodha, Jessica Elgot and Kalyeena Markotoff on Wednesday 2 June, 7pm BST | 8pm CEST | 11am PDT | 2pm EDT. Book tickets here.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, will have a chance to respond to what Dominic Cummings has said about him in the Commons tomorrow, because Labour has tabled an urgent question for him.

Greg Clark goes again.

Q: Do you accept from the evidence you should have done more to promote the case you became convinced of earlier?

Cummings accepts that.

Q: You edited your blog to make it look better in hindsight. Is that what you are doing here?

Cummings does not accept what Clark says about his blog.

He says it was outsiders who alerted him to the problems.

He sought advice from outsiders. But the media then criticised him for trying to influence Sage. He says his sense was that the system was failing.

Clark thanks Cummings for being very generous with his time. Matt Hancock will be giving evidence two weeks tomorrow, he says. After that the two committees will reflect and publish their report.

And that’s it. That lasted just over seven hours.

I will be posting reaction and analysis.

A summary would probably take another seven hours, but there are already extensive news reports on our website, plus analysis. You will find them all here.

Jeremy Hunt gets his own final question.

Q: It was not until 11 March that you advised the PM to change course. It took time to set up test and trace. And you did not win the argument on the timing of the second lockdown. Did you do your job properly?

Cummings says there are many thousands of people in the country who could do the job better than him.

Cummings says 99% of civil service jobs should be open to outsiders

Greg Clark says it is time to conclude.

But he has some final questions (often the best ones).

Q: What are he key lessons we should learn?

Cummings says scientific advice should be more open.

There is an obvious question about responsibility, he says.

He says normally the division of responsibility works.

But that won’t work with a big challenge like this.

He says the Whitehall policy of diffusing responsibility is “intrinsically hostile to high performance management”.

He says 99% of civil service jobs should be open by default. There are so many brilliant people in this country. But the civil service only recruits internally. It’s “crackers”, he says.

The system should be open, so we can get the best people into the best jobs.

He says he knows many senior people agree with him.

But parts of Whitehall will fight this to the death.

And his other recommendation is to think hard about incentives. People are not incentivised to tell the truth, or to think through hard problems, or to deliver.

Instead people are incentivised to keep their heads down.

He says people who are good at delivery are not rewarded.

Updated

Here is some comment from journalists and commentators on what Dominic Cummings has been saying about Rishi Sunak.

From the FT’s Robert Shrimsley

From the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe

From Sam Feedman, a former government policy adviser

Q: You spoke about people saying the UK could not follow Asian countries because “Asians all do what they’re told, so it won’t work here.” Who said that and who was promoting that outdated racist stereotype?

Sarah Owen, who asks this, is British Chinese.

Cummings says he does not want to reveal private conversations. But he says there is a problem with the UK’s refusal to learn from other countries.

Q: Is Boris Johnson a fit and proper person to get us through this?

No, says Cummings.

Q: Some people will be thinking you are betting on a Rishi Sunak administration?

Cummings says everyone, including his wife, thinks the less everyone hears from him in the future, the better.

Q: You have been very supportive of Rishi Sunak, the chancellor.

Cummings says there were powerful voices in the Treasury who were worried about the first lockdown. But he says the chancellor never tried to stop it. He says he does not remember it being discussed in cabinet. Or it was not discussed in a meaningful way. They were Potemkin meetings, he says. He did not attend meetings because he had better things to do.

Updated

Q: Is Michael Gove culpable in any of the procurement chaos?

(In the past Gove and Cummings were very close. Cummings worked for him as an adviser when Gove was eduction secretary.)

Cummings says he does not think Gove played a major role. The Cabinet Office was not responsible for procurement.

Sarah Owen (Lab) goes next.

Q: Will you publish the evidence you have to back up claims that Matt Hancock lied?

Cummings says he will think about it. But he says he is wary of publishing private messages.

Greg Clark says, if Cummings has accused someone of lying, he should publish the evidence.

Owen suggests Cummings could just share his evidence with the committee.

Cummings says he will take some advice on this.

Cummings says he was tempted to resign last summer. But various people said he should stay because Covid was going to get worse in the autumn. He says people said he should try to stay “to control the shopping trolley [Boris Johnson]”.

This is from Nick Boles, the former Conservative MP.

Cummings says he urged Johnson to sack Hancock 'sometimes almost every day'

Cummings says Boris Johnson was told he should keep Matt Hancock as health secretary so that he could sack him when the public inquiry happened.

He says his own view was that waiting was a mistake, because keeping Hancock in place would give him more time to mess things up.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

It’s definitely the case that the prime minister was told that, contrary to my view ... I said sack him, I said sack him almost every week, sometimes almost every day.

He was told though that you should not sack him, you should keep him there because he’s the person you fire when an inquiry comes along.

My counterargument to that was if you leave him there we’re going to have another set of disasters in the autumn, and that’s the critical thing.

Updated

Cummings says Dominic Raab has not got enough credit for how he handled the situation when Boris Johnson was ill. He says he also thinks Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, did a brilliant job.

Paul Bristow (Con) asks about a social media post saying Cummings is a “disingenuous little fucker” because the main reason for his decision to leave Downing Street was his failure to get his allies into key positions.

Cummings does not accept that. He says he works well with some people, and has built teams. He says much of what is said in him about the media is not true.

Updated

Cummings says he should have tried using resignation threat in September to get PM to agree to lockdown

Cummings says in late September he should have told Johnson that if Johnson did not order a lockdown, he would resign and hold a press conference and say the decision was going to cost thousands of lives. He says he does not know if this would have worked. But he apologises for not trying.

Cummings says he came to conclusion Johnson was 'unfit for the job'

Cummings says his decision to quit No 10 was linked to Carrie Symonds, the PM’s partner, trying to change various Downing Street appointments. In particular, he says she was trying to change the outcome of one official hiring process in a way that was “completely unethical”.

But he says his relationship with the PM had deteriorated. “Fundamentally I regarded him as unfit for the job,” says Cummings.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

My resignation was definitely connected to the fact that the prime minister’s girlfriend was trying to change a whole bunch of different appointments at Number 10 and appoint her friends to particular jobs.

In particular she was trying to overturn the outcome of an official process about hiring a particular job in a way which was not only completely unethical but was also clearly illegal.

I thought the whole process about how the prime minister was behaving at that point was appalling and all that was definitely part of why I went.

Updated

These are from the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, which has been campaign for a public inquiry to start now.

This is what Downing Street said earlier about the claim that Boris Johnson proposed getting injected with coronavirus live on TV. (See 9.55am.) Asked if this was true, the PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing:

I don’t plan to get into various allegations and claims that have been made today, our focus is on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the road map and distributing the vaccines.

Updated

Cummings says he was not surprised that the government delayed putting India on the red list.

Cummings says he heard PM say he would rather see 'bodies pile high' than order another lockdown

Carol Monaghan (SNP) asks how a previous PM would have dealt with this.

