Dominic Cummings’ evidence in full on Boris Johnson’s handling of Covid

Westminster is gripped today as Dominic Cummings gives evidence to MPs about Boris Johnson‘s handling of the Covid crisis. 

The maverick former No10 chief adviser is delivering four hours of testimony to a joint session of the Commons health and science committees in which he is handing a bruising to his former friend and boss. 

Mr Cummings is expected to be accused by Tory MPs of using today’s appearance to ‘avenge’ his sacking in November after he lost a power struggle with Ms Symonds.

But Labour will seize on the claims as evidence that Mr Johnson could have done more to save lives.

Below is Mr Cummings’ evidence in full: 

SESSION ONE

Q – Greg Clark, Tory MP and Chair of the Science and Technology Committee 

On January 22, Wuhan, a city the size of London, was sealed off. Did this set alarm bells ringing? 

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. 

When it started, in January, I did think in part of my mind, ‘Oh my goodness, is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time?’ However, at the time the PHE (Public Health England) here and the WHO (World Health Organisation) and CDC, generally speaking, organisations across the western world were not ringing great alarm bells about it then.

I think it is in retrospect completely obvious that many, many institutions failed on this early question. The Taiwanese his the panic button some time around New Year’s Eve and immediately closed the borders and introduced a strict quarantine system. I think it’s obvious that the Western world including Britain completely failed to see the smoke and hear the alarm bells. 

Q – Do you remember a time when you personally were seized of the important of it?

On something like January 25 I said to the private office at Number 10 that we should look at pandemic planning and soon after I asked Matt Hancock where we were with scanning the pandemic operation plans. 

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. 

Q – When did you talk to the PM about it first?

It was definitely raised with the PM in the first half of January in a chat with me and other people. 

Q – In the months that followed was Covid the most important matter that you dealt with?

At the time the government, in no way shape of form, acted like it was the most important thing going on in January, nor in February. The Government itself and Number 10 was not operating on a war footing in February on this in any way, shape or form. Lot of key people were literally skiing in the middle of February. 

Obviously in retrospect I should have been hitting the panic button more than I did in February, I did more as the month went on.  

Q – Give a brief summary of the principle things you were dealing with during February. 

I was working very much on the science and technology agenda and procurement reform. I was dealing with other things like HS2, national security issues and the reshuffle. 

Q – Did you have to book meetings with the PM?

I could just pop in and out of his office. I sometimes wrote notes but most of our interaction was talking. I wrote a note to him about the Covid situation in February, I’m not sure if I did in January. 

Q – Did you attend Cobra meetings in February?

I don’t think that I did. What I did was hire a guy to run data for No10. [Additional Q – Did you choose not to go?] It was a question of dividing people’s time. I don’t remember if I attended any of the Cobra meetings. 

[Additional Q – Did you advise the Prime Minister to go?] No. [Additional Q – Why didn’t you?] The best use of people’s time was to send Ben Warner, a physicist I hired, and a Downing Street adviser. A lot of Cobra meetings are just PowerPoint slides and aren’t very useful.

Also bear in mind one of the huge problems we had throughout was things leaking and creating chaos in the media. Things were leaking from Cobra, leaking from practically everything. 

‘So when I wanted to have sensitive conversations that I didn’t want to see appear in the media I did not have those conversations in Cobra.’

I was having meetings about it with people like Patrick Vallance [chief scientific adviser] in a way I knew wouldn’t leak. In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story, he described it as the new swine flu.

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.

I’m not a technical person, I’m not a smart person. I couldn’t understand a lot of the things that were being discussed and the modelling that was being done so I thought it was more useful to have a PhD physicist there [at the Cobra meetings]. A lot of it was over my head. 

Q – Why did you change your 2019 blog to refer to coronaviruses?

There have been a lot of media stories saying that I changed what I wrote but that’s all false. Not a single letter of what I wrote was changed. Not a single word was changed. [Additional Q – But you added to it?] Correct. [Additional Q – How did you have time to do that?] Pasting over a blog takes 90 seconds or so. 

Q – Could you explain the thinking on the issue of herd immunity?

Essentially the logic of the official plan from the Department of Health was that this disease is going to spread, vaccines are not going to be relevant in any way, shape or form over the relevant time period, we were told it was essentially a certainty that there would be no vaccines available in 2020, something else which turned out to be completely wrong because, as I think we’ll come onto, it actually turns out we could’ve done vaccines much faster than happened.

But at the time the whole plan was based on the assumption that it was a certainty that there would be no vaccines in 2020. So the logic was you can either have … if it’s 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.

In response to the argument. ‘But hang on a second, look at what they’re doing in Wuhan, Taiwan and South Korea’, the assumption in Whitehall was that it wouldn’t work for them… secondly, that it was inconceivable that the British public would accept Wuhan-style measures. 

Even if we therefore suppress it completely all you’re going to do is get a second peak in the winter when the NHS is already every year under pressure, so we only actually have a real choice between one peak and herd immunity by September – terrible but then you’re through it by the time the next winter comes – if you try and flatten it now the second peak comes up in winter time that’s even worse.

So, horrific as it looks in the summer, the numbers will be even worse if this happens in October, November, December-time.

It’s important to bear in mind on this whole herd immunity point, obviously no one is saying that they want this to happen, the point is it was seen as an inevitability – you will either have herd immunity by September after a single peak or you will have herd immunity by January with a second peak, those are the only two options that we have. 

