Health News at Your Fingertips

Cummings says, even of the week of 9 March, Downing Street was told that the Sage scientists were in favour of a “mitigation” strategy – which would involve delaying the peak of the epidemic, and then relying on the population having “herd immunity” to keep this under control.

He suggests later Sage scientists claimed this had not been their consensus view.

In January and February he says No 10 was told that the biggest threat was from a second peak in September. That is why the single peak strategy was favoured.

Q: If you were not being given an accurate view of what Sage was recommending, why did you not change the Sage structure.

We did, says Cummings.

He says he set up a group to “red team” Sage, and criticise its advice.

Q: How did you get Sage to change the way it presented its advice?

Cummings says he set up a group to interrogate the Sage advice.

It was not his job to tell Sir Patrick Vallance how to manage Sage. His view was thta No 10 needed its own people with the skills to handle this data.

Keith says Cummings has described No 10 has a “hopeless structure” for dealing with a crisis like Covid.

Asked why, Cummings says No 10 is not configured to be “the nerve centre of a national crisis”. It is not set up so people can liaise with each other physically, he says. And it is not good for handling data. Also, the real power is in the Cabinet Office, he says.

Cummings says he wanted Michael Gove to deal with the leaders of the devolved administrations, not Boris Johnson, because he thought Gove would handle it “10 times better”.

Keith shows an email from Cummings saying he thought Cobra meetings were “hopeless” for decision making.

Dominic Cummings is giving evidence again. Hugo Keith KC is asking him about Cobra, the government’s emergency committee.

Cummings says Boris Johnson was not keen on attending Cobra meetings.

In his written statement to the inquiry, Lee Cain also said that Boris Johnson was influenced by the desire to appease anti-lockdown rightwing papers such as the Daily Telegraph – even though the evidence suggested their anti-lockdown views were wrong. Adam Bienkov from Byline Times has posted the screengrab.

Yesterday the inquiry released extracts from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diaries. In one entry, on 28 October 2020, Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said: “The rightwing press are culpable and we have a weak, indecisive PM.”

In his evidence to the Covid inquiry this morning Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s communications director during the first phase of Covid, said that he found it hard to support the “eat out to help out” subsidy scheme for restaurants in the summer of 2020, and the government’s attempt to get people back in the office at the same time. Cain said:

I, and particularly the other communicators as well, were just finding it very, very difficult because a huge part of what our role and responsibility is at that point is ‘what are we signalling to the public?’

At this point of developing policy, we are indicating to people that Covid is over – go back out, get back to work, crowd yourself onto trains, go into restaurants and enjoy pizzas with friends and family – really build up that social mixing.

Now, that is fine if you are intent on never having to do suppression measures again – but from all the evidence we are receiving, from all the advice we are receiving, it was incredibly clear that we were going to have to do suppression measures again.

We knew that all the way through, that was the strategy from the start.

So to then move forward and say: ‘Hey we’re going to get back into work’ when business wasn’t even asking for people to come back into work – in fact they were encouraging their employees to stay at home still.

It was government that seemed to be on its own demanding people go to work when the research we had was still quite cautious, businesses were feeding back they didn’t want to do it, the scientific opinion was we were going to have to have another lockdown.

So to me it made absolutely no sense whatsoever why we were talking about getting everybody back to work and they were the stories that ended up being on the front pages.

Plans to close railway station ticket offices in England have been scrapped in a government U-turn, Gwyn Topham reports.

Keith is now quoting from another Cummings document extremely critical of how the government machine was working.

Q: Was there any part of the government machine with which you did not find fault?

Cummings he spent some time talking to special forces, and they were exceptional.

Overall, there was “widespread failure”, he says. There were pockets of people doing exceptional work within an “overall dysfunctional system”.

Q: You complain that the PM ignored you because he was listening to “pop-ins”.

Cummings says that was a term used for when officials objected to a decision, and took the decision to pop in and see the PM, when Cummings was not there, to ask for a rethink. He says they would ask him to “trolley” on this.

Keith asks for a clarification.

Cummings says “trolley” was the term he used for Boris Johnson because he changed his mind so often. He claims “pretty much everyone” used the term to describe Johnson too.

They have now stopped for lunch.