Cummings says if you took “anybody at random from the kind of top 1% competent people in this country” they would do things differently.

Q: Was it arrogance or complacency?

Cummings says Boris Johnson is misunderstood. People think that after he fell ill, he took it more seriously. But he thought that the first lockdown was a mistake. And he thought he had been gamed into ordering it.

There’s a great misunderstanding people have that because it nearly killed him therefore he must’ve taken it seriously.

But in fact after the first lockdown his view was ... he was cross with me and for others with what he regarded as basically pushing him into the first lockdown.

His argument after that happened was, literally quote, ‘I should’ve been the mayor of Jaws and keep the beaches open’. That’s what he said on many, many occasions.

He didn’t think in July or September, thank goodness we did the first lockdown, it was obviously the right thing to do, etc, etc. His argument then was we shouldn’t have done the first lockdown and I’m not going to make the same mistake again.

He also essentially thought that he’d been gamed on the numbers in the first lockdown and thought the NHS would somehow have got through.

Q: Did you hear him say that he would rather see the bodies pile high than order another lockdown?

Cummings says there are different versions of this. There was a version in the Sunday Times that was not correct. But he says the BBC version was correct.

He says: “I heard that in the PM’s study.”

He says this was at a different point. This was on 31 October.

Here is the BBC version of the story. And this is how it starts:

Boris Johnson said he would rather see “bodies pile high” than take the country into a third lockdown, sources familiar with the conversations have told the BBC.

The remarks were said to have been made last autumn, just as England went into a second lockdown.

This piece of evidence from Cummings is important because Johnson specifically denied saying this, or anything to this effect, in the House of Commons. Cummings is the first on-the-record witness to contradict him.

Updated

Cummings says all credible people, in his opinion, were pushing for a lockdown at this point.

But the PM was just taking his own advice.

He says the cabinet was not asked. He says he has been very critical of Matt Hancock, but Hancock agreed with Cummings at this point.

Cummings describes how Johnson rejected Sage's call for lockdown in late September

The hearing is now resuming. The next session will focus on what happened in the autumn, ahead of the second lockdown.

Dominic Cummings says Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, advised a short, sharp lockdown. The PM refused to agree to that. But eventually the government did lock down, at the end of October.

He says Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, came to No 10 proposing a lockdown lasting two weeks or more.

He says Whitty had said previously that, once schools went back in September, R, the reproduction number, would rise above 1.

He says over the summer he and others had told the PM not to tell everyone to go back to work. But the PM’s priority was the economy.

He says there was a long discussion on a Friday near the end of September when the PM said no.

Cummings proposed a meeting on Monday 21 September, looking at the predictions for what the data would say at the end of October.

But he says by this stage the PM was listening to people saying there was already herd immunity in the population.

He says Vallance and Whitty gave their views.

Prof Carl Heneghan and Prof Sunetra Gupta, both from Oxford and both sceptical about lockdown, spoke.

And Prof John Edmunds from Sage spoke too. Edmunds said they should learn the lessons from March.

But Cummings says the PM still was not convinced by the need for the lockdown.

Updated

As my colleague Claire Phipps points out, Dominic Cummings did mention threats to his family as one of the reasons for his lockdown-busting trip to Durham last year - contrary to what he implied earlier. He is an extract from what Cummings said at his Rose Garden press conference last year.

No 10 says it will not be responding to all Cummings' claims and allegations

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesperson refused to deny the claim that Boris Johnson considered sacking Matt Hancock in April last year. (See 12.51pm.) Asked about the claim, he said:

I don’t plan to get into every allegation or claim made today.

At all times the prime minister and the health and care secretary have been working closely to protect public health during the pandemic. That’s been the case throughout and continues to be so.

Asked if the PM still has confidence in Hancock, the spokesperson said:

Yes, the health secretary has been working closely with the prime minister throughout and has been fully focused on protecting the health and care system and saving lives.

Updated

Jeremy Hunt has now adjourned the evidence session until 3.05pm. He says they have one more theme to cover - what happened in September, ahead of the second lockdown.

This is the topic on which Cummings’s evidence may be the most damning.

This is from Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons home affairs committee, on what Cummings said about border policy. (See 1.12pm.)

James Davies (Con) starts his questioning by saying Cummings is now into his sixth hour of evidence.

Q: Are there lessons to be learnt from how well the vaccine taskforce worked.

Cummings says the key thing is that people knew who was responsible. The taskforce was simple. Kate Bingham picked a good team.

This is from the Labour MP Barbara Keeley, who questioned Cummings about care homes earlier. (See 1.23pm.)

Cummings says he has heard from people still in government that the vaccine programme is not working so effectively now because Kate Bingham is no longer involved.

Updated

Cummings says the companies making mRNA vaccines could create them in hours.

He says human challenge trials should have been set up much more quickly to test them.

I’ve been beefing up some of the earlier posts with direct quotes from Cummings’ evidence. To get the updates to appear, you may need to refresh the page.

Cummings says at one point the Department for Health was about to sign a “duff contract” on AstraZeneca that would not have given the government rights. He credits Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, for blocking this.

Sultana is now asking about contracts to Tory donors.

Cummings says early on he was concerned that the procurement system was too slow.

He says there needs to be a legal, proper fast-track process.

He says people like him were saying the government should just requisition planes from airline and fly them to China to get PPE. But no one know if that was legal, or if the government would be sued.

He says a system should be in place so that, in an emergency, the government could just press the panic button, and activate systems like this.

Cummings claims 'tens of thousands' of people died unnecessarily because of way Covid was handled

Q: Do you support calls for a statutory, judge-led inquiry?

Cummings says it does not necessarily need to be headed by a judge. But he says he wants a statutory inquiry, starting before next speaking.

He says “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die”.

There is no excuse for delaying, he says.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.

There is absolutely no excuse for delaying that because a lot of the reasons for why that happened are still in place now.

Look at the whole debate about variants and whatnot - this has to be honestly explained.

If No 10 today won’t tell the truth about the official plan which they briefed the media about and described on TV a year ago, what on earth else is going on in there now? ...

There is absolutely no excuse for a delay and the longer it is delayed, the more people will rewrite memories, the more documents will go astray, the more the whole thing will just become cancerous.

Updated

Labour’s Zarah Sultana goes next.

Q: Did the PM acknowledge that the herd immunity plan could lead to 500,000 deaths. Was he okay with that?

Cummings says the possible death tolls were revealed on the documents that he tweeted out earlier this week.

But this option was clearly intolerable, he says.

Cummings says in March he started getting calls from people who said mRNA vaccines could smash the conventional wisdom (and deliver a vaccine more quickly).

He says Sir Patrick Vallance backed this approach, and taking it out of the Department for Health.

And Boris Johnson agreed this “in 90 seconds”, he says.

Hunt says, having focused on what went wrong, they now want to ask about what was successful - the vaccine programme. Why did it go so well?

Cummings says Kate Bingham, who has in charge of the vaccine taskforce, had clear responsibility. And she had the “strength of character” not to be pushed around.

