Cummings launches stinging attack on Johnson and handling of Covid crisis

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, has accused the prime minister of being “unfit for the job”, as he painted a picture of chaos, indecision and deceit at the heart of government as ministers battled Covid-19.

Giving evidence to MPs over almost seven hours, Cummings claimed that “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die” because of multiple government failures.

The former aide accused Johnson of initially treating Covid-19 as a “scare story” and accused Matt Hancock, health secretary, of repeatedly lying. He said that Johnson considered sacking Hancock in April 2020.

“Senior ministers, officials and advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards the public have a right to expect in a crisis like this,” he admitted at the start of an extraordinary day at Westminster.

The former adviser, who left Downing Street last November after a power struggle involving Johnson’s fiancée Carrie Symonds, made a series of damning claims, including portraying his former boss as completely unsuited to the job of running the country.

“Nobody could find a way around the problem of the prime minister, just like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle to the other,” he said.

Cummings, giving evidence to a joint hearing of the Commons health and science committees, said the government did not have a plan for protecting residents of care homes from coronavirus, despite Hancock’s claim to the contrary.

“The government rhetoric was we put a shield around people in care homes — that was complete nonsense,” he claimed. “Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with Covid back to care homes,” he said.

Cummings claimed that Hancock had lied on “numerous” occasions, including on the availability of protective equipment, to the point where former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill told Johnson he had “lost confidence in the honesty” of the minister.

Johnson refuted the claim and a spokesman for Hancock said: “We absolutely reject Mr Cummings’s claims about the health secretary.” Hancock will lead a Downing Street Covid press conference on Thursday.

Amid the chaos in Downing Street as the pandemic approached, Cummings revealed a moment on March 12 when Helen MacNamara, a senior cabinet office official, came to Number 10 to warn of impending disaster.

“I’ve been told for years there’s a whole plan for this — there is no plan,” Cummings claimed that MacNamara said. “I’ve come through here to tell you I think we are absolutely fucked.”

In March 2020, ministers initially pursued a Plan A where “herd immunity” was the byproduct of a strategy intended to control transmission, rather than halt it in its tracks.

Greg Clark, chair of the science committee, said it did not require “fancy modelling” to work out that Plan A could result in perhaps 400,000 deaths. Plan B, a national lockdown, was belatedly introduced instead on March 23.

Cummings also accused Johnson of acting too slowly to introduce a second lockdown in September 2020, of failing to secure Britain’s borders, and of being distracted by financial problems, his divorce and other personal issues.

Cummings’s evidence left few reputations undamaged. Chancellor Rishi Sunak was among the few senior figures to avoid his criticism, but Hancock was the subject of the most sustained attack.

Cummings told MPs that there were at least 15 reasons why Hancock should have been sacked, accusing him of “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” over his handling of the testing system. 

Cummings also said that human trials were considered to test early vaccines where “everyone takes their chances” and where they might receive £1m in compensation if they died. The idea was discarded.

Johnson’s allies believe that Cummings’s allegations will not seriously damage the prime minister. One senior minister said his claims were like “revenge porn” that people would see that Cummings was “bitter”.

One cabinet minister said that Cummings’s evidence had caused “no damage” to the prime minister.

The former adviser is an unpopular figure in the country after he broke the government’s own lockdown by travelling to County Durham. He said he wanted to protect his family from threats, but admitted that the episode was “definitely a major disaster for the government and for the Covid policy”.

Johnson told MPs yesterday that a public inquiry, starting next spring, would draw on the lessons of the government’s handling of the crisis. His aides believe the public are more focused on the successful vaccination programme than what happened last year.

The prime minister insisted that Keir Starmer, Labour leader, was “fixated on the rear view mirror” while he preferred to focus on the latest rollout of the vaccine programme to cover the over-30s.