That was the whole logic of all of the discussions in January and in February and early March. [Additional Q – So when Matt Hancock said on March 15 that herd immunity was not a policy, was that wrong?] Completely wrong. That was the plan. I’m completely baffled as to why No 10 has tried to deny that because that was the official plan.

Q – Jeremy Hunt, former Conservative health secretary   

On the Sage meeting on March 5 it was five weeks since the WHO had said Covid was an issue of international concern. But the minutes say that the only measures recommended were shielding the vulnerable and elderly. Did you advise him that Sage were wrong?

No I didn’t. In the first ten days of March I was increasingly being told by people things were going wrong, but I was also really worried about smashing my hand down on a button saying ‘ditch the official plan’. By the 5th I was still reluctant to do that. 

I was really torn about the whole thing because 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 kind of like smashing my hand down on a massive button marked ‘ditch the official plan, stop listening to the official plan, I think there’s something going wrong’. I did do that as we’ll come on to but on the fifth I was reluctant to do that. 

[Additional Q – Did you advise that Cheltenham be cancelled?] No, the official advice was that it wouldn’t make much difference to transmission, which was bizarre in retrospect, and that cancelling it could be actively bad as it would just push people into pubs. No one in the official system, in the Department of Health, drew the obvious logical conclusion, which was ‘shouldn’t we be shutting all the pubs as well?’

There was push back from within the system against advising on the 12th to say stay at home if you’ve got symptoms. 

And me and others were realising at this point the system is basically delaying announcing all of these things because there’s not a proper plan in place. 

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. 

Q – Jeremy Hunt, former health secretary 

How would you change the structures and systems to stop this happened in a future pandemic?

The way in which Sage and the whole thinking around the strategy was secret was a huge mistake because there wasn’t proper scrutiny. 

Anyone who has been involved in the political world knows the whole thing is riddled with duff studies to make people believe things that weren’t true. And that was one of the problems behind the group-think, which was that the British public would not accept a lockdown or an Asian-style track and trace system. Those assumptions were central to the official plan and obviously completely wrong. 

[Additional Q – did you advise going further with the lockdown?] We need to understand the crucial period between Thursday 12th and the Sunday, when things started to change. 

On the 12th – it was a completely surreal day… I sent a message to the PM at 7.48 that morning and, forgive the language this is expressed in, ‘We’ve got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly s***. 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.’

So the day started with that but we then got completely derailed when in the morning of the 12th the people of the National Security Committee came in and said Trump wanted us to join in a Middle East bombing campaign. 

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.

Fortunately thank God the Attorney General persuaded the PM not to join in with the Middle East bombing campaign.

The evening of Friday 13th, I’m sitting with Ben Warner [data scientist] and the PM’s private secretary in the PM’s private study and we discussed about how we would have to speak to him tomorrow about needing to ditch the official plan. This is the white board [pictured below] which has plan B sketched on it. 

At this point, deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen McNamara said she had been talking to the official Mark Sweeney, who was in charge with coordinating with the Department of Health and he said, ‘I have been told for years that there is a plan for this, there is no plan, we are in huge trouble’. 

Helen McNamara said ‘I think we are absolutely f****d’ I think this country’s in a disaster and we are going to kill thousands of people. I said ‘I think you’re right, it is a disaster, we are going to sketch out plan b’. 

On March 14, the Prime Minister was told ‘You are going to have to lock down’. But there is no lockdown plan. Sage haven’t modelled it, DH don’t have a plan, we are going to have to figure out and hack together a lockdown plan. This is like a scene from Independence Day with Jeff Goldblum saying, ‘the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken, and you need a new plan’… that is what the scene was like that morning, with Ben Warner in the Jeff Goldblum role.

He took the Prime Minister through all the graphs, and through the NHS graphs, and showed him that the system is thinking this is all weeks and weeks and away… but this is all completely wrong… The NHS is going to be smashed in weeks.

Q – You didn’t advise the PM to change tack until March 11, you didn’t advise him to cancel Cheltenham, the Champions League, to close the borders. Do you not recognise that was a massive failing on your part?

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 than 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?’

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. 

Q – Mark Logan, Tory MP for Bolton North East  

You are seen as very successful, but why were you not able to nail an earlier lockdown?

I didn’t pay enough attention to it early enough, for sure. It was the classic group think bubble. But what is inarguable the case was that part of my job was to challenge things and I didn’t do that early enough. If this process had been opened up to outside smart people we would have figured out at least six weeks earlier that there was an alternative plan. 

At this time, not just the Prime Minister but many other people thought that the real danger is not the health danger but the over-reaction to it and the economy. The Prime Minister said all the way through February and through the first half of March the real danger here isn’t this new swine flu thing, it’s that the reaction to it is going to cripple the economy.

To be fair to the Prime Minister, although I think he was completely wrong, lots of other senior people in Whitehall had the same view, that the real danger was the economic one. 

Q – During January, February and March time, how was the international situation being fed into the system?

It was essentially completely discarded by the system. During January, February and March, even after we went into lockdown on the 23rd, the view was that it is inconceivable to do a Taiwan-style lockdown.  

Q – Rosie Cooper, Labour MP for West Lancashire

What were the barriers to having the Sage papers published?

There was no push back from Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty or Sage. But what should have happened is we would have had the conversation in January. What happened is we waited until when we were already dangling over the cliff. 