And she reported directly to the PM, not to the Department for Health.

Jeremy Hunt says people find Cummings’ story about going to Barnard Castle to check his eyes implausible.

Cummings says, if he were to invent a story, he would have invented a better one. A few days before that trip he was in bed writing his will because he thought he might die.

Q: But if you were testing your eyesight, wasn’t it odd to take your wife and child in the car?

Cummings says it did not feel crazy at the time. He was just driving down the road to see how it went.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

If I was going to make up a story I would have come up with a hell of a lot better one than that one right? It’s such a weird story.

The truth is only a few days before then I had been sitting in bed writing a will, what to do if I die.

I tried to explain this all at the time, it seemed to me like, okay if you’re going to drive 300 miles to go back to work the next day then pottering down the road for 30 miles and back to see how you feel after you have come off what you thought might be your death bed didn’t seem crazy to me at the time.

Updated

Cummings says the real problem was the the PM would not come up with a policy and stick to it. He was changing his mind every time the Daily Telegraph wrote a leader on the subject. He was “just like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.

Cummings says media 'massively exaggerated' his influence in No 10 after 2019 election

Cummings says although he was probably right not to resign in March last year, he was “definitely wrong” not to resign in September.

He says the press may have under-estimated his influence between July and December 2019. But after that they “massively exaggerated” his influence, he says.

If I could have clicked my fingers and done things, there would have been a serious border policy, masks would have been compulsory, Hancock would have been fired, we’d have done dozens and dozens and dozens of things.

He says the problems was that he and Boris Johnson just fundamentally disagreed on Covid.

Fundamentally the prime minister and I do not agree about Covid.

After March he thought that the lesson to be learned is we shouldn’t have done a lockdown, we should have focused on the economy, it was all a disaster, ‘I should have been the mayor in Jaws’. I thought that perspective was completely mad.

I had very little influence on Covid stuff, I mean I tried, I made arguments, but as you can see on pretty much all the major arguments I basically lost.

And the PM’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, was “desperate to get rid of me”, Cummings says.

Updated

Q: Why did you not reveal your concerns about Covid policy to the media?

Cummings says it was because he wanted to change policy within government.

James Davies (Con) is asking the questions now.

Q: Why did you not apologise last year?

Cummings says there were multiple things going on. He says he thinks his behaviour was “perfectly reasonable”. So that is why he did not want to apologise. He did not see it as a mistake.

But he was only telling part of the story. It was a complete disaster.

He says the security problems recurred. He says twice more he had to move his family out of the house.

He says the story about him returning to Durham again is false.

But he says his family did move out. He discussed that with the police, he says.

Q: Why has it taken you this long to explain this?

Cummings says he does understand people’s anger about this. He says his own uncle died in hospital with Covid around this time.

Q: Why were you targeted so much by the media?

Cummings says he has never complained about the media, or threatened to sue them.

But if you have said as many critical things about the media as he has, then they will criticise you.

He says he also wanted to change the way No 10 deals with the media. He says Downing Street traditionally operated as a “press answering service”. He says the PM was happy with that. But Cummings says he wanted to change that, and diminish the importance of the media.

Cummings says his wife insisted on family returning to London with Cummings

Jeremy Hunt says threats are totally unacceptable. But one thing he did not understand. If he moved his family out of London for security reasons, why did he move them back?

Cummings says he was very ill. He thought he might die. If it was up to him, he would have left his family in Durham. But he was quite ill, and his wife was worried about what might happen if he collapsed alone in the house. He says he was under pressure to return to work because the government was in free fall. His wife insisted on returning to London with him.

Cummings says he did not disclose last year that security threats were major factor in lockdown-busting trip to Durham

Evans asks about Cummings’ trip to Durham, and Barnard Castle.

Cummings says there is information about this not in the public domain.

He says in the autumn of 2019 he had to leave home for a few weeks because he was receiving threats.

And he says there was another incident when his wife was in the house alone, and there were people outside making threats.

He says that at that point he discussed this with officials in government, and he agreed to move his family out of London.

After it emerged that he had left London, he had to hold the press conference.

He says he made a terrible mistake. He decided it was best not to discuss the security issues affecting his decision to leave London because he thought that would just make the situation worse.

He says that this was a mistake.

This is from Prof Christina Pagel, head of the clinical operational research unit at University College London and a member of Independent Sage, an expert group that has been making Covid recommendations as an alternative to the official Sage.

Cummings describes Johnson as someone who 'changes his mind 10 times a day'

Luke Evans (Con) is asking the questions now.

Q: How would you rate government communications in this?

Cummings says some of the best people in the world were working on communications. The problems were “bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning, bad operational capability”. He goes on:

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got great people doing communications. If the prime minister changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day, you’re going to have communications disasters.

As an example, he says Boris Johnson was warned by his head of communications, Lee Cain, not to pick a fight with Marcus Rashford over school meals. But Johnson ignored that advice, and had to back down twice.

Updated

Q: It has been reported that the PM said he was not worried about the pandemic because it was only killing 80-year-olds.

Cummings says it is clear there was no proper plan for care homes. It was catastrophic.

Like all of these things, it was not deliberate. It was a function of the fact that the system was just completely overwhelmed.

On the point about 80-year-olds (see 12.12pm), he says this was an issue in September.

The hearing will get on to September later.

Cummings says he had death threats after newspaper story claimed he favoured herd immunity, with inevitable pensioner deaths

Barbara Keeley (Lab) is asking the questions now.

Q: Why was there no plan to protect people in care homes?

Cummings says they were told in No 10 that people would be tested before being sent back to care homes and they were told there was a shielding plan. Neither of those things was correct.

He says some people from the Cabinet Office, the government digital service and the communities department then got together to get the government data systems to talk to each other, so that they could produce a plan for shielding.

Q: What about social care? It was reported that in February you described the government’s plans as herd immunity, protecting the economy, and it being too bad if some old people died.

Cummings says that quote came from a Sunday Times story (paywall) that was wrong. He never said that. And the story mentioned a meeting that never took place. He says it led to people coming to his home threatening to kill him. The journalist involved later said it was the worst professional mistake of his career, he says.

Updated

Johnson 'never wanted proper border policy', says Cummings

Cummings says “there was no proper border policy because the prime minister never wanted a proper border policy”.

After April, though, it’s a completely different story, once we’ve switched to plan b.

Fundamentally, there was no proper border policy because the prime minister never wanted a proper border policy.

Repeatedly in meeting after meeting I and others said all we have to do is download the Singapore or Taiwan documents in English and impose them here.

We’re imposing all of these restrictions on people domestically but people can see that everyone is coming in from infected areas, it’s madness, it’s undermining the whole message that we should take it seriously.

At that point he was back to, ‘lockdown was all a terrible mistake, I should’ve been the mayor of Jaws, we should never have done lockdown 1, the travel industry will all be destroyed if we bring in a serious border policy’.

