Dominic Cummings: Key evidence from ex-aide's bombshell testimony

Mr Cummings, who left No.10 in November last year after falling out with Ms Symonds, said the government had not acted quickly enough to deal with the crisis, claiming incompetence in a whole range of areas including procurement of health equipment and PPE, border control, lockdowns, quarantine and communications.

During the marathon seven-hour evidence session he also addressed his own conduct in relation to the now infamous trip to Barnard Castle, admitting that he did not handle the situation properly and should have owned up to his actions immediately.

Here are the key pieces of evidence from today’s Committee:

Matt Hancock “lied” and should have been fired

Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been fired over coronavirus failings and “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” on the testing target, Cummings said.

“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.”

Downing Street did not deny the PM had considered firing Mr Hancock, but said Mr Johnson had full confidence in him now.

PM thought covid “scare story”

MPs were told: “In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story, he described it as the new swine flu.”

When asked if he had told the Prime Minister it was not, Mr Cummings added: “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.”

Boris Johnson said he “did not recognise” what Mr Cummings said.

Thousands of people should not have died

The aide said that during meetings in September Sage scientists and England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had said that there needed to be a two-week lockdown.

Mr Cummings said despite modelling showing the NHS was going to get “smashed again” Mr Johnson decided not to lock down.

He said: “In this hypothetical point five, six, weeks hence where we are looking at that, we are back to we are now days from the point at which you are going to have to act now or you cross the tripwire whereby the NHS is going to get smashed again.

“That’s what all the data is showing us and the Prime Minister wasn’t persuaded about this.

“I said to him the whole lesson of what happened before is that by delaying the lockdown to later it had to be more severe, it had to last longer, the economic disruption is even worse anyway and we will have killed God knows how many thousands of people in the meantime who have caught Covid who wouldn’t have caught it if we act now – surely you have got to learn the lessons from the past.

“And the Prime Minister decided no and said basically we are just going to hit and hope.”

He later added that he regrets not speaking out about his concerns earlier, and regrets not quitting government in September of last year, holding a press conference to “blow this thing sky high” because “tens of thousands of people would now still be alive”.

“I think I made the wrong decision and I apologise for that,” he said.

Cummings heard ‘bodies pile high’

“There’s been a few different versions of this, of these stories knocking around.

“There was a version of it in the Sunday Times, which was not accurate. But the version that the BBC reported was accurate.

“I heard that in the Prime Minister’s study. That was not in September though, that was immediately after he finally made the decision to do the lockdown on October 31.”

Boris Johnson has repeatedly denied making the comments, which were said to have been made in relation to not imposing another lockdown.

March 12 mayhem

The former aide told MPs about March 12, 2020, when the Government was planning to make a decision on whether to tell people to self-isolate if they were feeling unwell.

He said this discussion was “derailed” however due to Donald Trump wanting the UK to help in a bombing campaign in the Middle East, and Carrie Symonds trying to get the No.10 press office to handle a story in the media about her dog.

“The day started off with us thinking [it] is going to be all about Covid and whether or not announced the household quarantine.

"We then got completely derailed because in the morning of the 12th suddenly the national security people came in and said 'Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight' and we need to start having meetings about that through the day with Cobra as well.

"That day was, on Covid, completely disrupted because you have these two parallel sets of meetings.

"You have the national security people running in and out talking about are we going to bomb the Middle East, and we had the COBRA meetings being delayed and whatnot, as we were trying to figure out are we going to do household quarantine." 

“Then...it sounds so surreal I couldn't possibly be true...That day the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog, and the Prime Minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that."

Mr Cummings said there was an "insane situation" in No.10, saying: "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, Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial."

Herd immunity strategy

Cummings said the former head of the Civil Service, Sir Mark Sedwill, wanted Boris Johnson to go on television and advise people to hold ‘spreading parties’ so herd immunity could be generated by September 2020.

“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 something that Cabinet Secretary had come up with, he was saying what the official advice to him from the Department of Health was.”

Borders

“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.”

Downing Street has defended its policy, with the Prime Minister’s official spokesman saying earlier: “Obviously I would refute that. We have some of the toughest border measures in the world and we have taken action whenever necessary to keep the public safe.”