How would you rate the performance of the Department of Health and secretary of state?

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. 

Why were the financial incentives for people to self-isolate so fatally weak?

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.

There wasn’t any plan for shielding, there wasn’t even a helpline for shielding, there wasn’t any plan for financial incentives, there wasn’t any plan for almost anything in any kind of detail at all. There wasn’t any plan for furlough at all, nothing, zero, nada. The problem you are describing about the financial incentives on Covid and isolation, you are obviously completely correct, there should’ve been a whole plan but like on testing, like on shielding, there was no plan.    

Why did you describe the Department of Health as a smoking ruin?

There wasn’t any system set up [at the Department of Health] to deal with emergency procurement. When the PM tested positive we were told that the Department of Health had been turning down ventilators because the price was marked up. It completely beggars belief that this kind of thing was happening. 

We were told the PPE would not arrive for months because it would take that long to ship. ‘But why are you shipping it?’… ‘That’s what we always do.’ I told them to fly it… at that point you had Trump getting the CIA involved to get the fast track on PPE. Everything was like wading through treacle, that’s why I described it as a smoking ruin.  

Q – Greg Clarke

Saying Matt Hancock lied is a serious accusation, can you provide evidence to back that up?

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.

In mid-April, just before the Prime Minister and I were diagnosed with having Covid ourselves, the Secretary of State for Health told us in the Cabinet room everything is fine with PPE, we’ve got it all covered, etc, etc. When I came back, almost the first meeting I had in the Cabinet room was about the disaster over PPE and how we were actually completely short, hospitals all over the country were running out. 

The Secretary of State said in that meeting this is the fault of Simon Stevens, this is the fault of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it’s not my fault, they’ve blocked approvals on all sorts of things. I said to the cabinet secretary, please investigate this and find out if it’s true.

The cabinet secretary came back to me and said it’s completely untrue, I’ve lost confidence in the Secretary of State’s honesty in these meetings. The cabinet secretary said that to me and the cabinet secretary said that to the Prime Minister.

[Did you make a note of that at the time, could you supply that to the committee?] Yes. 

Q – Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour MP for for Salford and Eccles 

Who in government was arguing against taking action for economic reasons?

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’. Fundamentally the Prime Minister just never … didn’t really think that this was the big danger.

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… 

There is a very profound question about our political system that at the last election we could a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. It shows things have gone extremely, extremely badly wrong.  

There’s so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two. And there’s obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties if that’s the best that they can do. 

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. It’s also the case that there are wonderful people inside the Civil Service, there are brilliant, brilliant officials all over the place. But the system tends to weed them out from senior management jobs. And the problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys over and over again.

Q – Greg Clark

Did you engage in any unauthorised briefings?

Yes, I did talk to people unauthorised in the sense of actually pretty rarely did I speak to the Prime Minister before I spoke to any journalists. I just got on with things because because my view was the Prime Minister already is about a thousand-times too obsessed with the media. 

I did occasionally talk to people but the main person I spoke to was Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC because the BBC has a special position in the country during a crisis and because I was in the room for particular crucial things I could give guidance to her on very big stories.  

[Additional Q- Will you share all your communications with the media?] With all respect, chairman, I am not going to hand over my private phone and let you judge what you decide should be in the public domain. Anything that I think is significant to decisions that were made, including decisions that were made, then I will share those. But when you get to that stage you are getting into that territory because you are also sharing things that journalists themselves would think was private. 

Q – Laura Trott, Conservative MP for Sevenoaks

Did anyone mention a risk register or a pandemic to you before 2020?

Yes, I had conversations with people about the risk register in general and some specific issues. And also during my time in government I had various specific meetings with people about the question of bioterrorism, which obviously overlaps with pandemic planning. [Additional Q – Did you have any views on the quality of the pandemic plans at that point?] 

I thought that many of the plans seemed to me to fall very short of what was actually needed. A lot of things are just power points and they lack detail. But most importantly, I think, I think the process around them as with the pandemic plan is just not open, there’s is not a culture of talking to outside experts. I was talking to some people who said ‘did you ever go read the plan on solar flares’ and I said ‘no’, and they said ‘if you get some expert advice to that you will see that the current Government plan on that is just completely hopeless, if that happens we are all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.

One thing that I did say to the Cabinet Secretary last year in the summer, and which I ardently hope is actually happening, is there ought to be an absolutely thorough, total review of all such risk register programmes, there ought to be an assumption of making this whole process open and only closed for specific things. For example, one of the other things very high on risk register is the anthrax plan, what happens if terrorists attack with anthrax. Personally, I would be extremely concerned that the plan is as robust as it should be. 

Who is responsible for monitoring future threats?

One of the fundamental problems that we find in this whole thing, it is a general problem in Whitehall but it was very, very clear and disastrous during Covid, is you have this system where on the one hand ministers are nominally responsible in various ways for a, b, c. But ministers can’t actually hire and fire anybody in the department. The officials are actually in charge of hiring and firing a, b, c.

So, as soon as you have some kind of major problem you have kind of that Spiderman meme with both Spidermans pointing at each other, it’s like that but with everybody. So, you have [Matt] Hancock pointing at the permanent secretary, you have the permanent secretary pointing at Hancock, and they are both pointing at the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Office is pointing back at them and all the different Spidermans are all pointing at each other saying ‘you are responsible’ and the problem is that everyone is right and everyone is unhappy.’