To which, of course, some of us said there’s not going to be a tourism industry in the autumn if we have a second wave, the whole logic was completely wrong.

He says Johnson was also being influenced by the Daily Telegraph’s “stupid campaign” on this topic, and Tory MPs were “going crackers” about this too.

He says in the early stages of the pandemic Johnson was not prioritising the economy over health. But after April it was a different story. That was when he was opposing border controls, Cummings says.

Updated

Cummings says Hancock failed to honour promise that people would be tested before being discharged into care homes

Q: The English death figures were very high partly because untested people were sent back into care homes. How was that decision taken?

Cummings says he found this shocking. When they found out in April this was happening, the PM said a less polite version of “What on earth is happening?” Matt Hancock had said in the cabinet room in March that people would be tested before they went back to care homes.

The government claimed that it had put a shield around care homes. That was “complete nonsense”. Quite the opposite happened, he says.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

We were told categorically in March that people would be tested before they went back to homes, we only subsequently found out that that hadn’t happened.

Now while the government rhetoric was we have put a shield around care homes and blah blah blah, it was complete nonsense.

Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with Covid back to the care homes.

Updated

Cummings says, if the government had been putting money into lateral flow tests in April, then September would have been very different, because millions of tests would have been available.

Cummings claims Johnson said he did not mind 'chaos' at No 10 because it meant no one else in control

Q: Why did you not threaten to resign to get your own way?

Cummings says he thought about it. He says that, in the week of 16 March, he spoke to people about how if policy did not change, he would resign and hold a press conference saying that thousands of people would die.

He says he he had a conversation with Johnson in July 2020 when he said he would leave by the end of December. He says he told Johnson the whole system was “chaos” and that he thought Johnson was more frightened of Cummings having the power to stop the chaos than he was of the chaos itself. He also told the PM he was fed up of working with people like Matt Hancock. Cummings says Johnson laughed and said that Cummings was right. He says Johnson said:

You’re right, I am more frightened of you having the power to stop the chaos around than the chaos. Chaos is not bad. Chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.

Updated

Johnson came close to sacking Matt Hancock in April 2020, Cummings claims

Labour’s Graham Stringer is asking the questions now.

Q: You have described Matt Hancock as a serial liar and disgraceful. Why did the PM not take your advice and sack him?

Cummings says Boris Johnson came close to getting rid of him in April.

Q: So why did Johnson keep him?

Cummings says that would be speculation. There was no good reason for keeping Hancock, he says.

Q: Why do you think compliance with self-isolation was not higher?

Cummings says one of the problem was the science advice being given to the public. He says the government too much focus on hand washing, and not enough on ventilation.

And he says the government did not promise to compensate people for any salary they lost.

Back in the hearing Cummings says Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, told Boris Johnson that the cabinet system was not set up to deal with a minister like Matt Hancock who repeatedly lied in meetings.

Hunt says that is a serious allegation. He says Hancock himself will be giving evidence to the committee next month.

My colleagues Ben Quinn and Peter Walker have been fact checking some of Dominic Cummings’s claims during the hearing so far.

Cummings says Hancock's interference in building test and trace 'criminal, disgraceful behaviour'

Cummings says that, when they were trying to set up the test and trace system, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, interfered. He says that was because he wanted officials to focus on work that would help him meet the target for reaching 100,000 tests per day that he had set. He said Hancock should have been sacked for this alone. It was “criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm”, he says.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

In my opinion, disastrously, the secretary of state had made, while the prime minister was on his near death bed, his pledge to do 100,000 by the end of April.

This was an incredibly stupid thing to do because we already had that goal internally.

What then happened when I came back around the 13th was I started getting calls and No 10 were getting calls saying Hancock is interfering with the building of the test and trace system because he’s telling everybody what to do to maximise his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month.

We had half the government with me in No 10 calling around frantically saying do not do what Hancock says, build the thing properly for the medium term.

And we had Hancock calling them all saying down tools on this, do this, hold tests back so I can hit my target.

In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.

It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.

Updated

Jeremy Hunt (Con), chair of the health committee, is asking the questions.

Q: Why did it take two months to set up a system?

Cummings says the core of government “essentially fell apart” early in the crisis.

Updated

The Dominic Cummings hearing has resumed, and they are now talking about testing.

Cummings says in March it was assumed that the UK would not be able to run an Asian-style test and trace system.

He says he and others, including Sir Patrick Vallance, pushed against that.

He says they realised they would have to build a test, track and trace system from zero.

Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminter, says Dominic Cummings apologised this morning. Like Starmer, he quotes Cummings’ opening apology. (See 9.36am.) If even a “disgraced figure” like Cummings can apologise, shouldn’t Johnson do the same?

Johnson says he is truly sorry for what happened. But the government acted with the intention of saving lives, he says. And it followed the best advice.

Blackford asks when the PM will accept responsibilities for the failings of his government.

Johnson says he takes responsibility. He has set up an inquiry, he says.

Updated

Starmer urges the government to bring forward the official inquiry.

Johnson says that will not be a good use of officials’ time.

PMQs: watch live

You can watch a live stream of PMQs here:

Updated

Johnson refuses to deny claim he said Covid was 'only killing 80-year-olds' when he resisted second lockdown

Starmer says there is a pattern of behaviour here: lack of planning, poor decision-making and a lack of planning. He says it is alleged Johnson said Covid was only killing 80-year-olds when he resisted the second lockdown. Did the PM use those words, or words to that effect? He says not having a lockdown last autumn was one of the government’s biggest errors.

Johnson says this will be a matter for the inquiry. There was a circuit breaker in Wales.

Updated

Starmer says the Cummings evidence has got to Johnson. He says Cummings accused Matt Hancock of misleading colleagues. Did the cabinet secretary tell him he had lost faith in Hancock’s honesty?

No, says Johnson. He says people want the government to focus on reopening the economy. That would be much more profitable line of inquiry for Starmer, he says.

Starmer says Cummings says Johnson dismissed this as “another scare story, like the swine flu”. Will the PM apologise for being complacent?

Johnson says no one can accuse the government of being complacent about the threat posed. Labour has flip-flopped, he says. Meanwhile the government has got on with the job.

Updated

Sir Keir Starmer starts by saying Dominic Cummings said the government failed when the public needed it most. Does the PM agree?

Johnson says handling the pandemic has been one of the hardest things for government. It has tried to save lives, and followed the best scientific advice.

Starmer says a year ago Johnson praised Cummings. Now Cummings says ministers fell “disastrously short”. Does the PM accept that, and that his inaction led to needless deaths?

No, says Johnson. He says the inquiry will look at this. He says Starmer is “fixated on the rear-view mirror”.

He says everyone over 30 can now come forward for a vaccination.

Updated

The Cummings hearing is taking a short break, just as PMQs starts.

Boris Johnson begins by paying tribute to the former MP Mike Weatherley.

In the Commons chamber PMQs is about to start. The Cummings hearing is due for a short break soon, but for a while I may be flitting between one event and the other, posting the most interesting exchanges.

