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Keith ended by asking Cummings about the Barnard Castle affair, when Cummings took his family from London to his parents’ home in County Durham when the country was in lockdown, and trips like this were supposed to be banned. Cummings also drove his family to Barnard Castle to “test his eyesight” before driving back to London.

Cummings claimed there were security reasons why he needed to leave London. Asked why he needed his family in the car on the trip to test his eyesight, he conceded they did not need to be there.

Asked if he accepted that he caused huge offence, Cummings defended his decision to move his family out of London for a time. But he said the way No 10 handled the story was “an absolute car crash”.

He said:

It was certainly a disaster, the whole handling of the situation. But there were other factors involved with it all as well – testing and PPE and many other things were all going haywire at the time …

In terms of my actual actions in going north and then coming back down I acted entirely reasonably and legally and did not break any rules.

Keith ended by saying that Cummings left Downing Street on 13 November 2020 never to return. And he left No 10 in the control of someone he thought was unfit for office.

As Pippa Crerar reports, Hugo Keith asked Dominic Cummings why he helped to make Boris Johnson PM if he thought he was not fit for the job.

Inquiry lead counsel says Cummings helped put into power someone who was, in his view, unfit to respond to pandemic.

“Correct.”

“Are you sorry?”

“No. Politics is about choices. We thought combination of second referendum and Corbyn was so bad that we should roll the dice.”

Here is the full quote:

Politics is about choices.

And the choice that we had in summer 2019 was do we allow the whole situation, this once-a-century constitutional crisis to continue, meltdown and possibly see Jeremy Corbyn as PM and a second referendum on Brexit – which we thought would be catastrophic for the country and for democracy, for faith in democracy – or to roll the dice on Boris and to try and control him and build a team around him that could control him.

We didn’t take that choice lightly. We considered in summer 19 an alternative of staying out of it.

But we thought the combination of second referendum and Corbyn was so bad that we should roll the dice.

Keith shows a WhatsApp message that Boris Johnson sent to Dominic Cummings after he left No 10. In it, Johnson accuses Cummings of presiding over “a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism”.

In response, Cummings blocked Johnson.

Keith asks Cummings if there was an orgy of narcissism in the government. Cummings replies: “Certainly there was.”

Cummings said Boris Johnson’s concern for the media, and how he felt he had to respond to what it was saying, was “extremely bad and extremely damaging to the Covid response”.

He said there were specific concerns about his relationship with the Barclays and the paper they owned, the Daily Telegraph.

And he said there was “possible corruption in terms of [Johnson’s] relationship with [George] Osborne” and the way money was being funnelled to the Evening Standard, the paper Osborne edited.

This seems to be a reference to the way the government spent money generously on Covid advertising that appeared in the Standard, and most other national newspapers, at a time when they were grateful for extra advertising revenue.

Keith asks Cummings if he contributed to the atmosphere of contempt and misogyny in No 10 that was identified in an internal report. Extracts from this were published yesterday.

“Certainly not,” says Cummings.

Keith then presents some messages from Cummings referring to Helen McNamara, the deputy cabinet secretary.

In this one Cummings says he is in a “homicidal” mood and wants to go back to No 10 and fire some people.

In this one, Cummings says he would like to handcuff McNamara and remove her from the building, because they cannot keep ‘“dodging stilettos from that cunt”.

And in this one, he describes moving her to the communities department, where she can build “millions of lovely houses”.

Cummings accepts that his language was “obviously appalling”.

But he claims he “got on well at a personal level” with McNamara.

He says there were structural reasons why he wanted her moved.

Keith says Cummings was clearly misogynistic.

Cummings does not accept this. He says he was “much ruder about men”, and he says he used similar language, or worse, about the PM.

Cummings says Boris Johnson’s decision to tell Mark Sedwill he had to go was a mistake.

Keith points out that Cummings had contributed to this, by denigrating him to Johnson. He says Cummings had insulted Sedwill, and put poison in Johnson’s ear.

Cummings does not contest this, but he says removing Sedwill in this way was a mistake.

Keith says he will not go into care home policy, and PPE now, because future modules will look at this.

Q: But did you say you had been misled by Matt Hancock, and the health department, about what was being done to protect people in care homes and to procure PPE.

Cummings says multiple people told him what Hancock was saying in morning meetings was not true.

Keith shows an extract from a message sent by Cummings to Johnson in May 2020 saying Hancock was unfit for his job.

Keith says Cummings says in his witness statement to the inquiry that, if a proper test-and-trace system had been in place, lockdown would not have been necessary. But lockdown became necessary to stop the NHS being overwhelmed.

Q: The lockdown could have been decided upon earlier?

For sure, says Cummings.

Q: From 9 March onwards the government tried to change course. But lack of planning made that hard.

Cummings accepts that.

Q: Later Boris Johnson said “thank God we changed course – it would have been a catastrophe”.

Correct, says Cummings.

Here is the text of the WhatsApp message sent by Dominic Cummings on 12 March 2020 referring to Mark Sedwill and chickenpox. (See 4pm.)

Sedwill babbling about chickenpox god fucking help us …

In the conversation the cabinet secretary said to the PM, ‘PM you should go on TV and should explain that this is like the old days with chickenpox and people are going to have chickenpox parties. And the sooner a lot of people get this and get it over with the better sort of thing’.

And this had been mentioned before this analogy and I said ‘Mark, you should stop using this analogy of chickenpox parties and the cabinet secretary said why. And Ben Warner said ‘because chickenpox doesn’t spread exponentially and kill thousands and thousands of people’.

And the look on people’s faces when Ben said this, that was quite a crystallising moment because it made us (a) think who on earth is briefing the most important official in the country along these lines. This is terrifying.

But also other officials obviously heard this exchange and some of them came to us and said essentially ‘something has gone terribly wrong in the Cabinet Office’.

Keith says around this time there is a reference to Mark Sedwill, the then cabinet secretary, saying the government should describe this as like chickenpox, and remind people about chickenpox parties.

Cummings says Sedwill was told that this comparison was wrong, because chicken pox does not spread exponentially and kill thousands of people. But he says this was a “crystallising moment” because it showed that the most senior civil servant in the country was being wrongly briefed.

Keith presents a minute from a cabinet meeting on 11 March at which Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said that if someone did not have a cough and a temperature, they were unlikely to have coronavirus.

Cummings says at that point people in No 10 knew this was not true. He says Hancock had been repeatedly told by Sir Patrick Vallance that this was not true, but he kept saying it anyway.