In my opinion, you would have had a kind of dictator in charge of this. If I was PM I would have said Mark Warner is in charge of the whole thing, he has as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do that, and you’re pushing the boundaries to legality. He is in charge, and he can fire anybody and jiggle people around. 

Q – Katherine Fletcher, Conservative MP for South Ribble

I’d like to return to the data and the raw numbers that you had between January and May last year. What’s your assessment of it?

Concerns is like saying ‘we have concerns about the situation in May 1940’. In all sorts of ways it didn’t exist. The data system on Monday March 16 was the following. It was me wheeling in that whiteboard you’ve seen from the photo, Simon Stevens [head of the NHS] writing down data from the ICUs. Then I’d get my iPhone out and go times two times two times two, then I’d say that if it was doubling every five days these are the numbers we’d be looking at… and everybody would say ‘Jesus, could this possibly be correct?’

There was no functioning data system. And that was connected with, there was no proper testing data.

Because we didn’t have testing, all we could really do was look at people arriving in hospital. So, the whole thing, therefore, is weeks and weeks out of date. Once you’re looking at ICU numbers as your leading indicator, you know that you’re in a world of trouble… By the time I came back from being ill on Tuesday April 14 they then had an absolutely brilliant data system and were starting to build models and predictions… that completely transformed decision making. 

Q - Aaron Bell, Tory MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme

What were you doing in the first two weeks of March when you had said there wasn’t a plan. 

I was having meeting after meeting with people trying to figure out where we were.

[…] 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. 

Are you here today to help learn lessons or settle scores?

I was invited here to try and explain the truth about what happened. I think the families of the thousands of people who died deserve the truth. [Additional Q – What was your motivation for working for the PM?] I went in because in summer 2019 the situation that the country was facing was either to sort out the constitutional crisis and have a new agenda, or have Jeremy Corbyn and a second referendum which would have been absolutely catastrophic… that’s why I got involved. 

I do think that one way in which this could have been even worse than it was, if you imagine that Parliament of 2019, that hung parliament. If you imagine that Parliament colliding with this disaster in January 2020, God only knows what would have happened. If that broken Parliament had limped on into 2020 and confronted this crisis, I think that we’d be now be looking at … I think, frankly, the whole system would have would have melted down and fallen apart. 

Q – Greg Clark

You were a person of significant influence… what you’ve described is being like a whistle blower in a sense… did you forget to blow the whistle?

It’s true that I hit the panic button and said we’ve got to ditch the official plan, it’s true that I helped to try to create what an official plan was. 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. 

SESSION TWO 

Q – Jeremy Hunt

On March 12 we stopped community testing following very clear Sage advice that when there was sustained community transmission is would no longer be useful. Sage didn’t even model Korean-style test and tracing until May, so why was there such a long delay?

Fundamentally it goes back to what we discussed in the previous session. The logic was that if you were going for herd immunity for September, you wouldn’t take testing as an urgent priority. 

That’s why the Department of Health said in that week that we didn’t need to test anybody any more. The view was that 60/70% of the country are going to get it, that’s going to happen for sure, so why would you bother testing people. 

No one challenged that idea strongly until we challenged it strongly during the shift to Plan B. 

The core of the Government kind of collapsed when the Prime Minister got ill himself, because he’s suddenly gone and then people are literally thinking that he might die. 

By the time I came back on April 13 we had this terrible situation where Alex Cooper (senior civil servant) and his team were trying to build a whole new test and trace system. In my view disastrously, the Secretary of State had made – when the PM was on his near deathbed – this pledge to do 100,000 tests 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. 

That was one of the reasons why the Cabinet Secretary and I agreed that we had to take testing away from Hancock and put it in a separate agency. 

What the point at which we said we were going to do it the South Korean way?

It was all very disjointed. We didn’t even have a plan for lockdown, so we were trying to get to lockdown and also get people to work on what this South Korean thing would look like, then the Prime Minister goes down and nearly dies… 

What I wanted to do was essentially the same as had happened in South Korea and Taiwan and places where you start using bank data, you start using mobile phone data to triangulate where people are, use the data coming off cell phone towers and things like that. So it wasn’t just the testing system you had to get built up. It was also the whole data architecture as well. And, of course, we had huge legal problems because you had a whole bunch of people coming back in the legal system saying first of all, EU data law or GDPR basically means all of this stuff is illegal, medium term.

Secondly, a whole bunch of things around European Convention of Human Rights, right to privacy, etcetera etcetera. So you had … we’ve got to build this testing, we got to build this data, we’ve then got to think about all these complexities about the legal side… 

It took too long to get set up, the system was hugely disrupted in April because of the Hancock pledge… fundamentally this should have been happening in January. There was all this bureaucratic infighting in April and remember the Prime Minister wasn’t back then either, Dominic Raab was doing a brilliant job chairing the meetings, but this was a huge call and very difficult for him to basically start carving up the Department of Health in April.

So, essentially, we never really got to grips with it until the Prime Minister was back in the office and the cabinet secretary and I could say to him we’ve got to do the track and trace thing in a completely different way.  

I warned the Prime Minister, if we don’t fire the Secretary of State (Matt Hancock) and we don’t get the testing in someone else’s hands, we are going to kill people and it will be a catastrophe. And there was the constant, repeated lying about PPE… The Cabinet Secretary told me the British system is not set up to deal with a Secretary of State who repeatedly lies in meetings.