Greg Clark is asking the questions again.

Q: Were you part of No 10 groupthink? Or did you know it was wrong, but felt too junior to protest?

Cummings says, although the original plan looked terrible, one big peak looked better than another peak in the winter.

There was a better alternative. But he says people did not start discussing that until 12/13 March. Until then, people thought the alternative approach (lockdown) was possible.

And even after that there were people on Sage who thought the lockdown policy was a mistake. The scientists were still arguing about that at the meeting on 18 March.

Cummings says he does not think of himself as a whistle-blower.

He thinks “it’s a disaster that I acted too late”.

But he was frightened of acting, he says. He says he was asking himself if he hit the panic button, and persuaded the PM to change, whether he would be responsible for thousands of deaths.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

I think it’s a disaster that I acted too late. The fundamental reason was that I was really frightened of acting.

If you’ve got an official plan, you’ve got all the Sage advice, you’ve got the Cabinet Office, the cabinet secretary, everyone saying you’ve got to do this and if we don’t do it and if we try and do something different and stop it now it’s going to many times worse in the winter, I was asking myself in that kind of two-week period if I hit the panic button and persuade the prime minister to shift and then it all goes completely wrong, I’m going to have killed god knows how many hundreds of thousands of people.

I only had the confidence to do that once I knew that people who are much smarter than me had looked at it and said basically the Sage groupthink is wrong, the DH groupthink is wrong, we’ve got to change course.

I apologise for not acting earlier and If I had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive.

Updated

Q: Are you here to settle scores?

Cummings says he was invited to give evidence. He says the relatives of people who died deserve the truth.

Q: Why did you go into No 10? Was it for your agenda or the PM?

Cummings says there would have been a crisis if Brexit had not been implemented from the second half of 2019. He says reasonable people can take different views on Brexit, but there was a crisis in 2019. He says “God only knows” what would have happened if Covid had struck then (when parliament was deadlocked).

Cummings says, if you had dropped Bill Gates or some of the most competent people in the world, into No 10 in early March they would have found it a complete nightmare.

He says there is no doubt that Boris Johnson made “some very bad judgments and got some very serious things wrong”.

But he also says Johnson was “extremely badly let down by the whole system”. He says he played a role in that.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

I have been critical of the prime minister.

But ... if you dropped, you know, Bill Gates or someone like that into that job on the 1st of March, the most competent people in the world you could possibly find, any of them would have had a complete nightmare.

There is no doubt that the prime minister made some very bad misjudgments and got some very serious things wrong.

It’s also the case, there’s no doubt, that he was extremely badly let down by the whole system. And it was a system failure, of which I include myself in that as well, I also failed.

Updated

Aaron Bell (Con) is asking the questions now.

Q: If you knew there was no plan, what were you doing in the first two weeks of March when you could have been drawing one up?

Cummings says, from about 25 February, he was having meeting after meeting, trying to find out what was going on.

He says the meeting with Helen MacNamara was focused on the NHS. (See 10.32am.) At that point there was not even a plan to bury all the bodies.

Asked about the No 10 data system, Cummings says originally he was just using the white board featured in his tweet this morning. Simon Stevens from the NHS came in with figures for people in intensive care. Cummings says he would write them on the white board, and then get his iPhone out to work out the doubling time.

Cummings says the civil contingencies secretariat in the Cabinet Office “completely collapsed” under the pressure of what was happening. They did not have the people, they did not have the skills and they did not have the data, he says.

He says the whole way the Cabinet Office handles national security issues needs to be changed.

He also says the Cobra system does not work. He says people cannot take phones or laptops into the meetings. That is to stop people like the Russians spying. But it did not work for Covid, he says, because people with laptops with the relevant data were not allowed in.

The last Cobra meeting he attended was a Potemkin meeting. He says the devolved authorities were there. But people know that, as soon as it was over, Nicola Sturgeon was just going to go out and announce what she wanted to do anyway.

Cummings says that one problem with Whitehall is that ministers cannot fire officials.

He says it would be better to have some sort of “dictator” in charge. If he had been prime minister, he would have put Mark Warner (his data scientist colleague) in charge of everything, giving him “kingly authority” over Whitehall.

The Telegraph’s Gordon Rayner points out that it is going to be a long day.

Cummings says he thinks there needs to be a thorough review of risk register planning. As an example, he cites the plans for a terrorist anthrax attack. He says he is concerned the plans are not as robust as they should be.

Cummings refuses request to disclose all his text messages with journalists

Greg Clark is asking the questions now.

Q: Did you engage in unauthorised briefings?

Cummings says generally he did not engage with the media. He says that drove the media mad, because in the past people in his position had not done that.

But he says he did speak to Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, in 2020. That was because of the special status of the BBC, he says. He says he generally spoke to her every three or four weeks.

As an example, he says on 18 March there were rumours of a London-only lockdown, with the military involved. He spoke to Kuenssberg to tell her this was not true.

Q: Were your briefings unauthorised?

Cummings says they were, in the sense that he did not get permission from the PM first.

Clark asks if Cummings will release his messages to journalists. Cummings says he does not see why people should have to reveal all their dealings with journalists.

Q: But you have committed to publishing other messages? If these briefings were designed to be helpful, will you share them with the committee?

Cummings says most of these dealings were conversations, so there is nothing to share.

He says if all dealings with journalists were to be published, that would be a very big change. He asks Clark if he would publish all his WhatsApp messages to journalists.

Clark says Cummings is the one talking about transparency. So will you share your text messages.

Cummings says he may have very little.

That will make it easier, says Clark.

Cummings says anything with a direct bearing on decisions made and mistakes made he might share.

Clark says the committee can be the judge of that.

Cummings says he will not hand over his phone. But he will share some messages with the committee.

He also says journalists themselves expect these changes to be private.

Clark says the committee will rely on his candour.

Cummings says he will need to check the messages for the public inquiry anyway, so he will see what he can do to help.

Cummings says system that offers voters choice between Johnson and Corbyn for PM deeply flawed

Cummings says that at the last election people had a choice between a government led by Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. He says any system that presents people with a choice like that has gone “extremely badly wrong”.

There are thousands of people who could provide better leadership, he says.

He also says it is “crazy” that someone like himself was able to have so much power. And it was “crackers” that Johnson was in there too, he says.

It is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position in my personal opinion.

I’m not smart. I’ve not built great things in the world.

It’s just completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there, and that the choice at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn.

He says the political parties need to ask themselves about why they present the public with choices like this.

And he says Whitehall needs to explain why people out of their depth reach senior positions.

Updated

This is from Johnny Mercer, who resigned recently as a defence minister complaining that “almost nobody” told the truth in Boris Johnson’s government.

I’ve been beefing up some of the earlier posts with direct quotes from Cummings’ evidence. To get the updates to appear, you may need to refresh the page.

