Dominic Cummings has laid bare the “surreal” chaos in Downing Street in March last year as the government grappled with the Covid pandemic, portraying the prime minister as obsessed with the media and making constant U-turns, “like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”. During an extraordinary evidence session to MPs at Westminster on Wednesday, Boris Johnson’s former chief aide targeted the prime minister for personal criticism, accusing him of being “unfit for the job”. He claimed that Johnson regretted the first lockdown and held out against imposing later restrictions, despite the advice of many people inside Downing Street, and that overall, “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die”. Cummings told MPs the prime minister had repeatedly said in respect of the first lockdown, “I should have been the mayor of Jaws and kept the beaches open,” and confirmed reports that in October, Johnson said he would see “bodies pile high” rather than order a third lockdown. The general situation in Downing Street was described as “an out-of-control movie” and, in particularly incendiary claims about Matt Hancock, Cummings said the health secretary had lied to the public and fellow ministers, arguing that amounted to “criminal” behaviour. He said that in January and February 2020, as news of the pandemic emerged from Wuhan, ministers and senior officials fell victim to what he described as “literally a classic historical example of groupthink in action”.
He said the prime minister himself had repeatedly played down the seriousness of the disease, calling it a “scare story” and comparing it to swine flu. Cummings even claimed officials had deliberately kept Johnson out of emergency Cobra meetings. “Certainly, the view of various officials inside No 10 was if we have the PM chair Cobra meetings, and he just tells everyone, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’m going to get [England’s chief medical officer] 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 planning.” He claimed that only in mid-March was an initial plan to pursue “herd immunity”, by allowing the virus to spread but delaying the peak of the outbreak, belatedly abandoned. Herd immunity “was the whole logic of all the discussions in January and February and early March”, Cummings told the committee. In later evidence, Cummings said criticism for poor government communications was largely a factor of bad policy – and blamed Johnson for this. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve got great people doing communications if the prime minister changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day,” he said. After the first lockdown, Cummings said, he and Johnson disagreed fundamentally about the response to Covid, with the prime minister wanting to reopen the economy, a stance Cummings called “completely mad”. Many others inside No 10, as well as the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, sided with Cummings, he said, “but the PM just wouldn’t do what we advised”. He added: “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 was especially damning about the prime minister’s refusal to order a second lockdown in September in the face of firm scientific advice. Cummings said the cabinet was not consulted, and instead of learning the lessons of March, Johnson had continued to rail against the first lockdown. “He didn’t think in July, or September, ‘Thank goodness we did the first lockdown, it was obviously the right thing to do.’ His argument then was, we shouldn’t have done the first lockdown and I’m not going to make the same mistake again,” he said. Cummings called for the promised public inquiry into the handling of Covid to take place as soon as possible. He said: “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die. There’s absolutely no excuse for delaying that. A lot of the reasons for why that happened are still in place.”
Discussing the initial response, Cummings described what he called a “surreal” day on 12 March 2020, as he tried to press the prime minister to change course. Johnson was repeatedly distracted from Covid matters, Cummings claimed, including by security meetings about whether to join US bombing raids in the Middle East – and his partner, Carrie Symonds, going “completely crackers” over a newspaper story about her dog, Dilyn. On the evening of the following day, Cummings said the deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, walked into the prime minister’s office to say: “I’ve come through here to tell you all, I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for disaster. I think we’re going to kill thousands of people.” He said No 10 had been told of the herd immunity approach and said: “We don’t even have a plan for burying the bodies.” Cummings was repeatedly dismissive of his former boss Johnson, whom he helped into Downing Street. “Fundamentally, I regarded him as unfit for the job, and I was trying to create a structure around him to try and stop what I thought were extremely bad decisions, and push other things through against his wishes,” he said. Asked why he had not resigned when he believed the government’s response was failing, Cummings said he had told the prime minister at the end of July that he would leave by 18 December. He claimed to have told Johnson: “This whole situation is chaos; this building is chaos. You know perfectly well that 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 to be in.” He said that, in response, the prime minister had laughingly agreed, saying: “Chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.”