Q – Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton

Can you give me any idea why Matt Hancock is still the Secretary of State?

He came close to removing him in April but fundamentally wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t just me saying this… pretty much every senior person in Number 10 said he couldn’t go into autumn with the same system in place. There was certainly no good reason for keeping him. 

Could you not have changed things by threatening to resign?

Yes, I thought about it in March but we managed to bounce things do so I didn’t do it. I had similar conversations in September, and I had a conversation with the PM a night before an operation and said I was reflecting on things, and that you need to know that I am leaving at the latest Friday December 18 and I think it’s best if you and I part ways. 

He [Mr Johnson] asked why and I said because this whole system is chaos, this building is chaos, you know perfectly well that from having worked with me I can get great teams together and manage them, but you are more frightened of me having the power to stop the chaos than you are of the chaos, and this is a completely unsustainable position for us both to be in.

I am not prepared to work with people like Hancock any more, I have told you umpteen times you have got to remove him, you won’t, it’s going to be a disaster in the autumn and therefore it’s time that I should go. He laughed and said ‘you’re right, I am more frightened of you having the power to stop the chaos, chaos isn’t that bad, chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge’. 

Do you have an insight into how the decision was taken to send untested people back to care homes? 

When we realised in April that this had happened the PM said after coming back from being ill, ‘What on earth are you telling me’. Hancock told us in the Cabinet room that people were going be tested before they went back to care homes. What the hell happened?

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.

Q – Anum Qaisar-Javed, SNP MP for Airdrie and Shotts 

Who was advising the PM and government not to close the borders and on what basis?

I heard this discussed several times with the PM in Number 10. He was told repeatedly not to close the borders because it would have no effect. At this time another kind of group-think thing was that it was basically racist to close the borders. And in retrospect that was obviously completely wrong. 

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.

Q - Barbara Keeley, Labour MP for Worsley and Eccles South

Looking back after Covid was seeded in the care home do you think the government was taking the risk of transmission into care homes as seriously as it should… and was it the start of the Prime Minister’s thinking of ‘it’s only killing 80-year-olds’?

It was obviously not being taken seriously. Like all of these things it wasn’t deliberate, it was a function of the fact that the system was overwhelmed. The Prime Minister’s views on Covid and who it had killed were relevant in September, October but not his point. 

Q – Luke Evans, Tory MP for Bosworth

What would you scare the government out of 10 on its communication both to the NHS and the public?

Some of the people working on the communications were some of the best people in the world, and one of the great myths about the thing was that bad communications was the reason for all of these problems. But fundamentally the reasons were bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning, bad operational capability. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got great people doing communications if the Prime Minister changes his mind tens a day and then calls up the media contradicting his own policy.  

Like with Rashford. The Director of Communications said don’t pick a fight with Rashford, the Prime Minister decided to pick a fight and then surrendered twice.   

There was a certain infamous trip and that had huge influence on how people perceived the lockdown… where do you draw the line for you having personal responsibility over decisions both in government and over the way you conduct yourself?

In autumn 2019 I had to move out of my house because of security threats. On February 28 when I was dealing with the Covid problem on the Friday night I was down in Westminster and my wife called there was a gang of people saying they were going to come into the house and kill everybody inside. She was alone in the house at the time with our three-year-old. 

After that I spoke to the PM and the deputy cabinet secretary and it was suggested that I either move my family into government accommodation or move them off to family. On the 22nd the story happened with the fake quote saying I wanted everyone to die and that caused further problems. 

After that weekend I said to my wife, ‘Right, we’ve got to get out of here on Friday’. So before the whole thing happened with the PM on sick and my wife calling up on the Friday it had already been decided that I was going to move my family out of London despite the Covid rules… what happened is because of this we kept the whole thing very quiet, almost nobody in Number 10 knew about it. 

When the story then came out much of the story was completely wrong, it suggested that the police had spoken to me about my behaviour over lockdown rules but that was completely false… the PM and I agreed that because of the security things we would stonewall the story and not talk about it…

The Prime Minister and I agreed that because of the security things, we would basically just stonewall the story and not say anything about it. I was extremely mindful of the problem that when you talk about these things, you cause more trouble for yourself, and I’d already put my wife and child in the firing line on it. So I said, I’m not talking about this, we should shut our mouths about it.

I ended up giving the whole rose garden thing where what I said was true, but we left out a kind of crucial part of it all. And it just … the whole thing was a complete disaster and the truth is – and then it undermined public confidence in the whole thing – the truth is, if I just when the Prime Minister said on a Monday, ‘we can’t hold this line, we’re going to have to explain things’, if I just basically sent my family back out of London and said here’s the truth to the public, I think people would have understood the situation.

It was a terrible misjudgment not to do that. So I take … the Prime Minister got that wrong, I got that wrong.

Q – Dean Russell, Tory MP for Watford, asking about Mr Cummings’ role in decision making.  

People in Westminster underestimated the influence I had in July and December 2019 but massively exaggerated the influence I had after the election. The whole idea I was the second most powerful person in the country and all of that was massively wrong and that I could just click my fingers and do this and do that and do the other was completely wrong.

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.

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. 

