Dominic Cummings’ evidence in full on Boris Johnson’s handling of Covid

Westminster is gripped today as Dominic Cummings gives evidence to MPs about Boris Johnson‘s handling of the Covid crisis. 

The maverick former No10 chief adviser is delivering four hours of testimony to a joint session of the Commons health and science committees in which he is handing a bruising to his former friend and boss. 

Mr Cummings is expected to be accused by Tory MPs of using today’s appearance to ‘avenge’ his sacking in November after he lost a power struggle with Ms Symonds.

But Labour will seize on the claims as evidence that Mr Johnson could have done more to save lives.

Below is Mr Cummings’ evidence in full: 

Dominic Cummings is delivering four hours of testimony to a joint session of the Commons health and science committees about Boris Johnson’s handling of Covid 

SESSION ONE

Q – Greg Clark, Chair of the Science and Technology Committee 

On January 22, Wuhan, a city the size of London, was sealed off. Did this set alarm bells ringing? 

The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its Government in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most the Government failed. I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that. 

When it started, in January, I did think in part of my mind, ‘Oh my goodness, is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time?’ However, at the time the PHE (Public Health England) here and the WHO (World Health Organisation) and CDC, generally speaking, organisations across the western world were not ringing great alarm bells about it then.

I think it is in retrospect completely obvious that many, many institutions failed on this early question. The Taiwanese his the panic button some time around New Year’s Eve and immediately closed the borders and introduced a strict quarantine system. I think it’s obvious that the Western world including Britain completely failed to see the smoke and hear the alarm bells. 

Q – Do you remember a time when you personally were seized of the important of it?

On something like January 25 I said to the private office at Number 10 that we should look at pandemic planning and soon after I asked Matt Hancock where we were with scanning the pandemic operation plans. 

I would like to stress and apologise for the fact that it is true that I did this but I did not follow up on this and push it the way I should’ve done.

We were told in No 10 at the time that this is literally top of the risk register, this has been planned and there’s been exercises on this over and over again, everyone knows what to do.

And it’s sort of tragic in a way, that someone who wrote so often about running red teams and not trusting things and not digging into things, whilst I was running red teams about lots of other things in government at this time, I didn’t do it on this.

If I had said at the end of January, we’re going to take a Saturday and I want all of these documents put on the table and I want it all gone through and I want outside experts to look at it all, then we’d have figured out much, much earlier that all the claims about brilliant preparations and how everything was in order were basically completely hollow, but we didn’t figure this out until the back end of February. 

Q – When did you talk to the PM about it first?

It was definitely raised with the PM in the first half of January in a chat with me and other people. 

Q – In the months that followed was Covid the most important matter that you dealt with?

At the time the government, in no way shape of form, acted like it was the most important thing going on in January, nor in February. The Government itself and Number 10 was not operating on a war footing in February on this in any way, shape or form. Lot of key people were literally skiing in the middle of February. 

Obviously in retrospect I should have been hitting the panic button more than I did in February, I did more as the month went on.  

Q – Give a brief summary of the principle things you were dealing with during February. 

I was working very much on the science and technology agenda and procurement reform. I was dealing with other things like HS2, national security issues and the reshuffle. 

Q – Did you have to book meetings with the PM?

I could just pop in and out of his office. I sometimes wrote notes but most of our interaction was talking. I wrote a note to him about the Covid situation in February, I’m not sure if I did in January. 

Q – Did you attend Cobra meetings in February?

I don’t think that I did. What I did was hire a guy to run data for No10. [Additional Q – Did you choose not to go?] It was a question of dividing people’s time. I don’t remember if I attended any of the Cobra meetings. 

[Additional Q – Did you advise the Prime Minister to go?] No. [Additional Q – Why didn’t you?] The best use of people’s time was to send Ben Warner, a physicist I hired, and a Downing Street adviser. A lot of Cobra meetings are just PowerPoint slides and aren’t very useful.

Also bear in mind one of the huge problems we had throughout was things leaking and creating chaos in the media. Things were leaking from Cobra, leaking from practically everything. 

‘So when I wanted to have sensitive conversations that I didn’t want to see appear in the media I did not have those conversations in Cobra.’