Cummings gives two examples to back up his claim Hancock lied about his handling of Covid

Greg Clark asks Cummings for proof that Matt Hancock lied.

Cummings says:

There are numerous examples. I mean in the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment that they required.

He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak, and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.

Clark asks for another example.

Cummings says just before he and the PM fell ill, Hancock had told them in the cabinet room that everything was fine with PPE. It wasn’t. Later, when challenged about this, Hancock blamed Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, and the chancellor. He claimed it was not his fault. Cummings says after that meeting the cabinet secretary said he had lost confidence in Hancock’s honesty in these meetings.

Clark asks Cummings if he has a note of this. Cummings says he does, and that he will supply it to the committee.

Updated

Cummings says there was no plan for fulough.

A document was published on 3 March for Covid.

He says when they received the document, Ben Warner read it and said it was a press release. But that document was supposed to be the plan.

He says No 10 were operating on “false assumptions” (because they assumed plans existed which did not).

There was no plan for shielding, he says. He says officials did not originally want to set up a phoneline because they thought it would be swamped.

He says the plan was put together by Oliver Lewis in two all-nighters.

On shielding, on March 19, I pulled all the officials in on shielding to say where is the plan on shielding? Not only was there not a plan, lots of people in the Cabinet Office said we shouldn’t have a plan, we shouldn’t put out a helpline for people to call because it will all just be swamped and we don’t have a system.

The shielding plan was literally hacked together in two all-nighters after the 19th, I think, Thursday the 19th.

Q: Why did you call the health department a smoking ruin? And did you hear the PM talk about bodies piling up?

Cummings says the department’s procurement system was “hopeless”.

He says it was turning down ventilators because they were too expensive.

He recalls a meeting where he was told it would take months for PPE to arrive. When they were asked why, they said because it was shipped (from China, presumably). When asked why they were shipping it, not flying it in, he says they said that was how they always did it.

Updated

Cummings says Hancock should have been fired for many things, 'including lying to everybody on multiple occasions'

Rosie Cooper (Lab) is asking the questions now.

Q: Why did you not publish the Sage papers?

Cummings says Sir Patrick Vallance was in favour of publication, “as you would expect from a good scientist”. Prof Chris Whitty thought the same, and so did Sage.

But at that point they were in a crisis, he says.

They did not discuss publishing the Sage documents until the week of 9 March, when they were already “dangling over a cliff”.

Cooper says Cummings might want to discuss the claim that the PM was willing to see bodies pile up. But she goes on to ask how Cummings rates the performance of the Department for Health.

Cummings says there were many brilliant people at middle and junior levels, but they were let down by the leadership.

He says Matt Hancock should have been fired for at least 20 things, “including lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly”.

He says the cabinet secretary also told the PM Hancock should be fired, as did other senior people.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

Like in much of the government system, there were many brilliant people at relatively junior and middle levels who were terribly let down by senior leadership.

I think the secretary of state for health should’ve been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly.

There’s no doubt at all that many senior people performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect. I think the secretary of state for health is certainly one of those people.

I said repeatedly to the prime minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people.

Updated

Cummings says Johnson was more worried about threat to economy than threat to health

Cummings says in February and early March Boris Johnson, and others, thought the most serious threat was to the economy, not to public health.

And he says people also thought they had more time than they did, because Covid was not expected to peak until June.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

The prime minister’s view, throughout January, February, March, was - as he said in many meetings - the real danger here is not the disease, the real danger here is the measures that we take to deal with a disease and the economic destruction that that will cause. He had that view all the way through.

In fact, one of the reasons why it was so rocky getting from the 14th, when we suggested plan B to him, to actual lockdown was because he kept basically bouncing back to ‘we don’t really know how dangerous it is, we’re going to completely destroy the economy by having lockdown, maybe we shouldn’t do it’ ...

Now, there have been lots of reports and accusations that the chancellor was the person who was kind of trying to delay in March. That is completely, completely wrong.

The chancellor was totally supportive of me and of other people as we tried to make this transition from plan A to plan B.

Updated

Cummings says original plan would have been exposed as 'complete garbage' six weeks earlier if outside experts had been involved

Cummings says what happened was “a classic historic example of groupthink”.

The more people criticised the plan, the more people on the inside took the view that others just did not understand.

He says part of his job was to challenge things. He did do that, but he obviously did not do that early enough.

If the process had been opened up early to scrutiny by smart people, “we would have figured out at least six weeks earlier that there was an alternative plan”.

People would have realised the original plan was “complete garbage”, he says.

Cummings says at one point cabinet secretary told PM to use TV interview to describe coronavirus as like chicken pox

Cummings says there was a meeting where Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, told Boris Johnson that he should go on TV and explain that the herd immunity plan was like chicken pox parties.

Cummings says he told Sedwill not to use that analogy. Sedwill queried why. Cummings says he said coronavirus was not like chicken pox, it was spreading exponentially, and thousands of people were dying.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

We are sitting in the prime minister’s office, the Cabinet were talking about the herd immunity plan.

The cabinet secretary said ‘Prime Minister you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity plan and that it’s like the old chicken pox parties, we need people to get this disease because that’s how we get herd immunity by September’.

I said ‘Mark [Sedwill], you have got to stop using this chicken pox analogy, it’s not right’ and he said ‘why’ and Ben Warner said ‘because chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people’.

To stress, this wasn’t some thing that cabinet secretary had come up with, he was saying what the official advice to him from the Department of Health was.

Updated

Cummings says UK should have locked down 'in first week of March at the latest'

Hunt puts it to Cummings that it was a “massive failure” on his part taking so long to advise the PM that they needed to change course.

Cummings says that that was a “huge failing”.

I bitterly regret that I didn’t hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did. In retrospect, there’s no doubt that that I was wrong not to.

He says it is clear they should have locked down “in the first week of March at the latest”.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

In retrospect it is clear that the official plan was wrong, it is clear that the whole advice was wrong, and I think it is clear that we obviously should have locked down essentially the first week of March at the latest.

We certainly should have been doing all of these things weeks before we did, I think it’s unarguable that that is the case.

Updated

Cummings recalls how top official realised UK was 'absolutely fucked' because Covid plan flawed

Q: On 16 March the PM said people should stay at home. But pubs were not closed. Did you want to go further?

Cummings says he wants to explain what happened from Thursday 12 March.

At 7.48am he sent a message to the PM. He quotes it. He told the PM the Cabinet Office was “terrifyingly shit”. He says the PM should tell people that day with symptoms to stay at home.

But he says the PM was then told that President Trump wanted the UK to join a bombing campaign later. So that took up a lot of attention, and the Covid Cobra meeting was delayed.

He says that day the Times ran a story about the PM and the girlfriend and his dog. The PM’s girlfriend wanted the press office to focus on that. She was “going crackers about something completely trivial”.

He says, when the Covid meeting did go ahead, they decided to go ahead with household quarantine quite quickly.

The attorney general ruled out joining in the US bombing campaign.