In the summer I brought in Simon Case because I thought the PM wasn’t listening to me, our relations are getting worse and worse, his girlfriend is desperate to get rid of me and all my team, if I brought in someone official then maybe he would listen to them. 

Your advice was not being taken, was that because you were not bringing people along with you to give that advice to get the Prime Minister to listen, what was the reason for that?

It’s hard to generalise about some of these things. I think on lots of stuff on Covid actually there was a centre of gravity in No 10 with the same view that agreed with me, but the Prime Minister just wouldn’t do it. On many, many issues, me, the cabinet secretary, the chancellor, other senior people agreed but the PM just wouldn’t do what we advised. The problem wasn’t necessarily that I couldn’ t persusade other people. Everybody was screaming on quarantine ‘Have a policy, set it out clearly and stick to it, you cannot keep changing your mind every time the Telegraph has an editorial on the subject’ everybody agreed with me about that regardless of what they thought the real policy should be.

Nobody could find away around the problem of the Prime Minister just going like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other.

Q – Jeremy Hunt, asking again about Barnard Castle and the reason for the trip there 

If I was going to make up a story I would come up with a lot of a better one than that right? It’s such a weird story. A few days earlier I had been sitting writing a will, what to do if I die. I was then thinking about coming down on the 12th, the Sunday, but I was basically too ill to do that. My wife said ‘look you’re in a state, you can barely walk, are you sure you can go back to work?’ It seemed to me if you are going to drive 300 miles to go back to work the next day then pottering down the road 30 miles and back to see how you feel after just coming off what you thought might have been your deathbed doesn’t seem, it didn’t seem crazy to me at the time.

Did it not seem crazy to do it with your wife and child in the car with you?

No it didn’t. It didn’t seem crazy at the time. It was like, okay let’s get in the car, go up and down the road, if I feel bad, come up, see how I feel as I get going. I completely understand why people thought the whole thing was weird. Obviously I wish I had never heard of Barnard Castle and I wish I had never gone and that the whole nightmare had never happened. Hopefully people can – even if they don’t agree – they can understand, as I say, I can only apologise for the whole debacle.

What is it that you think that we got right on the vaccine that was so different to some of the other things we’ve been talking about? 

I think fundamentally on vaccines there was clear responsibility, there was someone who was actually in charge of it Kate Bingham, she was working with Patrick Vallance, she built a team who actually understood what they were doing and she had the kind of strength of character not to be pushed around. We had a formal thing that was ‘You’re in charge of it, you report directly to the PM, don’t report to the Department of Health’ so she knew who her boss was on it. We also said to her, treat this like a wartime thing, ignore rules, if lawyers get in your way come to us, we’ll find ways of bulldozing them out of your way.

Patrick Vallance texted me on the 24th of March. There is no doubt we could have done this quicker than we did. The conventional wisdom was that we were not going to get a vaccine in 2020. There’s a network of people, Bill Gates-type people, that were saying completely rethink the whole paradigm of how you do this. Build in parallel, here is the science thing, here is the manufacturing thing, here is the distribution, here is the supply, here is the logistics, here is the data.

The normal thing is you do things like that sequentially. What Bill Gates and people like that were saying was you need to think much more like some of the classic programmes of the past. The Manhattan Project in World War II, the Apollo programme, build it all in parallel. 

What Bill Gates was saying and what Patrick and what Patrick’s team was saying was the actual expected return on this is so high that even if it does turn out to be all wasted billions it’s still a good gamble. 

Patrick said take it out of the Department for Health, will you support me on that with the PM? I said absolutely damn sure I will. I spoke to the cabinet secretary and the cabinet secretary agreed. It’s inconceivable we can leave it with DH and the Prime Minister decided in about 90 seconds fine do it and that was it. There was a little bit of whinging here and there. There was a little bit of pushback in some quarters saying ‘This is extremely risky, if you don’t go down the EU approach and that works and we do it ourselves and that doesn’t work you guys are all going to be in a huge political hole.’

But you have to take risks, and when we looked at the EU plan it just looked like the classic Brussels thing… thank goodness that was one of the few things I think we got right. 

Zarah Sultana, Labour MP for Coventry

Did the PM specifically acknowledge that pursuing herd immunity would result in an excess of 500,000 deaths and was he ok with that death toll?

When we had the meeting on the 14th, the whole point of that meeting was looking at the numbers about what the herd immunity by September really means. It’s on the best case 260,000 dead. We can’t do that, we just can’t do it, we’re going to have to gamble on an alternative plan. But remember at that point the conventional wisdom was that if you took the alternative plan there could be three times more dead by the autumn. 

Do you support a call for a public inquiry led by a judge?

I don’t know about led by the judge because history shows they often get down to the bottom of it, but the principle of it, yes. I think the idea that an kind of serious inquiry doesn’t start until next year is completely terrible - tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die, there is absolutely no excuse for delaying that because the reason why so many people died are still in place now. 

This has to be honestly explained. If the Government, 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?The elected representatives of the families of people who died who didn’t need to die must get to grips with this now, there’s absolutely no excuse for delaying it… 

Why on earth can MPs now not take control and say it is intolerable that this could be delayed. The elected representatives of those who died who did not need to die need to get grips to it right now. And the longer it’s delayed, the more people will rewrite memories, the more documents will go astray, the more the whole thing will just become cancerous.

Why is the PM running away from meeting the bereaved families?

I can’t imagine why.  