I was having meetings about it with people like Patrick Vallance [chief scientific adviser] in a way I knew wouldn’t leak. In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story, he described it as the new swine flu.

The view of various officials inside Number 10 was if we have the Prime Minister chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone ‘it’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of’, that would not help actually serious panic.

I’m not a technical person, I’m not a smart person. I couldn’t understand a lot of the things that were being discussed and the modelling that was being done so I thought it was more useful to have a PhD physicist there [at the Cobra meetings]. A lot of it was over my head. 

Q – Why did you change your 2019 blog to refer to coronaviruses?

There have been a lot of media stories saying that I changed what I wrote but that’s all false. Not a single letter of what I wrote was changed. Not a single word was changed. [Additional Q – But you added to it?] Correct. [Additional Q – How did you have time to do that?] Pasting over a blog takes 90 seconds or so. 

Q – Could you explain the thinking on the issue of herd immunity?

Essentially the logic of the official plan from the Department of Health was that this disease is going to spread, vaccines are not going to be relevant in any way, shape or form over the relevant time period, we were told it was essentially a certainty that there would be no vaccines available in 2020, something else which turned out to be completely wrong because, as I think we’ll come onto, it actually turns out we could’ve done vaccines much faster than happened.

But at the time the whole plan was based on the assumption that it was a certainty that there would be no vaccines in 2020. So the logic was you can either have … if it’s unconstrained it will come in and there will be a sharp peak like that, and it will completely swamp everything and huge disaster.

The logical approach therefore is to introduce measures which delay that peak arriving and which push it down below the capacity of the health system.

In response to the argument. ‘But hang on a second, look at what they’re doing in Wuhan, Taiwan and South Korea’, the assumption in Whitehall was that it wouldn’t work for them… secondly, that it was inconceivable that the British public would accept Wuhan-style measures. 

Even if we therefore suppress it completely all you’re going to do is get a second peak in the winter when the NHS is already every year under pressure, so we only actually have a real choice between one peak and herd immunity by September – terrible but then you’re through it by the time the next winter comes – if you try and flatten it now the second peak comes up in winter time that’s even worse.

So, horrific as it looks in the summer, the numbers will be even worse if this happens in October, November, December-time.

It’s important to bear in mind on this whole herd immunity point, obviously no one is saying that they want this to happen, the point is it was seen as an inevitability – you will either have herd immunity by September after a single peak or you will have herd immunity by January with a second peak, those are the only two options that we have. 

That was the whole logic of all of the discussions in January and in February and early March. [Additional Q – So when Matt Hancock said on March 15 that herd immunity was not a policy, was that wrong?] Completely wrong. That was the plan. I’m completely baffled as to why No 10 has tried to deny that because that was the official plan.

Q – Jeremy Hunt, former health secretary   

On the Sage meeting on March 5 it was five weeks since the WHO had said Covid was an issue of international concern. But the minutes say that the only measures recommended were shielding the vulnerable and elderly. Did you advise him that Sage were wrong?

No I didn’t. In the first ten days of March I was increasingly being told by people things were going wrong, but I was also really worried about smashing my hand down on a button saying ‘ditch the official plan’. By the 5th I was still reluctant to do that. 

I was really torn about the whole thing because in the first 10 days of March. I was increasingly being told by people I think this is going wrong but I was also really, really worried about kind of like smashing my hand down on a massive button marked ‘ditch the official plan, stop listening to the official plan, I think there’s something going wrong’. I did do that as we’ll come on to but on the fifth I was reluctant to do that. 

[Additional Q – Did you advise that Cheltenham be cancelled?] No, the official advice was that it wouldn’t make much difference to transmission, which was bizarre in retrospect, and that cancelling it could be actively bad as it would just push people into pubs. No one in the official system, in the Department of Health, drew the obvious logical conclusion, which was ‘shouldn’t we be shutting all the pubs as well?’

There was push back from within the system against advising on the 12th to say stay at home if you’ve got symptoms. 

And me and others were realising at this point the system is basically delaying announcing all of these things because there’s not a proper plan in place. 

