Six things we learned from Boris Johnson’s key aides Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain
The evidence from Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings and ex-communications director Lee Cain was some of the most eagerly awaited of this phase of the Covid inquiry. Here are the biggest takeaways from their testimonies.
PM thought ‘older people should accept their fate’
Diary entries written by Sir Patrick Vallance, the then chief scientific adviser, in August 2020 claimed Mr Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going”.
A later record by Sir Patrick from December 2020 alleged that Mr Johnson agreed with Conservative MPs who claimed that Covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people”.
Cummings was told virus likely to ‘sweep world’
On 6 February 2020, Mr Cummings sent a message to a No 10 aides’ WhatsApp group saying he had just been told by Sir Patrick that the virus was already “probably out of control now and will sweep the world”.
This was at odds with what was being revealed to the public, to the prime minister and ministers and officials on the government’s emergency committee, Cobra – which was that it was possible the virus could still be contained within China.
PM accused Cummings of lying over Barnard Castle
Mr Cummings and his wife and son left London in late March 2020, a few days into the first national lockdown, to drive to Durham where his parents lived, while the family was experiencing Covid symptoms.
When the scandal emerged in May 2020, the PM’s chief adviser claimed he had spoken to Mr Johnson about his decision to travel to Durham, but given both he and Mr Johnson were suffering from Covid symptoms, neither could remember the detail of the conversation.
The inquiry was shown a WhatsApp message sent by Mr Johnson on 19 July 2021, after Mr Cummings had left his post, saying: “Cummings a total and utter liar. He never told me he had gone to Durham during lockdown.
“I only discovered when the stories started to come out about Barnard castle etc… He later claimed that he had told me but that my brain was so fogged by Covid that I didn’t register.
“It’s not true, I would have noted it. He never told me. I then tried my very best to defend him.”
Government had no plans for shielding vulnerable
Mr Cummings told the inquiry it was “crackers” that there was no plan in place to shield older and vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic.
He said: “If you are not going to control the virus, if you are not going to have test and trace, it makes the lack of a plan for shielding in care homes even more crackers.
“There was effectively no plan for a lot of that. One of the most appalling things of the whole enterprise was on 19 March when we realised there was almost no shielding plan at all and the Cabinet Office was trying to block us creating a shielding plan.”
Lockdown could have been avoided if UK borders closed
Mr Cummings said that when cases of the virus first emerged in late December 2019, senior scientific advisers and officials were arguing for a strategy of herd immunity rather than taking radical action to protect the UK from cases being imported from China, where Covid had originated.
He said: “My view is that what ought to have happened is as soon as the first reports came at the end of December we should have immediately closed down flights to China, had a very hardcore system at the airports and border, and there should have been a whole massive testing infrastructure ramping up.
“If you had that combination of serious border control with test and trace then I think in retrospect that would have been a much better approach, not just in terms of deaths but also us being able to keep open the economy to a massively greater extent.”
Johnson was called the ‘trolley’ in No 10
Mr Cummings’s description of the former prime minister as a “trolley” who frequently changes his mind is well known, but the ex-adviser told the inquiry that several other people in government also used the label.
He said: “Pretty much everyone called the PM a trolley.” Earlier, giving his evidence to the inquirty, Mr Cain said: “Covid was the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skill set.”