A year after the first lockdown almost a billion pounds in government contracts has been awarded to 15 firms linked to Conservative donors. During your time at Downing Street was there concern about the transparency of the contracts process? 

Initially no. In February, March, all of our concern was the disaster coming at us. At the beginning concerns were about procurement and speed and getting PPE to the frontline. Later on there were concerns yes over how it had all been done. But that didn’t cross my radar until around May. 

Some contracts were completely unusable. In hindsight what processes do we need to stop the government throwing millions of pounds down the toilet in wrong items. 

I said many times before that the procurement system is completely unfit for its purposes in Whitehall. Ironically in January and February when I should have been paying more attention to Covid, one of the big issues I was dealing with was procurement. I was bringing in outside experts to address the issue as we didn’t have time to sort this out before the crisis hit. The fundamental thing is there needs to be a legal, proper, emergency, fast-track process. There also needs to be people with the skills to execute that at speed and at scale. 

The obvious lesson [to learn is] changing the legal framework and changing the recruitment and training so you have people in place who can do that. We need an emergency system where people are authorised to execute at scale and fast. But that just did not exist. 

If you were advising the Prime Minister would you be supporting President Biden’s move to support lifting patent protection. What is your opinion on vaccine IP?

I don’t really have an opinion on it. I suspect Bill Gates knows more than President Biden does. If he is saying it’s a mistake then we should take his opinion very seriously.  

Q -Greg Clarke, Tory MP and Chair of the Science and Technology Committee

You said it was Patrick Vallance’s idea to set up the vaccine task force?

He had the idea, but there were lots of people thinking of similar kind of things around the same thing. He wanted to do it outside of the Department of Health. Patrick and I both spoke to the cabinet secretary about it. 

Who was instrumental in the Government deal with AstraZeneca?

Patrick Vallance was instrumental in that. He used to work in vaccines so he knew the key players involved. At one point there was a terrible fright that the Department for Health was about sign a duff contract on AstraZeneca, which would not have given us the rights to the vaccine, or they would have been questionable. 

Patrick intervened and made sure the contract went properly. He deserves enormous credit for his role in the vaccine task force. He was the first official to come up with the idea, he pushed it and he deserves enormous credit from the country for that. 

Were ‘human challenge trials’ contemplated? 

To stress, this is not my idea. Normally in vaccine trials you have to take time to go through the testing process. However it is un-arguable what should have happened in this case. The companies who made the vaccines created the vaccine itself in literally hours in January. What should have happened is Governments like the UK and US should have gone to them and said ‘we will take this idea and pay 5-10,000 people to be injected with Covid’, then others get placebos, and then everyone takes their chances. If you die your family gets compensation. That would obviously have been the best thing to do as it is fast. We could have cut the time doing this and had vaccines in peoples’ arms by September. 

The fact we didn’t do that, were we constrained by regulation or a distaste for the risk involved in injecting healthy people with Covid?  

Fundamentally it was never properly explored. People suggested it and it was talked about. It was one of the many things I should have forced harder. As far as I understand it was never properly discussed but obviously should have been. 

You’ve raised concerns that the plan for vaccination or the adjustment to new variants… I sense from some of your recent tweets you think that’s not as sound as you think it should be – have I got that right?

Yeah I mean obviously I’m not in government any more but I talk to people who are involved with it and people have just expressed concern to me that since Kate Bingham left, the kind of normal entropy process of Whitehall has got its fingers on the thinking and operation around this, and there hasn’t been the kind of very aggressive approach that some inside government want about thinking through the danger of variants and how to make sure that the vaccine task force is ahead of the game on the whole thing. I can’t go into any details because I’m not aware of them, but I’ve had senior people express this concern to me, yes. 

Is that a personnel or an organisational concern?

I think it’s a combination of both, yes, I think there’s been a shift in personnel as far as I understand it and concerns about the orginsational setup. 

You’ve spoken very positively about Kate Bingham’s role in this – and others. She went through a difficult time in the autumn in which she was being criticised roundly by, from a lot of quarters, and some of that briefing was alleged to come from No 10, were you aware of that at the time?

I was aware that there was briefing against her, I was told at the time by officials that they thought that most of this had come from DH, but like most of these things we never really got to the bottom of it. Certainly nobody who you could describe as being part of my core team, obviously was involved with that, and nobody – I asked all of them do you know where this is coming from? 

The closest we got to is, essentially, people in the system kind of feeling either their noses put out of joint, or jealous about her profile or whatnot. One of the bad thing that happened is lots of outsiders who came in to volunteer to help, the same thing happened in terms of test and trace, people dropped massively lucrative careers to come and help test and trace also got trashed in the press from parts of Whitehall, which I thought was terrible. Kate, I think got caught in that sort of crossfire. 

So you’re not aware of any particular briefing against her from No 10 but conversely there was radio silence from No 10 in terms of defending her and my understanding is she had to threaten to go on a broadcast round personally before there was a response from No 10. Again were you aware of that?

I tried to stay very far away from kind of day to day media things, I was, I’ve got a vague recollection of a time when there was some kind of problem, I think she might have called the PM directly or something and said essentially that I’m very unhappy about what’s going on and I want some support from No 10. But I wasn’t part of that conversation and I don’t really know what happened, I’m afraid.   

Did you not feel, observing, even as a reader of the newspapers and the blogs that hold on we should be backing the work that she’s doing?