Cummings says some of the private secretaries at No 10 were young women. He says some of them complained to him about how they felt they were treated by the senior male leadership in the Cabinet Office.

Q: In May you sent a memo saying material from the Cabinet Office and the Treasury should not go directly to the PM?

Cummings says he was trying to empower Tom Shinner, who was an excellent official. The Cabinet Office was a “bombsite”. It was producing inconsistent data.

He says he wanted Shinner to take charge of ensuring that the information that went to the PM was correct.

Shinner was a civil servant, who had been brought to No 10 by Cummings, Cummings says. Shinner had previously worked on Brexit. Cummings says hiring him was one of his best moves.

Q: Do you think your description of your colleagues added to the dysfunctionality at No 10?

No, says Cummings. He claims he is not particulary smart or effective in some ways. But he has built good teams, he says. So he felt he had a duty to speak out.

Q: You say Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary in 2020, was talented. But you denigrated and insulted him, didn’t you?

Cummings accepts that he said derogatory things about Sedwill, although he says he did not say Sedwill was unable to function.

Q: And you said the PM’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, was not up to the job. You thought he did not force the PM to take tough choices.

Cummings agrees. He says that should be a post held by one of the most able people in the country. He says he twice tried to get Boris Johnson to move him – in January 2020, and again after the first wave of Covid – but he lost the argument.

Cummings says the Cabinet Office was “incredibly bloated” and inefficient. Even people in charge did not know who was responsible for particular subjects, he says.

Q: Did you think the wrong people were in top jobs there?

Yes, says Cummings. He says some people had been moved after Cummings spoke to the cabinet secretary. But he says, “Whitehall being Whitehall”, they were often promoted.

Keith says he wants to ask Cummings about his “trenchant views”.

He says in his witness statement Cummings said the cabinet was seen as “largely irrelevant”, not a place for decisions to be taken, and a problem to manage.

Cummings says formally things are decided in cabinet. But in practice decisions are taken elsewhere, he says.

Q: So decisions started to be taken elsewhere?

Cummings queries “started”. He says it had been like this in government for a long time.

Q: Did you contribute to this?

Cummings says he managed this.

He urged the PM to carry out a big reshuffle, and to radically reduce the size of the cabinet, he says. He says Johnson did not agree.

Q: You called cabinet ministers “useless fuckpigs”, “morons” and “cunts”. Were these views shared by others?

Cummings says his appalling language was his own. But those judgments were widespread, he says.

Q: Did you express your views too trenchantly?

Cummings says, if anything, he understated the problem.

Dominic Cummings, who was Boris Johnson’s chief adviser for most of 2020, has just started giving evidence.

As he began, Sky News warned its viewers to expect bad language.

Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry, is questioning Cummings. He says the inquiry has had a witness statement. It was “lengthy”, he says (which will be no surprise to anyone who has read a Cummings blog).

And Pippa Crerar has this, from what Lee Cain was saying while Keir Starmer was speaking.

Lee Cain tells Covid inquiry that Boris Johnson and top team made “huge blunder” by resisting Marcus Rashford’s call for free school meals to be extended.

He said lack of cabinet diversity meant none had received FSM themselves which resulted in “policy & political blind spot”

Turning back to the Covid inquiry, Lee Cain is coming towards the end of his evidence.

While Keir Starmer was speaking, the inquiry was presented with an extract from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary saying that in December 2020 Boris Johnson told a cabinet meeting that he favoured letting “the old people” get Covid to protect others from the impact of another lockdown. Vallance was the government’s chief scientific adviser.

The Times’ Steven Swinford has posted the extract on X.

UPDATE: PA Media has more on on the extracts from Sir Patrick Vallance’s notebooks shown to the inquiry. PA says:

The government’s former chief scientist described a “bonkers set of exchanges” as he noted that Boris Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” in the pandemic.

Sir Patrick Vallance wrote in one of his notebooks in August 2020 that Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going. Quite bonkers set of exchanges”.

Another note from Vallance in December 2020, said: “PM told he has been acting early and the public are with him (but his party is not). He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just Nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much’. Wants to rely on polling. Then he says, ‘We should move things to Tier 3 now.”

A WhatsApp exchange between the PM and Lee Cain in October 2020, saw Johnson write: “Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff.”

And Adam Bienkov from Byline Times has posted the screengrabs on X.