That night he sat down with Ben Warner and his brother Mark and they discussed how the plan was flawed.

On Friday 13 he says he spoke to Sir Patrick Vallance. They discussed how, with the government’s plan, the NHS would be swamped.

That night he sat with Ben Warner in the No 10 study and discussed an alternative plan. This is the one he has tweeted.

He says at that point Helen MacNamara, the second most powerful civil servant, came in. She said she had been speaking to a Department of Health official who said that there was no plan and that the government was in trouble. She said they were “absolutely fucked”, he says. She said the country was heading for disaster. She realised that Cummings and Warner had come to the same conclusion.

He says on Saturday 14 March he told the PM they would have to lock down. But there was no plan for lockdown, he says.

Updated

Cummings says it was assumed at this point that the British public would not accept a lockdown, and that they would not accept Asian-style track and trace systems.

But both assumptions were false, he says.

Those two assumptions were completely central to the official plan and were both obviously, completely wrong.

Updated

Cummings says he told PM to speed up introducing Covid measures on Wednesday 11 March

Q: You tweeted your picture of plan B this morning? You spoke to the PM on the Saturday 14 March. Was that when you first told the PM the plan was wrong?

No, says Cummings. He says Ben Warner’s brother, who worked in the health department, had alerted him earlier to the problems with the official plan.

He says on the night of Wednesday 11 March he texted a group, including the PM, that the risks of delay were too high.

He quotes from a text he sent. In the message, he said there would be “massive pushback” if the government delayed starting social distancing. In the message he proposing acting more quickly.

He says he wanted the government to announce on 12 March that people should stay at home, and quarantine measures too.

Updated

Cummings says, around 5 March, he was reluctant to abandon the official plan.

He says he did not advise the the sports events planned for then should be cancelled.

At the time the advice was that those events might not be that bad for transmission, and that cancelling the events might be counter-productive, because people would go to pubs instead.

He says no one in the Department for Health drew the logical conclusion - which is that pubs should have been closed too.

Cummings says Hancock 'completely wrong' to claim herd immunity not part of government's plan

Jeremy Hunt (Con), the health committee chair, is taking over now. They turn to herd immunity.

Cummings says the term can mean different things.

The original thinking was: the disease would spread, vaccines would not be available in 2020 .... that was wrong, says Cummings; vaccines could have been obtained earlier.

So the logic originally was: Covid would arrive, and there would be a sharp peak. Measures should be introduced to push the peak down, so the NHS could cope.

In response to questions about the Chinese lockdown strategy, the argument was: in China suppressing the virus will generate a second peak in the winter, when the NHS is already under pressure. And they argued the public would not accept a lockdown, he says.

He says the choice then became one between: a bad, single peak; or two peaks, with the second one in the winter, which would be worse.

He says no one wanted this to happen. But they thought this was inevitable, and they thought the choice was herd immunity by September after a single peak, or herd immunity in January 2021 after a second peak.

That is why people started talking about it, he says.

That was the assumption until Friday 13 March.

Q: So when Matt Hancock said on 15 March that there was a plan, and herd immunity was not part of it, was that wrong?

Cummings says that was “completely wrong”. He says no one wanted this to happen. But it was seen as an “unavoidable fact”.

He says he is “baffled” as to why No 10 is now denying this.

Cummings denies rewriting old coronavirus blog - saying he just added fuller version of a quote

Q: Why did you change your blog to make it look as thought you had anticipated coronavirus?

Cummings says a lot of these stories are false. He did not change a single letter of what he wrote. But in May last year he says he thought the issue of a lab leak in China would become a huge issue, because President Trump would use it in the US election. So he went back to an article he quoted in the blog. He had half-remembered, half-forgotten it, he says. So he posted a fuller quote in his blog. That was because he wanted people to know that this was not a new issue.

Not a single word of what he wrote changed, he says. All he did was included a longer quote from an article quoted in the original.

Q: That was an intense period? Did you have the time to be editing old blog posts?

Cummings says he thought this would become a huge issue. He wanted people to know that people were warning about this earlier.

He says, given he has written so many tens of thousands of words on his blog, he did not think people would be so interested.

He says now there is more interest in Wuhan, in the light of the story about people from their lab getting ill in late 2019.

Cummings says he was not an expert in the science involved. “I’m not a smart person,” he claims. That is why he got involved. In the early stages a lot of it was doing “above my head”, he says.

That is why he sent Ben Warner, a scientist, to the meetings.

Updated

Cummings suggests PM talked about getting injected with Covid himself to reassure people

Cummings says if Johnson had attended a Cobra meeting, and said it was just like swine flu and that he wanted Chris Whitty to inject him with coronavirus live on TV, that would not have helped.

Greg Clark, who is asking the questions, does not pursue the allegation, but persists with questions about why Cummings was not able to get people to respond.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

Certainly, but the view of various officials inside Number 10 was if we have the prime minister chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone ‘it’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of’, that would not help actually serious panic.

Updated

Cummings defends not attending Cobra meetings - saying they 'leaked all the time'

Q: Did you go to the early Cobra meetings?

Cummings says he does not think so.

Q: Were you stopped from going?

Cummings says he sent Ben Warner, a data scientist, and the PM’s health adviser to those meetings.

Q: Were you at any Cobra meetings in February?

Cummings says he doesn’t remember.

Q: Did you advise the PM to go?

No, says Cummings.

Q: Why not?

Cummings says it was a better use of his time not to go.

Q: So Cobra was a waste of time?

No, says Cummings. He says Warner was a scientist, so he was a better person to go. he says he personally was briefed one to one by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, and Prof Chris Whitty, its chief medical adviser.

Another problem was that Cobra meetings “leaked all the time”, he says.

He says he preferred to have sensitive discussions elsewhere.

Q: So the most sensitive meeting in Cobra leaks?

Yes, says Cummings. He says that happened with Brexit meetings.

Updated

Q: Did you need to book meetings with the PM?

Cummings says he just went into the PM’s office. Sometimes he wrote notes, but mostly he just spoke to him.

He says he wrote a note to the PM in February, but not January.

Q: Do you have a copy?

Cummings says if he does, he will give it to the committee.

Q: Did you use text and WhatsApp?

Cummings says yes. He has copies of some of these messages, and he says he will share them with the committee.

Cummings claims Johnson 'went on holiday for two weeks' in February as Covid crisis escalating

Cummings says he had a general chat with Boris Johnson about this in January.

But the government did not act as if this was the most important thing, in January or in February.

In January “not very much” of his time was devoted to this. In February more time was devoted to it - less than half of the time in the first half of February, but more than half after that, and 90% by the last 10 days.

But, he says, the government was “not operating on a war footing” on this in February. Lots of people were “literally skiing”.

Q: Were you operating on a war footing?

Cummings says the PM “went on holiday for two weeks”.

(Boris Johnson was at Chevening at the time. No 10 has always denied he was on holiday. They claim he was working.)

Cummings issues another apology, saying he should have “hit the panic button” more than he did.