Yeah, I mean as far as I was concerned we were backing, we were, I mean, we obviously supported the work of the vaccine taskforce. 

But in terms of Kate Bingham’s role in that?

I mean No 10 as far as I was concerned and as far as I was aware No 10 was always supportive of the vaccine taskforce and supportive of Kate Bingham. As I said I’ve tried to escape, you know, I tried to keep out of the way of lots of conversations with the PM about briefing or leaks or that sort of thing so I’m not the person to speak to about it. All I basically remember is, there was some briefing against her, I asked at a couple of meetings where do we think this is coming from, the best guess of people in No 10 was people in Whitehall have had their noses put out of joint. I also vaguely remember some Sunday Times story about her but I can’t remember what that was. 

Just looking back and thinking of the system, when you appeared before the science and technology committee you talked about the deal that you did with the PM when you came in to be his advisor in Downing Street. You said there were four components of it – get Brexit done, double the science budget, create a new research agency modeled on DARPA, and the fourth was to change the way that Whitehall works. 

You’ve talked about this a lot in your blog in 2019, you talked about turning government institutions responsible for decisions about billions of lives and trillions of dollars from hopeless to high performance, so this was one of the things you thought about and you brought into Whitehall. 

Looking back, as we are and you can now, some of the failures have been organisational and operational. The fact that we had to stop testing in the community because we didn’t have enough tests. The fact that we ran out of tests in September. Why did something that was such a priority in which you, was part of the deal for you being in Downing Street, why was it not possible to have made good progress on that during the nine months that you were there, say from July to the spring of 2020?

Well I mean July 2019 to the election was essentially just completely dominated by the constitutional crisis over Brexit and we did not really have the bandwidth or the real authority to start trying to change all sorts of things in terms of Whitehall, we had to be very focused on what it was we were trying to change. For example we did chain the whole decision making structure around the negotiations and around Brexit. We did change, radically and effectively. 

I started work on things like the procurement reform, but it’s also the case that we just, the situation was so overwhelming, particularly after the kind of prorogation and the Supreme Court judgement, that, in September 2019 I had senior officials come to me and say the system’s creaking and very shortly senior people are just going to stop obeying orders from this PM and are going to regard it as not a legitimate government, so it was a really, really weird time. 

That was an environment in which you could certainly start saying, right we’re going to have all of these huge shifts to the basic wiring of Downing Street and Whitehall. Once we came back in January I did begin a lot of this process, I talked to the Cabinet Secretary about making various changes to the civil HR system. 

As I’ve said, I started a whole process from the beginning of January. And the data side, the problem was that we basically already had a kind of six weeks for coming back… to Covid sort of overtaking things from mid-February. 

One of the things that did happen, which was relevant to the September decision, was building the, what’s known as the analytical private office in No 10, which I think will be a permanent institution, will become a permanent part of how every subsequent PM works, I think no one in their right mind would possibly get rid of it, and everybody involved with it knows it’s been a great success. 

So I think that is, that shows, if you read the media you’d think this was some huge row between me and all the officials and everyone hating it and everyone screaming at each other but the truth is, pretty much all the good senior officials pretty much supported me on that and helped me do it.

It wasn’t Cummings against the system, it was all sensible people realised that this was a huge gap in Whitehall capabilities and we had to try and change it, both structurally and in terms of the specific skills. 

You’ve talked about the success of the vaccine taskforce. Are there lessons to be learnt from that that can be applied across Government?

Certainly I think, as I’ve said, some of the core principles of who is actually responsible. Who is actually responsible for the team. Jeremy knows, Greg knows, the British state is set up almost by design to create a dysfunctional system because you have to go out and potentially resign over things that are being done and you cannot fire a single person apart from your SPADs in your department. Literally nothing that works well in the real world ever works like that. It’s a completely crazy system. It is a system where responsibility, by design, is diffused and no one knows who is really in charge. 

One of the key things in the vaccine taskforce was we tried to keep things very simple and have how do really good things work, know who the boss is, it is her team. Kate is going to pick the people, Patrick is going to give scientific advice, and if it turns out Kate Bingham is no good [clicks fingers], we’ll get rid of her like that and we will put someone else in who is responsible. 

That was the whole reason for the approach. She picked the team, she did a good job of picking the team, and everyone knew they were working for her. They were not working for Hancock, they were not working for the Permanent Secretary in DH, they were not working for the Cabinet Secretary. That very very simple principles are the core of the difference between well-run organisations and badly run organisations. 

So I think there’s obvious lessons to learn. The problem is that in much of Whitehall it kind of suits everybody to be in the situation of everyone pointing at each other and saying it was him, no it was him, no it is him, no it is him. 

Changing that is, even after a disaster of the scale that we have seen, going to be a really big job to have those conversations like ‘well is the Secretary of State really in charge of this’, ‘can they really do that’, because the Cabinet Secretary, of all the people that have criticised Mark Sedwill, but he was perfectly within his right to say to the Prime Minister that Matt Hancock was the minister responsible. He was correct. 

But we were also correct to say  but so-and-so is in charge of this and so-and-so is in charge of that. I can’t fire them. Fundamentally the only person that can fire them is the Cabinet Secretary and the only way that happens is if the Prime Minister tells the Cabinet Secretary to fire them. The whole thing doesn’t work if it is like that. 

Correct up to 2.30pm