Dominic Cummings’ select committee LIVE: Boris Johnson’s former adviser appears before MPs | Cummings says people died unnecessarily because of Government failings | Grant Shapps accuses Cummings appearance as 'sideshow' | One year on from Barnard Castle press conference
The Prime Minister’s former chief advisor has been vocal in his condemnation of Boris Johnson Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and others since leaving Government after a behind-the-scenes power struggle in November.
You can follow all the updates here as Cummings gives evidence to a joint inquiry of the Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees.
Dominic Cummings’ select committee RECAP: Boris Johnson’s former adviser appears before MPs
Key Events
- Dominic Cummings claims Boris Johnson suggested getting injected with coronavirus ‘live on TV’
- Cummings says Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, should have been fired for “lying”.
- Cummings claims PM described Covid as “new swine flu”
- “We fell disastrously short of standards,” says Cummings
Dominic Cummings said he had “mounting panic” about the response to coronavirus in early March last year.
He said he was pushing for the Government to announce that individuals should stay at home if they had symptoms and households should quarantine on March 11, but he said there was “push back” from others who felt the advice could be delayed for another week.
“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,” he told MPs.
“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.”
Dominic Cummings said that in retrospect it was a “huge failure” on his part not to “hit the emergency panic button” earlier.
Giving evidence to the Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees, he said: “There’s no doubt in retrospect that yes, it was a huge failure of mine and I bitterly regret that I didn’t hit the emergency panic button earlier then I did.
“In retrospect there’s no doubt I was wrong not to.
“All I can say is my worry was, my mental state at the time was, on the one hand you can know from the last week of February that a whole many things were wrong.
“But I was incredibly frightened, I guess is the word, about the consequences of me kind of pulling a massive emergency string and saying the official plan is wrong and it’s going to kill everyone and you have got to change path because what if I’m wrong?
“What if I persuade him to change tack and that’s a disaster?”
Dominic Cummings said it was” obvious” in retrospect that the UK should have locked down in the first week of March at the latest.
Giving evidence to the Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees, he 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.”
Dominic Cummings said he warned the PM on March 12 that there were “big problems coming” if self-isolation measures were not announced immediately.
He said he told Boris Johnson: “We’ve got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly sh*t. No plans, totally behind the pace, we must announce today, not next week. We must force the pace. We’re looking at 100,000 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.”
But he said on that day rather than focusing on Covid the Government was consumed with a potential bombing campaign in the Middle East at the request of Dominic Trump and a “trivial” story in the Times newspaper about Boris Johnson, his fiancee Carrie Symonds and their dog.
He said: “And then to add to … it sounds so surreal couldn’t possibly be true … that day, the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog.
“The Prime Minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that.
“So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which 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, the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial.”
Cummings: Herd immunity was regarded as an inevitable outcome of Covid policy
Ministers and officials believed herd immunity was an “inevitability” because it was not possible or desirable to completely suppress the spread of coronavirus in the early stages of the pandemic, Dominic Cummings said.
The Prime Minister’s former adviser said until mid-March it was considered that measures to halt the spread of the virus would simply delay the peak until the winter, when it would cause more devastation with the NHS under its usual seasonal pressure.
Mr Cummings told MPs that it was only in mid-March that he insisted a new plan was needed to prevent a catastrophe.
“The whole plan was based on the assumption that it was a certainty there would be no vaccines in 2020,” Mr Cummings said.
“So the logic was you can either have – if its unconstrained it will come in and there will be a sharp peak like that and it will completely swamp everything and huge disaster.
“The logical approach therefore is to introduce measures which delay that peak arriving and which push it down below the capacity of the health system.”
He said that when examples like the strict lockdowns in Chinese city Wuhan and elsewhere in Asia were brought up, the “entire assumption” in Whitehall was that they would not work in the UK and would result in second peaks later on.
It was also thought to be “inconceivable that the British public are going to accept Wuhan-style measures here”.
“So we only actually have a real choice between ‘one peak and herd immunity by September’ – terrible, but then you have got through it by the time the next winter comes; if you try to flatten it now this second peak comes up in winter time, that’s even worse than summer, so horrific as the numbers look in summer the numbers will be even worse if this happens in October, November, December time.”
He said he is “completely baffled” why No 10 has tried to deny that herd immunity was the official plan early last year.
“It’s not that people were thinking this is a good thing and we actively want it, it’s that it’s a complete inevitability and the only real question – it’s one of timing, it’s either one of herd immunity by September or it’s herd immunity by January after a second peak. That was the assumption up until Friday March 13.”
Asked whether he told the Prime Minister that the advice coming from the Sage scientific advisory panel was wrong, following its meeting on March 5, Mr Cummings said: “No, I didn’t.”
But he said he was ringing alarm bells and had “mounting panic” about the strategy.
“In the first 10 days of March I was increasingly being told by people: ‘I think this is going wrong’, but I was also really, really worried about smashing my hand down on a massive button marked ‘ditch the official plan’.”
Mr Cummings said he was pushing for the Government to announce that individuals should stay at home if they had symptoms and households should quarantine on March 11, but he said there was “push back” from others who felt the advice could be delayed for another week.
He realised “the system is basically delaying announcing all of these things because there’s not a proper plan in place”.
It was a “catastrophic mistake” for Sage deliberations to be in secret, he said.
By March 11-12 2020 “we had already gone terribly wrong”, Mr Cummings said.
A change of course was finally agreed and on March 16 the Prime Minister said it was time to stop non-essential travel and contact, with the first lockdown beginning on March 23.
Mr Cummings was giving evidence to the Commons health and science committees.
Dominic Cummings said the Cabinet Secretary had suggested the Prime Minister go on television and tell people to catch coronavirus as if it was chicken pox.
Giving evidence to the Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees, he 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.”
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