‘Disastrous’ mistakes caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths from Covid, says Dominic Cummings

Boris Johnson is not a “fit and proper person” to lead Britain through the coronavirus pandemic, after committing a string of “disastrous” mistakes that caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, his former right-hand man Dominic Cummings has said.

In a remarkable seven-hour evidence session before a parliamentary inquiry, Mr Cummings said the prime minister had dismissed Covid-19 as a “scare story” in the early months of the outbreak, ordering the first English lockdown at least three weeks too late in March 2020 and then resisting scientists’ pleas to reimpose restrictions in the autumn.

Johnson repeatedly said he wanted to be like “the mayor in Jaws” who kept beaches open despite shark attacks, and when finally forced to authorise the second lockdown in October said he would rather see “bodies pile high” than do the same again, the former Downing Street adviser told MPs.

Answering questions from the House of Commons health and science committees, Cummings painted a picture of chaos and disarray in No 10 as the threat of Covid emerged from China in January 2020.

Claims that the UK was prepared for a pandemic were shown to be “hollow”, and leading politicians and scientists were so committed to a “herd immunity” policy that the PM suggested he could be injected with the disease on live TV to convince the public it was nothing to worry about, while officials said he could encourage people to hold “chickenpox parties” to spread the virus.

The former Vote Leave campaign director reserved his harshest attacks for the health secretary, Matt Hancock, saying he should have been sacked on at least 20 occasions for lying about supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the testing of patients discharged from hospital into care homes.

He accused the health secretary of disrupting the launch of the test and trace programme by setting a “stupid … criminal, disgraceful” target for 100,000 tests, and said that Mr Johnson’s top civil servant, Sir Mark Sedwill, urged Mr Hancock’s dismissal because he had “lost confidence in the secretary of state’s honesty”.

A spokesman for Mr Hancock said the health secretary “absolutely rejects” Mr Cummings’s claims. And in an apparent show of support from No 10, he was given the job of fronting Thursday’s Downing Street press conference on the pandemic response.

As he arrived at his north London home on Wednesday evening, Mr Hancock was asked for his reaction to the allegations. He replied: “I haven’t seen this performance today in full, and instead I’ve been dealing with getting the vaccination rollout going, especially to over-30s, and saving lives. I’ll be giving a statement to the House of Commons tomorrow and I’ll have more to say then.”

But Mr Johnson’s official spokesperson did not deny Mr Cummings’s claim that the PM “came close” to sacking Hancock in April 2020 after coming out of intensive care to discover that Covid had been “seeded” into care homes by patients discharged from hospital without tests.

And at prime minister’s questions in the Commons, Mr Johnson did not rebut reports that he had himself played down the need for a second lockdown by saying that “only 80-year-olds are dying”.

The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, branded the failure to deny the claim “shocking” and called for the public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic to begin immediately, while the Lib Dem leader, Sir Ed Davey, wrote to the PM to say a chair should be appointed within days.

Mr Cummings told MPs that Mr Johnson’s decision to hold back the inquiry until 2022 was “intolerable”.

“Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die,” said the PM’s former senior adviser. “There’s absolutely no excuse for delaying that. A lot of the reasons for why that happened are still in place.”

Mr Cummings said Mr Johnson and other government leaders were “completely out of their depth” when the coronavirus hit. He described the PM as “like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to another” and said those in the wider civil service and on the NHS front line were “lions led by donkeys”.

There was a “lack of urgency” in No 10, with officials away on skiing breaks during February, while Mr Johnson was “distracted” by money worries, his divorce and his fiancee Carrie Symonds’s pregnancy, as well as by negative newspaper stories about her dog.

Mr Cummings said it was “absurd” for ministers to claim now that it had never been government policy to allow Covid to spread in the hope that enough people would gain antibody resistance to the disease by the autumn to prevent a second wave.

“Groupthink” behind the herd immunity plan was so entrenched among Whitehall departments and scientific advisers that he was “frightened” to speak out against the consensus.

He told MPs that he “hit the panic button” on 11 March after being told by independent scientists that the plan was “completely flawed” and that the UK was heading for its worst peacetime catastrophe, with up to 500,000 dead.

The scale of the trauma envisaged was reflected in a line scribbled in marker pen on the bottom of a whiteboard sketching out the first draft of plan B on 12 March, which asked: “Who do we NOT save?”

Mr Cummings said “enormous credit” should go to Helen MacNamara, the government’s second most senior civil servant at the time, who marched into 10 Downing Street on 13 March to tell the PM, on the basis of what experts had told her: “There is no plan. We are in huge trouble ... I think we are absolutely f***ked.”

But he said that even this was “far, far too late”, telling the hearing: “I failed and I apologise for that.” The first national lockdown was eventually implemented only on 23 March.

“In retrospect, it’s clear that the official plan was wrong. It’s clear that the whole advice was wrong and I think it’s clear that we obviously should have locked down essentially in the first week of March at the latest,” said Mr Cummings.

The situation in Downing Street in mid-March was 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”, he said.

There were no plans in place for shielding vulnerable people, testing for the virus or providing furlough payments to those who were unable to work, and Mr Johnson did not want a “proper border policy” to keep the infection out. No 10 suffered a “meltdown weekend” when Mr Johnson himself caught Covid-19 and went into intensive care and “in many ways, the whole core of government fell apart”.

Mr Cummings said he unsuccessfully argued against the reopening of the economy last summer and the return of students to universities in September. He rejected suggestions that Rishi Sunak had been a roadblock to tighter restrictions, though he claimed not to remember whether he had opposed the chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out plan.

And he branded Mr Johnson’s decision to ignore scientific advice for a two-week “circuit-breaker” lockdown in September “completely mad”.

In hindsight, Mr Cummings said he should have “held a gun to his head” at that point with a threat to resign and go public with their disagreements, as his relationship with Mr Johnson had taken a “terrible dive” and the PM knew that “I blamed him for the whole situation”.

“Fundamentally, I regarded him as unfit for the job,” said Mr Cummings, who eventually quit in November in a power struggle with Ms Symonds, whom he accused of trying to put friends into powerful positions at No 10.

“If I had gambled then and said, ‘I will basically call a press conference, and blow this thing sky high,’ and then he had caved in and done it, tens of thousands of people would now still be alive, and we could have avoided the whole horror of the delays and the variants and Christmas and the nightmare that the country’s gone through in the first quarter of this year,” he said. “I think I made the wrong decision and I apologise for that.”

Mr Cummings told the hearing: “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.”

The wife of one Covid victim said Mr Cummings had “spelt out what we all feared”.

Fran Hall, 60, who lost her husband to coronavirus last year, told the PA news agency: “Hearing such serious allegations made, without there being any consequences – other than scandalised media headlines for a few days – just adds to the unbearable pain felt by us, the bereaved families left behind.”