Heard the one about the special ‘Covid-killing’ hairdryer? Dominic Cummings’s other inquiry revelations

Dominic Cummings’s bravura performance at the Hallett inquiry has obviously attracted huge attention, and not just because of his potty-mouthed ways. Despite his being discredited during the “Barnard Castle” scandal (though he maintains that no rules were broken), it seems that his recollections of the official response to Covid are now being given a fair hearing.

His allegations – nothing, in truth, that he hasn’t said or hinted at before – remain incendiary, but many of the more startling “second-order” revelations in his 115-page witness statement, more of a memoir, have perhaps not enjoyed the prominence they deserve...

What was that about a hairdryer?

In a Trumpian moment (recalling the time when the president suggested that bleach could be administered internally to kill the coronavirus), Boris Johnson circulated to close colleagues, including a surely puzzled Patrick Vallance (chief scientific adviser/CSA) and Chris Whitty (chief medical officer/CMO), a YouTube link suggesting a revolutionary method of defeating the virus.

As Cummings explains in paragraph 465 of his witness statement: “A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill Covid’ and asked the CSA and CMO what they thought (cf. YouTube link he sent to the WhatsApp group at 2133 on 14/3, which doesn’t now work because it was removed by YouTube).”

It would be nice to know what Valance and Whitty made of it, but at any rate, it didn’t become official policy.

Who’s bonkers?

You mean “Bonkers” with a capital B...

One of Cummings’s well-aired criticisms of Johnson is that he spent too much time pandering to the right-wing press, once referring to The Daily Telegraph as his “real boss”.

This time round, Cummings adds some vivid colour to the media obsession: “The PM did not want us to ‘antagonise’ the media by calling out false stories. In summer 2020, he called me into the office to complain about some of the crazy media. I said that a much more aggressive approach was needed, the media was full of garbage, partly because the newspapers feared bankruptcy from the collapse of commuter traffic. ‘No no no, I want to make friends with them ... and the trouble is, my heart is with Bonkers [Peter Hitchens], those are my people.’”

How bad was it?

Absurdly so. Johnson ended up briefing against himself: “We also couldn’t be sure that [Johnson] was not himself the source of false stories. For example, in summer, Fraser Nelson [editor of The Spectator] wrote that we had brought in masks because of focus groups, even though we knew they didn’t work. This was the opposite of the truth. Some thought the PM was the source of the story.”

Could things have been different?

Obviously, and Cummings even goes so far as to suggest that, had the UK been better prepared, there might have been no lockdown at all. This does beggar belief, given that almost all advanced economies, including the most efficiently run states, had to impose severe social distancing.

Anyway, according to Dom: “If we had had a government that implemented the referendum decision and focused on a government’s core job, like preparing for large disasters, and changed procurement law and so on, then no lockdowns would have been necessary. We could have met the crisis with rapid action at the borders, and rapid build-up of testing capacity, rapid vaccine building and so on. Mass rapid tests deployed at scale (tens of millions per week) could have averted any need for lockdown to stop NHS collapse in spring 2020 as well as autumn 2020.”

There you go.

Is Boris Johnson a liar?

The allegation is hardly new, and has been investigated extensively. Cummings has spoken about him despairingly, but in the witness statement he is unusually precise, as well as blunt, in reference to Partygate: “From December 2021 the PM lied repeatedly, and told the No 10 press office to tell the media things he knew were untrue. This obviously damaged trust in government. Senior Cabinet Office officials allowed the most junior staff to be blamed for events, while they, with actual responsibility, escaped punishment. This was as disgraceful as the PM’s behaviour, but has been unpunished.

What does Dom want?

Apart from smashing the British state and starting again, he has the eccentric wish to be interrogated by the police about Partygate: “I was never interviewed by the police about parties. I do not know why. The police did not investigate written evidence of PM lies. I do not know why. It’s important to stress that some junior staff were fined for attending events they were told to attend and did not think of as ‘parties’.

“Further, the media often says ‘they acted like different rules applied’ but different rules literally did apply to No 10, because it was the PM’s home and a government building, and rules for it were explicitly changed to do some experiments, eg on use of mass tests ... Junior staff were entitled to believe that if the PM’s office asked them to attend an event, then that event was lawful.”

Maybe the Met hasn’t got the time for Cummings’ fascinating but rather verbose account of events. A shame, because it’s worth the read.