Health News at Your Fingertips

O’Connor shows an extract from MacNamara’s witness statement. In it, she says the government was already “on the back foot” in January 2020 because of Brexit. And she says the relationship between the civil service and Boris Johnson’s team was a “low trust environment”.

In her oral evidence MacNamara does also say that preparing for a possible no deal Brexit had been “immensely valuable” in terms of preparing for Covid.

At the Covid inquiry Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, is giving evidence now.

Andrew O’Connor KC is questioning her.

MacNamara says public inquiries are important. Her witness statement runs to more than 100 pages.

But she says it was “extraordinary difficult to get even the most basic pieces of information” from the Cabinet Office when she was compiling her statement.

And she says the Cabinet Office deleted her work mobile phone, which meant some messages were not available.

But most of her business was on email, she says.

A live stream of the inquiry is here:

James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, says the Foreign Office is trying to help Britons trapped in Gaza leave today via the Rafah crossing, which has opened. He posted this on X.

The Rafah crossing is likely to open today for a first group of foreign nationals.

UK teams are ready to assist British nationals as soon as they are able to leave.

It’s vital that lifesaving humanitarian aid can enter Gaza as quickly as possible.

There is full coverage of developments in the Israel-Hamas war on our live blog.

Here is the clip of Oliver Dowden telling Kay Burley on Sky News this morning that what Dominic Cummings said about Boris Johnson at the Covid inquiry was “very partial”.

Burley invited Dowden to accept that what Johnson was revealed yesterday to have said about Covid being “nature’s way of dealing with old people” was “shocking”. But Dowden wouldn’t say that. He said he did not “recognise” much of the evidence given yesterday, and said he rejected in many respects what had been said.

Good morning. The evidence from Dominic Cummings to the Covid inquiry yesterday was not good for Boris Johnson’s reputation. The papers where he either used to be or is now a columnist have led their coverage with an anti-Cummings take, but elsewhere the headlines reflect evidence that emerged that suggests Johnson’s leadership during Covid was even more chaotic and flawed than people already thought.

There is more coming this morning when Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary who was the subject of misogynist-sounding rants by Cummings, gives evidence. (Cummings claims he wasn’t misogynist because he was just as unpleasant and offensive about men; in other words, he says he’s an equal opportunities misogynist.)

Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, was on the morning interview round earlier. He wanted to talk about the PM’s AI safety summit, but inevitably he was asked about Johnson. Along with Rishi Sunak and Robert Jenrick, Dowden wrote a joint article in the Times in June 2019 endorsing Johnson for the Tory leadership on the grounds that he had “governed well” as London mayor and that he would bring “a sense of excitement and hope about what we Conservatives can do for Britain”. At the time Johnson was worried his most prominent MP supporters were cranks, and so an endorsement from mainstream high-flyers was valuable.

In the light of the new evidence to the inquiry, does Dowden have any regrets? It does not sound like it. In interviews this morning, rather than endorse the Cummings critique of Johnson’s leadership, he urged people to wait until Johnson presented his side of the story. He told Sky News:

What I think you are seeing there is very partial, one piece of evidence amongst many others. I am quite sure that when the former prime minister gives evidence he will give a full account of himself, the Cabinet Office has given a very full account of how we conducted ourselves.

I am not going to give commentary on one individual piece of information because it needs to fit in with a much wider picture of how we conducted ourselves both at the time and through the vaccine programme, and through all the different, very difficult decisions that were taken around the cost and benefits of lockdowns.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.15am: Political and tech industry leaders arrive at Bletchley Park for Rishi Sunak’s global summit on AI safety.

10am: Helen MacNamara, former deputy cabinet secretary, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.

1.30pm: Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, takes part in a Q&A at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.

2pm: David Halpern, former head of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.

4pm: Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, gives a speech at a King’s Fund conference.

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