Covid inquiry live: Priti Patel admits policing of Sarah Everard vigil was ‘totally inappropriate’

A day after the Covid inquiry revealed Dominic Cummings called Helen MacNamara a "c***", it seems he is tuned in to hear her evidence, Archie Mitchell reports.

The former chief of staff in Downing Street said she was "right that the Cabinet Office failed to follow the orders given in 2020 to keep records of everything".

Mr Cummings said: "Helen right that CABOFF has failed to follow the orders given in 2020 to keep records of everything - I asked for this to happen - so did Helen - yet the Cabinet Office has destroyed a lot of documents - e.g some that I have accidental copies of do not show up in official records."

Helen MacNamara said Boris Johnson was “confident” that Britain would “sail through” the pandemic in January and February 2020, urging officials to be “careful not to overcorrect”, Archie Mitchell reports.

“The atmosphere in the meetings I attended was confident and macho,” the former deputy cabinet secretary said.

Ms MacNamara said it was “striking” that there was a “de facto assumption that we’re going to be great” without any of the behind the scenes work.

“This in itself was not a new thing, but it seemed even more so than usual, that we were going to be world beating at conquering Covid-19 as well as everything else,” she said.

Helen MacNamara has said civil servants were made to feel as though “everything else could wait” for the Brexit question to be settled by 2019’s general election, Archie Mitchell reports.

“And then there was going to come a very large amount of change,” she said.

As a result, the civil service was on the “backfoot” at the beginning of 2020, in the months before the first Covid lockdown.

There was “no clear business as usual under Boris Johnson”, Helen MacNamara has told the official Covid inquiry, Archie Mitchell reports.

Her witness statement to the probe into the pandemic said: “Whitehall had developed some unhealthy habits in terms of ways of working and it was a low trust environment in terms of relationships between the civil service and the prime minister and his political team.”

Helen MacNamara has compiled a 100-page witness statement for the official Covid inquiry, which was made “extraordinarily difficult” by the government, Archie Mitchell reports.

The former deputy cabinet secretary said she was prevented from accessing “even the most basic pieces of information” from her ex-employer.

“It’s been hard enough for me to work out what was happening, and I was there,” she told the inquiry.

One of the issues was that her phone had been wiped once she gave it back.

She also said January 2020 felt like the beginning of a decade of Boris Johnson’s government, which in the end lasted around three years.

After yesterday’s hearing revealed a tirade by Dominic Cummings against Helen MacNamara in which he called Britain’s former top female civil servant a "c***", she will today have the chance to respond, Archie Mitchell reports.

Ms MacNamara will no doubt be questioned about her role in the Partygate scandal, after she brought a karaoke machine to a leaving bash for Downing Street aide Hannah Young during the pandemic.

A former No 10 communications chief has described Dominic Cummings as a “dysfunctional psychopath” who actively sought to undermine Boris Johnson.

Guto Harri, who briefly served as Johnson’s director of communications during the dying days of his premiership, said he was shocked to see the extent to which his old boss had been criticised by some his top advisers.

Referring to WhatsApp messages between Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings shown to the Covid inquiry on Tuesday, Harri accused the pair of being engaged in an “ongoing, almost adolescent...WhatsApp rant” against the former PM.

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Testimony given to the Covid inquiry this week is “clear evidence of scandalously bad government”, a former health secretary has said.

Stephen Dorrell, the Tory health secretary from 1995 to 1997, said the sessions showed there was a need to reestablish distance between politicians and civil servants.

“I can think of no circumstance in which it’s appropriate for senior civil servants to engage in political gossip on WhatsApp with whom people they are supposed to be accountable,” he said.

Watch a clip of Dorrell’s interview with Sky below:

The Covid inquiry has already heard from a host of big-name politicos, including former prime minister David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne.

But perhaps the biggest draw is yet to come, with Boris Johnson himself set to testify before the end of the current module, which is set to conclude on 14 December.

Speaking to Sky News earlier, Oliver Dowden, the current deputy PM who served as Tory Party chairman under Johnson, said his old boss would give a “full account” when he is eventually called to give evidence.

“I am quite sure that when the former prime minister gives evidence he will give a full account of himself, the cabinet office has given a very full account of how we conducted ourselves,” he told the broadcaster.

“I am not going to give commentary on one individual piece of information because it needs to fit in with a much wider picture of how we conducted ourselves both at the time and through the vaccine programme, and through all the different, very difficult decisions that were taken around the cost and benefits of lockdowns.”

When asked about the testimony given by Cummings, Dowden cautioned against “taking one person’s evidence” as it needed to be taken “in the context of all the other evidence”.

Boris Johnson and his former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, dominate the headlines today following the latter’s marathon evidence session on Tuesday.

Cummings, described as the most empowered adviser No 10 has ever seen, took several swipes at his old boss and criticised Whitehall’s ability to deal with a crisis.

In an extraordinary day of evidence, it was revealed that Cummings himself had described the constant change of strategy as “exhausting” and branded his cabinet “useless f***pigs” in explosive WhatsApp messages.

Johnson, meanwhile, was accused of saying old people needed to accept their “fate”. Below is a full recap of Tuesday’s proceedings, which also saw Lee Cain, Johnson’s former communications chief, testify: