A leading scientist from the government’s official advisory body has said there is a “vacuum in the heart of government” following Dominic Cummings’ press conference on breaking lockdown, and that “we now have to recognise that central government probably cannot be trusted to provide leadership.” Robert West, a professor of health psychology at University College London’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health, who sits on the advisory group on behavioural science for Sage told the Guardian: “From a public health perspective what we now have to recognise is that central government probably cannot be trusted to provide leadership, and other agencies, including local and regional government, are going to have to work together to make up for this. It will be difficult and maybe things will change but as things stand there is a leadership vacuum in the heart of government.” In reference to Cummings’ account of why he drove hundreds of miles to Durham during lockdown, West said: “There are so many holes in his narrative that only the most desperate people who want to believe him could do so. Not least is the idea that someone who is not an idiot would drive for 30 miles (coincidentally to a tourist attraction) with his wife and child in the car to check that he was safe to drive.” “It may sound odd but I really wanted him to find a credible and honourable way out of this mess,” said West. “But the whole thing is playing out like a Greek tragedy with the protagonists trapped by their own proclivities to self-destruct - in his case by his hubris and inability to say sorry.” West also said there had been growing unease among his advisory colleagues about a divergence between the scientific advice and the government’s approach. “Those of us on Spi-B have been increasingly concerned about the extent to which the government’s approach to the behavioural sciences and the messaging, particularly, has been at 180 degrees from the kind of advice that we have been sending into the Cabinet Office,” said West. Members of Spi-B, the advisory group on behavioural science, say their recommendations to set very clear and unequivocal messages for the public to follow have frequently been ignored by politicians. They fear Cummings’ apparent disregard of the rules will be extremely damaging. He noted that ministers got a lot of flak for changing the advisory slogan from “stay at home” to “stay alert” as they began to talk of easing the lockdown. “And rightly so, because it is exactly the kind of thing that you would have hoped they would have consulted with their scientific advisers on, in order to come up with something that would be meaningful at a really important stage of the process.” West said Spi-B was never asked about the change of slogan. “The sense is that there’s another parallel group of people who are effectively calling the shots here and have their own views on how things should go, but they are not necessarily experts in communication or behavioural science or all the things they would need to be. “They are treating the whole health crisis as though it were a political crisis. If it’s a political crisis, what you do is try to manage your reputation. If it’s a health crisis you focus on saving lives, at whatever cost to your political reputation.” He said 40 people were involved in Spi-B, the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, which feeds in to Sage, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. “I know [concern] is widespread among the group but not everybody feels comfortable speaking out and I completely understand that. But there has been considerable and growing unease,” West said. “The worry is that the government has said from the beginning it is following the science, and that was never true.” The group did not expect to be calling the shots, he said, “but when the government forms policy or does something that goes against the advice, they need to explain why”. He said the Cabinet Office asked the committee to provide guidance and write papers to answer questions posed by the government, sometimes at two hours’ notice. The members were working extremely hard, he said. “Then it seems to go into a black hole and we see communications that are at variance [with the advice].” He expressed sympathy for Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the chief medical officer for England and the chief scientific officer, who he said were “potentially in such a difficult position” attempting to champion the science with the government.