Updated

Cummings apologises for not checking pandemic preparedness plans - which were 'completely hollow'

Cummings says on 25 January he sent a text to Matt Hancock, the health secretary, about coronavirus. He asked what what been done to prepare for something like an Ebola outbreak. He says Hancock told him they had full plans, and that they were stress testing.

Cummings says he replied: “Great”. He told Hancock he was reading about what the CDC was doing in America.

He says he would like to apologise for the fact that he did not follow up on this and push it “in the way that I should have done”.

At No 10 they were told a pandemic like this was top of the risk register. He says it is “tragic” that someone like him, used to running “red teams”, did not take the same approach to this.

He says if he had taken a Saturday to look at the plans properly then, he would have realised that the plans were “completely hollow”.

UPDATE: Cummings said:

I would like to stress and apologise for the fact that it is true that I did this but I did not follow up on this and push it the way I should’ve done.

We were told in No 10 at the time that this is literally top of the risk register, this has been planned and there’s been exercises on this over and over again, everyone knows what to do.

And it’s sort of tragic in a way, that someone who wrote so often about running red teams and not trusting things and not digging into things, whilst I was running red teams about lots of other things in government at this time, I didn’t do it on this.

If I had said at the end of January, we’re going to take a Saturday and I want all of these documents put on the table and I want it all gone through and I want outside experts to look at it all, then we’d have figured out much, much earlier that all the claims about brilliant preparations and how everything was in order were basically completely hollow, but we didn’t figure this out until the back end of February.

Updated

Cummings apologises for mistakes made, including his own, and says government fell 'disastrously short'

Q: In your No 10 press conference last year you said you had warned of coronavirus for some time. You said you had mentioned this previously on your blog. So, when Wuhan declared an emergency, did you think you had thought about this in advance.

Dominic Cummings says senior ministers and senior advisers like him “fell disastrously short of the standards the public had a right to expect in a crisis like this”.

He starts with an apology for the mistakes made, and for his own mistakes. He says: “When the public needed us most, the government failed.”

UPDATE: Cummings said:

The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this.

When the public needed us most the government failed.

I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that.

Updated

Dominic Cummings committee hearing opens

Greg Clark (Con), chair of the science committee, opens the hearing.

He says Matt Hancock, the health secretary, will give evidence to the joint inquiry on 10 June. After that the two committees doing the inquiry will publish their report.

Dominic Cummings arriving at the House of Commons ahead of his select committee appearance.
Dominic Cummings arriving at the House of Commons ahead of his select committee appearance. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

One of the problems that Dominic Cummings faces is that, while it is easy to believe that the government’s handling of coronavirus last year was seriously flawed (the evidence for that is clear, and even Boris Johnson himself as said many mistakes were made), given that he was supposedly the most powerful aide in Downing Street for much of that time, he cannot escape all responsibility.

In his London Playbook briefing this morning Alex Wickham says WhatsApp messages are circulating in Whitehall that “blow apart Cummings’ central claim — made in his epic Twitter thread over the past few days — that he has sought to expose government ‘lies’ over its alleged policy of herd immunity during the virus’ first wave”. Wickham writes:

The revealing messages were last night circulating throughout Whitehall and call into question Cummings’ current claims to have sought transparency and honesty while, he alleges, government ministers “lied” about herd immunity. The WhatsApps clearly show that, at the beginning of the pandemic in March last year, Cummings directly told his colleagues to publicly deny herd immunity was the government’s policy, and instead agreed they should argue it was a secondary long-term effect of the “mitigation” policy pursued by the government at the start of the crisis.

Cummings’ direct order to ministers to deny that herd immunity was their policy could mean one of two things: That herd immunity either never was the government’s main strategy, meaning his tweets over the past few days are wrong, or that it was but he nonetheless instructed ministers to lie, detonating his supposed claims to be pursuing transparency and seriously undermining his credibility ahead of today’s select committee appearance. If Cummings’ tweets of the past few days are to be believed, these messages show he was guilty of the exact thing he is now accusing ministers of doing.

This should come as no great surprise. Downing Street has always denied that “herd immunity” was its strategy - even though Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said the opposite in a TV interview - and at the time the No 10 head of communications, Lee Cain, was effectively under Cummings’ line management, so Cummings must at least have acquiesced in the denials.

Rather than saving up all his anti-Johnson allegations for the hearing, Dominic Cummings seems to have been briefing them out liberally all week - a bit like the Treasury ahead of a budget. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has a new one this morning.

Cummings releases picture of No 10's first white board planning for lockdown

Dominic Cummings has been tweeting all week ahead of his evidence today - you can read his mammoth Twitter feed here - and this morning he has topped it up, with a picture of a white board in Downing Street, where on Friday 13 March No 10 staff started drawing up plans for a lockdown. Until then the plan had been for “mitigation”, a softer approach to protecting the public, which is often characterised as the “herd immunity” strategy. On Monday 16 March Boris Johnson announced what was effectively a soft lockdown - he told people to stay at home - and a week later the full, statutory lockdown was announced.

As the Labour peer Steward Wood points out, there is a chilling question on the white board: “Who do we not save?”

Updated

Minister casts doubt on Dominic Cummings’ credibility ahead of his Covid evidence to MPs

Good morning. Today we are going to get what is probably the most eagerly-anticipated select committee hearing in the Commons since Rupert Murdoch turned up 10 years ago to answer questions about phone hacking. This morning’s attendee is another sometime hate figure for liberal, progressive Britain, although Dominic Cummings is now primarily seen as a Covid whistleblower and a figure hell-bent on damaging Boris Johnson’s premiership, rather than the Vote Leave mastermind who was largely responsible for putting him in No 10 in the first place.

Here is my colleague Aubrey Allegretti’s preview story head of the hearing.

Here is a background from Aubrey on what to expect. And here is a more brutal take from my colleague Marina Hyde, who says “the level of self-mythologising indulged in by Cummings and his capos has been off the scale”.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was doing the morning media round for No 10 this morning and on Times Radio he rubbished Cummings using the nickname that Boris Johnson uses to describe Sir Keir Starmer, “Captain Hindsight”.

Given that Starmer has had a much better record than Johnson at anticipating the need for lockdown measures, that might not be as effective a put-down as Shapps thinks. But Shapps also cast doubt on Cummings’ reliability. He told BBC Breakfast:

I will leave it to others to judge how reliable a witness that former adviser happens to be.

Asked if Cummings was a “trusted adviser” to the PM when he worked in Downing Street as Johnson’s chief strategist, Shapps replied:

He was certainly an adviser of the government. It’s for others to decide the trusted part of it.

Here is the timetable for the day.

9.30am: Dominic Cummings starts giving evidence to a joint hearing of the Commons health and science committees.

12pm: Boris Johnson faces Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs.

1.30pm: Downing Street is expected to hold its daily lobby briefing.

Today I will be mostly focusing on what Cummings says. For global coronavirus news, do read our global live blog.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Updated

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