As far as I could tell from Sage, and as far as the minutes show, the fundamental assumption remained we can’t do lockdown, we can’t do suppression, because it just means a second peak. 

Prior to giving evidence, Cummings posted a chart on Twitter claiming that COBR documents had the ‘optimal single peak strategy’ showing 260,000 dead because the system was ‘so confused in the chaos’ 

Q – Jeremy Hunt, former health secretary 

How would you change the structures and systems to stop this happened in a future pandemic?

The way in which Sage and the whole thinking around the strategy was secret was a huge mistake because there wasn’t proper scrutiny. 

Anyone who has been involved in the political world knows the whole thing is riddled with duff studies to make people believe things that weren’t true. And that was one of the problems behind the group-think, which was that the British public would not accept a lockdown or an Asian-style track and trace system. Those assumptions were central to the official plan and obviously completely wrong. 

[Additional Q – did you advise going further with the lockdown?] We need to understand the crucial period between Thursday 12th and the Sunday, when things started to change. 

On the 12th – it was a completely surreal day… I sent a message to the PM at 7.48 that morning and, forgive the language this is expressed in, ‘We’ve got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly s***. No plans, totally behind the pace, we must announce today, not next week. We must force the pace. We’re looking at 100,000 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.’

So the day started with that but we then got completely derailed when in the morning of the 12th the people of the National Security Committee came in and said Trump wanted us to join in a Middle East bombing campaign. 

And then to add to … it sounds so surreal couldn’t possibly be true … that day, the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog. The Prime Minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that. 

So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq? Part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial.

Fortunately thank God the Attorney General persuaded the PM not to join in with the Middle East bombing campaign.

The evening of Friday 13th, I’m sitting with Ben Warner [data scientist] and the PM’s private secretary in the PM’s private study and we discussed about how we would have to speak to him tomorrow about needing to ditch the official plan. This is the white board [pictured below] which has plan B sketched on it. 

At this point, deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen McNamara said she had been talking to the official Mark Sweeney, who was in charge with coordinating with the Department of Health and he said, ‘I have been told for years that there is a plan for this, there is no plan, we are in huge trouble’. 

Helen McNamara said ‘I think we are absolutely f****d’ I think this country’s in a disaster and we are going to kill thousands of people. I said ‘I think you’re right, it is a disaster, we are going to sketch out plan b’. 

On March 14, the Prime Minister was told ‘You are going to have to lock down’. But there is no lockdown plan. Sage haven’t modelled it, DH don’t have a plan, we are going to have to figure out and hack together a lockdown plan. This is like a scene from Independence Day with Jeff Goldblum saying, ‘the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken, and you need a new plan’… that is what the scene was like that morning, with Ben Warner in the Jeff Goldblum role.

He took the Prime Minister through all the graphs, and through the NHS graphs, and showed him that the system is thinking this is all weeks and weeks and away… but this is all completely wrong… The NHS is going to be smashed in weeks.

Mr Cummings teed up his evidence by tweeting this chart of the government’s Plan B this morning

Q – You didn’t advise the PM to change tack until March 11, you didn’t advise him to cancel Cheltenham, the Champions League, to close the borders. Do you not recognise that was a massive failing on your part?

There’s no doubt in retrospect that yes, it was a huge failure of mine and I bitterly regret that I didn’t hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did. In retrospect there’s no doubt I was wrong not to. All I can say is my worry was, my mental state at the time was, on the one hand you can know from the last week of February that a whole many things were wrong.

But I was incredibly frightened, I guess is the word, about the consequences of me kind of pulling a massive emergency string and saying the official plan is wrong and it’s going to kill everyone and you have got to change path because what if I’m wrong? What if I persuade him to change tack and that’s a disaster?’

We are sitting in the Prime Minister’s office, the Cabinet were talking about the herd immunity plan. The Cabinet Secretary said ‘Prime Minister you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity plan and that it’s like the old chicken pox parties, we need people to get this disease because that’s how we get herd immunity by September’.

I said ‘Mark (Sedwill), you have got to stop using this chicken pox analogy, it’s not right’ and he said ‘why’ and Ben Warner said ‘because chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people’.

To stress, this wasn’t some thing that Cabinet Secretary had come up with, he was saying what the official advice to him from the Department of Health was. 

Q – Mark Logan, MP for Bolton North East  

You are seen as very successful, but why were you not able to nail an earlier lockdown?

I didn’t pay enough attention to it early enough, for sure. It was the classic group think bubble. But what is inarguable the case was that part of my job was to challenge things and I didn’t do that early enough. If this process had been opened up to outside smart people we would have figured out at least six weeks earlier that there was an alternative plan. 

At this time, not just the Prime Minister but many other people thought that the real danger is not the health danger but the over-reaction to it and the economy. The Prime Minister said all the way through February and through the first half of March the real danger here isn’t this new swine flu thing, it’s that the reaction to it is going to cripple the economy.

To be fair to the Prime Minister, although I think he was completely wrong, lots of other senior people in Whitehall had the same view, that the real danger was the economic one. 

Mr Cummings posted another excerpt from a report suggesting that imposing a tough lockdown could merely have caused a second peak at a more dangerous time for the NHS 

Q – During January, February and March time, how was the international situation being fed into the system?

It was essentially completely discarded by the system. During January, February and March, even after we went into lockdown on the 23rd, the view was that it is inconceivable to do a Taiwan-style lockdown.  

Q – Rosie Cooper, MP for West Lancashire

What were the barriers to having the Sage papers published?

There was no push back from Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty or Sage. But what should have happened is we would have had the conversation in January. What happened is we waited until when we were already dangling over the cliff. 

How would you rate the performance of the Department of Health and secretary of state?

Like in much of the Government system, there were many brilliant people at relatively junior and middle levels who were terribly let down by senior leadership. I think the Secretary of State for Health should’ve been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly.

There’s no doubt at all that many senior people performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect. I think the Secretary of State for Health is certainly one of those people. I said repeatedly to the Prime Minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people. 

Why were the financial incentives for people to self-isolate so fatally weak?

Not only was there not a plan, lots of people in the Cabinet Office said we shouldn’t have a plan, we shouldn’t put out a helpline for people to call because it will all just be swamped and we don’t have a system. The shielding plan was literally hacked together in two all-nighters after the 19th, I think, Thursday the 19th.

There wasn’t any plan for shielding, there wasn’t even a helpline for shielding, there wasn’t any plan for financial incentives, there wasn’t any plan for almost anything in any kind of detail at all. There wasn’t any plan for furlough at all, nothing, zero, nada. The problem you are describing about the financial incentives on Covid and isolation, you are obviously completely correct, there should’ve been a whole plan but like on testing, like on shielding, there was no plan.    

Why did you describe the Department of Health as a smoking ruin?

There wasn’t any system set up [at the Department of Health] to deal with emergency procurement. When the PM tested positive we were told that the Department of Health had been turning down ventilators because the price was marked up. It completely beggars belief that this kind of thing was happening. 

We were told the PPE would not arrive for months because it would take that long to ship. ‘But why are you shipping it?’… ‘That’s what we always do.’ I told them to fly it… at that point you had Trump getting the CIA involved to get the fast track on PPE. Everything was like wading through treacle, that’s why I described it as a smoking ruin.  

Q – Greg Clarke

Saying Matt Hancock lied is a serious accusation, can you provide evidence to back that up?

There are numerous examples. I mean in the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment that they required. He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak, and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.

In mid-April, just before the Prime Minister and I were diagnosed with having Covid ourselves, the Secretary of State for Health told us in the Cabinet room everything is fine with PPE, we’ve got it all covered, etc, etc. When I came back, almost the first meeting I had in the Cabinet room was about the disaster over PPE and how we were actually completely short, hospitals all over the country were running out. 

The Secretary of State said in that meeting this is the fault of Simon Stevens, this is the fault of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it’s not my fault, they’ve blocked approvals on all sorts of things. I said to the cabinet secretary, please investigate this and find out if it’s true.

The cabinet secretary came back to me and said it’s completely untrue, I’ve lost confidence in the Secretary of State’s honesty in these meetings. The cabinet secretary said that to me and the cabinet secretary said that to the Prime Minister.

[Did you make a note of that at the time, could you supply that to the committee?] Yes. 

Q – Rebecca Long-Bailey, MP for for Salford and Eccles 

Who in government was arguing against taking action for economic reasons?

The Prime Minister’s view, throughout January, February, March, was – as he said in many meetings – the real danger here is not the disease, the real danger here is the measures that we take to deal with a disease and the economic destruction that that will cause. He had that view all the way through.

‘In fact, one of the reasons why it was so rocky getting from the 14th, when we suggested plan B to him, to actual lockdown was because he kept basically bouncing back to ‘we don’t really know how dangerous it is, we’re going to completely destroy the economy by having lockdown, maybe we shouldn’t do it’. Fundamentally the Prime Minister just never … didn’t really think that this was the big danger.

Now, there have been lots of reports and accusations that the Chancellor was the person who was kind of trying to delay in March. That is completely, completely wrong. The Chancellor was totally supportive of me and of other people as we tried to make this transition from plan A to plan B… 

There is a very profound question about our political system that at the last election we could a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. It shows things have gone extremely, extremely badly wrong.  

There’s so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two. And there’s obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties if that’s the best that they can do. 

It is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position in my personal opinion. I’m not smart. I’ve not built great things in the world. It’s just completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there, and that the choice at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn. It’s also the case that there are wonderful people inside the Civil Service, there are brilliant, brilliant officials all over the place. But the system tends to weed them out from senior management jobs. And the problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys over and over again.

Q – Greg Clark

Did you engage in any unauthorised briefings?

Yes, I did talk to people unauthorised in the sense of actually pretty rarely did I speak to the Prime Minister before I spoke to any journalists. I just got on with things because because my view was the Prime Minister already is about a thousand-times too obsessed with the media. 

I did occasionally talk to people but the main person I spoke to was Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC because the BBC has a special position in the country during a crisis and because I was in the room for particular crucial things I could give guidance to her on very big stories.  

[Additional Q- Will you share all your communications with the media?] With all respect, chairman, I am not going to hand over my private phone and let you judge what you decide should be in the public domain. Anything that I think is significant to decisions that were made, including decisions that were made, then I will share those. But when you get to that stage you are getting into that territory because you are also sharing things that journalists themselves would think was private. 

Q – Laura Trott, MP for Sevenoaks

Did anyone mention a risk register or a pandemic to you before 2020?

Yes, I had conversations with people about the risk register in general and some specific issues. And also during my time in government I had various specific meetings with people about the question of bioterrorism, which obviously overlaps with pandemic planning. [Additional Q – Did you have any views on the quality of the pandemic plans at that point?] 

I thought that many of the plans seemed to me to fall very short of what was actually needed. A lot of things are just power points and they lack detail. But most importantly, I think, I think the process around them as with the pandemic plan is just not open, there’s is not a culture of talking to outside experts. I was talking to some people who said ‘did you ever go read the plan on solar flares’ and I said ‘no’, and they said ‘if you get some expert advice to that you will see that the current Government plan on that is just completely hopeless, if that happens we are all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.

One thing that I did say to the Cabinet Secretary last year in the summer, and which I ardently hope is actually happening, is there ought to be an absolutely thorough, total review of all such risk register programmes, there ought to be an assumption of making this whole process open and only closed for specific things. For example, one of the other things very high on risk register is the anthrax plan, what happens if terrorists attack with anthrax. Personally, I would be extremely concerned that the plan is as robust as it should be. 

Who is responsible for monitoring future threats?

One of the fundamental problems that we find in this whole thing, it is a general problem in Whitehall but it was very, very clear and disastrous during Covid, is you have this system where on the one hand ministers are nominally responsible in various ways for a, b, c. But ministers can’t actually hire and fire anybody in the department. The officials are actually in charge of hiring and firing a, b, c.

So, as soon as you have some kind of major problem you have kind of that Spiderman meme with both Spidermans pointing at each other, it’s like that but with everybody. So, you have [Matt] Hancock pointing at the permanent secretary, you have the permanent secretary pointing at Hancock, and they are both pointing at the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Office is pointing back at them and all the different Spidermans are all pointing at each other saying ‘you are responsible’ and the problem is that everyone is right and everyone is unhappy.’

In my opinion, you would have had a kind of dictator in charge of this. If I was PM I would have said Mark Warner is in charge of the whole thing, he has as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do that, and you’re pushing the boundaries to legality. He is in charge, and he can fire anybody and jiggle people around. 

Q – Katherine Fletcher, MP for South Ribble

I’d like to return to the data and the raw numbers that you had between January and May last year. What’s your assessment of it?

Concerns is like saying ‘we have concerns about the situation in May 1940’. In all sorts of ways it didn’t exist. The data system on Monday March 16 was the following. It was me wheeling in that whiteboard you’ve seen from the photo, Simon Stevens [head of the NHS] writing down data from the ICUs. Then I’d get my iPhone out and go times two times two times two, then I’d say that if it was doubling every five days these are the numbers we’d be looking at… and everybody would say ‘Jesus, could this possibly be correct?’

There was no functioning data system. And that was connected with, there was no proper testing data.

Because we didn’t have testing, all we could really do was look at people arriving in hospital. So, the whole thing, therefore, is weeks and weeks out of date. Once you’re looking at ICU numbers as your leading indicator, you know that you’re in a world of trouble… By the time I came back from being ill on Tuesday April 14 they then had an absolutely brilliant data system and were starting to build models and predictions… that completely transformed decision making. 

Q – Aaron Bell, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme

What were you doing in the first two weeks of March when you had said there wasn’t a plan. 

I was having meeting after meeting with people trying to figure out where we were.

[…] I have been critical of the Prime Minister. But… if you dropped, you know, Bill Gates or someone like that into that job on the 1st of March, the most competent people in the world you could possibly find, any of them would have had a complete nightmare. There is no doubt that the Prime Minister made some very bad misjudgments and got some very serious things wrong. It’s also the case, there’s no doubt, that he was extremely badly let down by the whole system. And it was a system failure, of which I include myself in that as well, I also failed. 

Are you here today to help learn lessons or settle scores?

I was invited here to try and explain the truth about what happened. I think the families of the thousands of people who died deserve the truth. [Additional Q – What was your motivation for working for the PM?] I went in because in summer 2019 the situation that the country was facing was either to sort out the constitutional crisis and have a new agenda, or have Jeremy Corbyn and a second referendum which would have been absolutely catastrophic… that’s why I got involved. 

I do think that one way in which this could have been even worse than it was, if you imagine that Parliament of 2019, that hung parliament. If you imagine that Parliament colliding with this disaster in January 2020, God only knows what would have happened. If that broken Parliament had limped on into 2020 and confronted this crisis, I think that we’d be now be looking at … I think, frankly, the whole system would have would have melted down and fallen apart. 

Q – Greg Clark

You were a person of significant influence… what you’ve described is being like a whistle blower in a sense… did you forget to blow the whistle?

It’s true that I hit the panic button and said we’ve got to ditch the official plan, it’s true that I helped to try to create what an official plan was. I think it’s a disaster that I acted too late. The fundamental reason was that I was really frightened of acting.

If you’ve got an official plan, you’ve got all the Sage advice, you’ve got the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Secretary, everyone saying you’ve got to do this and if we don’t do it and if we try and do something different and stop it now it’s going to many times worse in the winter, I was asking myself in that kind of two-week period if I hit the panic button and persuade the Prime Minister to shift and then it all goes completely wrong, I’m going to have killed god knows how many hundreds of thousands of people.

I only had the confidence to do that once I knew that people who are much smarter than me had looked at it and said basically the Sage groupthink is wrong, the DH groupthink is wrong, we’ve got to change course. I apologise for not acting earlier and if I had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive. 

SESSION TWO 

Q – Jeremy Hunt

On March 12 we stopped community testing following very clear Sage advice that when there was sustained community transmission is would no longer be useful. Sage didn’t even model Korean-style test and tracing until May, so why was there such a long delay?

Fundamentally it goes back to what we discussed in the previous session. The logic was that if you were going for herd immunity for September, you wouldn’t take testing as an urgent priority. 

That’s why the Department of Health said in that week that we didn’t need to test anybody any more. The view was that 60/70% of the country are going to get it, that’s going to happen for sure, so why would you bother testing people. 

No one challenged that idea strongly until we challenged it strongly during the shift to Plan B. 

The core of the Government kind of collapsed when the Prime Minister got ill himself, because he’s suddenly gone and then people are literally thinking that he might die. 

By the time I came back on April 13 we had this terrible situation where Alex Cooper (senior civil servant) and his team were trying to build a whole new test and trace system. In my view disastrously, the Secretary of State had made – when the PM was on his near deathbed – this pledge to do 100,000 tests by the end of April. This was an incredibly stupid thing to do because we already had that goal internally.

What then happened when I came back around the 13th was I started getting calls and No 10 were getting calls saying Hancock is interfering with the building of the test and trace system because he’s telling everybody what to do to maximise his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month. We had half the Government with me in No 10 calling around frantically saying do not do what Hancock says, build the thing properly for the medium term.

And we had Hancock calling them all saying down tools on this, do this, hold tests back so I can hit my target. In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’. It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm. 

That was one of the reasons why the Cabinet Secretary and I agreed that we had to take testing away from Hancock and put it in a separate agency. 

What the point at which we said we were going to do it the South Korean way?

It was all very disjointed. We didn’t even have a plan for lockdown, so we were trying to get to lockdown and also get people to work on what this South Korean thing would look like, then the Prime Minister goes down and nearly dies… 

What I wanted to do was essentially the same as had happened in South Korea and Taiwan and places where you start using bank data, you start using mobile phone data to triangulate where people are, use the data coming off cell phone towers and things like that. So it wasn’t just the testing system you had to get built up. It was also the whole data architecture as well. And, of course, we had huge legal problems because you had a whole bunch of people coming back in the legal system saying first of all, EU data law or GDPR basically means all of this stuff is illegal, medium term.

“Secondly, a whole bunch of things around European Convention of Human Rights, right to privacy, etcetera etcetera. So you had … we’ve got to build this testing, we got to build this data, we’ve then got to think about all these complexities about the legal side… 

It took too long to get set up, the system was hugely disrupted in April because of the Hancock pledge… fundamentally this should have been happening in January. There was all this bureaucratic infighting in April and remember the Prime Minister wasn’t back then either, Dominic Raab was doing a brilliant job chairing the meetings, but this was a huge call and very difficult for him to basically start carving up the Department of Health in April.

So, essentially, we never really got to grips with it until the Prime Minister was back in the office and the cabinet secretary and I could say to him we’ve got to do the track and trace thing in a completely different way.  

I warned the Prime Minister, if we don’t fire the Secretary of State (Matt Hancock) and we don’t get the testing in someone else’s hands, we are going to kill people and it will be a catastrophe. And there was the constant, repeated lying about PPE… The Cabinet Secretary told me the British system is not set up to deal with a Secretary of State who repeatedly lies in meetings.

Q – Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Broughton

Can you give me any idea why Matt Hancock is still the Secretary of State?

He came close to removing him in April but fundamentally wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t just me saying this… pretty much every senior person in Number 10 said he couldn’t go into autumn with the same system in place. There was certainly no good reason for keeping him. 

Could you not have changed things by threatening to resign?

Yes, I thought about it in March but we managed to bounce things do so I didn’t do it. I had similar conversations in September, and I had a conversation with the PM a night before an operation and said I was reflecting on things, and that you need to know that I am leaving at the latest Friday December 18 and I think it’s best if you and I part ways. He said, ‘Why’. And I said because this whole system is chaos, this whole building is chaos, you know perfectly well that from having worked from me I can get great teams together and manage them, but you are more afraid of me having the power to contain the chaos than the chaos, and this is completely unsustainable. And I’m not prepared to work with people like Hancock anymore… 

And he laughed and he laughed and said, ‘You’re right, I am more frightened of you having the power to stop the chaos than I am of the chaos, chaos isn’t that bad because chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.’