Health News at Your Fingertips

O’Connor shows a paragraph from Cain’s witness statement. At the end of January an adviser to the health secretary told Cain the UK might not be prepared for the threat posed by Covid. The adviser mentioned supply chain issues.

Cain says he was involved because he realised No 10 did not have answers to some of the questions the media might be asking.

O’Connor refers again to Cain’s witness statement, and says Johnson took at two-week holiday at this point (mid February). Hugo Keith KC referred to this yesterday, although he did not describe it as a holiday.

Cain defends Johnson’s actions at this point. He says Johnson had been assured that the government was making plans for Covid.

O’Connor asks if Johnson said over-reacting could be more of a threat. Cain confirms that. He says Johnson had a “colourful phrase of language” sometimes.

Q: Where did Covid fit in the hierarchy of concern in January and February 2020?

Cain says it started as a low base issue.

The view was that the UK was well prepared to deal with a pandemic.

The Department of Health was in the lead, he says. But as they moved through January into February, it moved up the agenda.

Q: In January/February you were not worried about the priority being given to Covid?

Cain says in early January he felt it was getting the right about of attention.

In late January and early February, he felt the balance was not quite right.

He says No 10 was “probably complacent”, thinking work was being done elsewhere.

Lee Cain is now giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. He is being questioned by Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel for the inquiry.

Cain starts by confirming details of his career. He worked as head of broadcasting for Vote Leave, before working as an adviser for Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary.

Q: Was Boris Johnson a friend?

Cain says Johnson was his boss. They had a good relationship.

He says he had a good understanding of how Johnson would react to something.

At the Covid inquiry yesterday Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry, said that, judging by the paperwork seen by the inquiry, Boris Johnson did not get any submissions about Covid for a period of 10 days in the middle of February 2020 – when the pandemic was becoming a global crisis, and only a month before the UK had to go into lockdown. The two private secretaries giving evidence did not contradict this, although they said they did not know if anyone else was speaking to him at the time about coronavirus. (Johnson was at Chequers.) They could not explain why he was avoiding the issue.

This morning Lord Bethell, a junior health minister during the pandemic, told the Today programme that he thought Johnson was avoiding the topic because he did not like bad news. Bethell said:

I was aware that during the early days of the pandemic, it was extremely difficult to get any response from Downing Street, and we could see this train coming down the tracks at us.

It was put to us there were other priorities including Brexit. I personally found that completely unexplainable and baffling.

I know [Boris Johnson] found the prospect of a pandemic personally very difficult to focus on, it was bad news of a kind he doesn’t like to respond to, and he did everything he could to try to avoid the subject.

Jamie Grierson has the full story.

Good morning. The Covid inquiry started taking evidence from witnesses in person in June, but only this week is it starting to interrogate members of Boris Johnson’s inner circle who were in the room with him as key decisions were taken at the start of the pandemic. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, who were in WhatsApp groups with him as key decisions were dodged, fudged or overturned. Yesterday’s hearing provided fresh evidence of the extent to which No 10 was in chaos at the time and today we’ve got two witnesses who potentially could be even more interesting.

In 2020 Dominic Cummings was Johnson’s chief adviser at No 10, and Lee Cain was his director of communications. They were involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and at the time Cummings was arguably the most powerful unelected person in the country. Ultimately he decided Johnson was a disastrous liability, and in 2021 he spent seven hours telling a Commons committee why. (For a reminder of what he said, skim the individual blog post headlines at the top of our blog covering the hearing.) It is hard to believe he has anything more to say, but his capacity for destructive criticism is inexhaustible, and the inquiry hearing will provide us with some of his WhatsApp messages, which did not happen two years ago.

Cain is a close ally of Cummings, but he has said much less about Johnson, and what happened during this period, in public, and so it is harder to predict where he will go. Some observers may also find him a more credible witness than Cummings, whose view of the world is often constrained by the assumption that he is always right and everyone else (with a handful of exceptions – normally geeks) is always useless.

The hearing starts at 10am. I will be covering it most of the day, although there will also be coverage of Keir Starmer’s speech on the Israel-Hamas war. Jamie Grierson has a preview of what he will say here.

This morning Richard Holden, a transport minister, was doing the broadcast round for No 10 and he had to defend the government’s handling of Covid in the light of the evidence revealed at the inquiry. He argued that the WhatsApp revelations were just “tittle-tattle” and that, if Churchill had had an iPhone during the second world war, similar disobliging comments may have emerged. He told Times Radio:

If there was conversations between people and they were recorded throughout history, as they are on WhatsApp, then would it be similarly embarrassing? Would Churchill and Chamberlain have faced a similar, what their colleagues said about them on X or Y day? I’m absolutely positive they would have done. I think that’s tittle-tattle. I don’t think that’s the important issue here. The important issue at stake is what we can learn as a country from our response.

Holden is right to the extent that WhatsApp means there is now a public record of exchanges that in the past might not have been recorded for posterity (although a lot of Churchill’s contemporaries kept and published very detailed diaries). But if he was trying to suggest a stronger parallel between Johnson and the great wartime leader – well, that’s probably best avoided. There is no record of any of Churchill’s colleagues saying he was making Britain look like a “a terrible, tragic joke”.

You might think this is just an argument about the past, but Holden’s response also shows how hard it is for Rishi Sunak to present himself as a “change” prime minister. If No 10 were serious about that, it would have sent Holden into the studios with orders to disown Johnson, trash his record, and stress that Sunak was doing things differently. But No 10 can’t say that because it would not sound plausible and Tory MPs would object, and so instead Sunak’s reputation remains shackled to Johnson’s.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

10am: Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former communications director, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.

11am: Keir Starmer gives a speech “on the international situation in the Middle East”. He will also take questions.

Late morning: Dominic Cummings is expected to start giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. After a break for lunch at 1pm, the hearing will resume at 2pm.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, speaks at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

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