Dominic Cummings launches all-out assault on Boris Johnson

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Dominic Cummings launched a devastating assault on Boris Johnson today saying he viewed coronavirus as a ‘scare story’ in February last year – just a month before the first lockdown.

The maverick former No10 chief admitted the government – and he personally – ‘fell disastrously short’ in its response to coronavirus as he kicked off a titanic hearing with MPs on coronavirus.

Mr Cummings conceded he should have been ‘hitting the panic button’ in mid-February but he had been ‘wrongly reassured’ by messages from the WHO and others. 

The government was certainly not on a ‘war footing’ at the time, with senior figures including Mr Johnson himself going on holiday. ‘Lots of key people were literally skiing in mid-February,’ he said.

And he said Mr Johnson regarded the pandemic as a ‘scare story’ and the ‘new Swine Flu’ at that stage, and had even suggested he could be injected with the disease live on TV by medical chief Chris Whitty to show people it was not a threat.    

Mr Cummings revealed that neither he nor Mr Johnson attended Cobra meetings in the early stages, and he did not advise the PM to do so. He said the sessions were often just ‘powerpoint presentations’ and ‘not massively useful’ and there were many leaks. 

‘In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story, he described it as the new swine flu,’ Mr Cummings said.

When asked if he had told the PM it was not, Mr Cummings added: ‘Certainly, but 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.’

In a damning assessment, Mr Cummings said: ‘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.’

Mr Cummings is expected to accuse Mr Johnson of referring to Covid as ‘Kung-Flu’.

In extraordinary claims that he says will be backed by documents, he will accuse the Prime Minister of being responsible for ‘thousands of deaths’ by delaying a second lockdown when a second wave of the virus hit the UK in the winter. 

He is also set to allege that Mr Johnson did say ‘no more f****** lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ – something the PM has flatly denied. And he could claim Mr Johnson was slow to react to the pandemic because he was on a ‘prolonged holiday’ with partner Carrie Symonds in February last year.

Another damaging barb is likely to be claiming that Mr Johnson wanted to go and seen the Queen in person on March 18 – again something that No10 denies. 

However, ministers have been frantically trying to blunt the attack from Mr Cummings, with Transport Secretary Grant Shapps dismissing the session as a ‘sideshow’ and suggesting he has his ‘own agenda’. 

Meanwhile, leaked WhatsApps reportedly show that Mr Cummings told politicians to deny that there was a ‘herd immunity’ strategy at the start of the pandemic – something he now says was the case until just 10 days before the first lockdown.  

Mr Cummings said that assurances given in January last year that pandemic preparations were brilliant ‘were basically completely hollow’.

He told the Commons committee he received a response from Health Secretary Matt Hancock assuring: ‘We’ve got full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepared and refreshed, CMOs and epidemiologists, we’re stress testing now, it’s our top tier risk register, we have an SR bid before this.’

Mr Cummings told the committee: ‘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.’

Mr Cummings said it is ‘completely obvious’ that many institutions around the world failed in their response to Covid.

‘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?’ he said.

‘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.’

Mr Cummings told MPs the Government ‘didn’t act like it (Covid) was the most important thing in February, never mind in January’, adding the Government was not on a ‘war footing’ and that ‘lots of key people were literally skiing’ in February. 

Ahead of his appearance before MPs, Dominic Cummings tweeted a picture of a whiteboard on which the Government’s ‘plan B’ for the first wave of the virus was sketched out.

One note visible on the board said ‘who do we not save?’  

The ‘first sketch’ was drawn up in Boris Johnson’s study on the evening of Friday March 13 and shown to the Prime Minister the following day.

Plan A ‘breaks’ the NHS and results in a daily death toll of more than 4,000, Mr Cummings said.

Plan B was for ‘lockdown, suppress, crash programs’ – the accelerated drive to boost tests, treatments and develop vaccines in order to escape both the first and second waves, he said.

Mr Cummings’ claim that Mr Johnson referred to Covid as ‘Kung-Flu’ will be seized on by those who criticise the Prime Minister’s politically incorrect language. 

The term was coined by Donald Trump in June last year, at which stage the full force of the pandemic had not hit America. By contrast, it had claimed 40,000 lives in the UK.

Mr Trump’s ‘Kung-Flu’ jibe was part of his attempt to pin the blame for the pandemic on China.

Mr Cummings’ allegation that Mr Johnson said he was willing to be injected with Covid to reassure the public is likely to cause a major controversy. 

The Mail has learned that Mr Cummings will claim the PM said: ‘I’m going to get Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer) to inject me with it live on national TV so everyone can see it’s nothing to be scared of.’ He will tell MPs the PM made the remark on repeated occasions.

In April, Mr Johnson nearly died after he was infected with Covid.

Mr Cummings will also argue that while publicly urging everyone to take the pandemic seriously, privately Mr Johnson downplayed the risks it posed to most people. He will tell the committee the PM said: ‘Covid is only killing 80-year-olds.’

While being at odds with Mr Johnson’s public comments, the statement is borne out by statistics which show the overwhelming majority of people who have died from Covid are over 80.

Mr Cummings will also claim that despite agreeing to order the first lockdown, Mr Johnson later said he regretted having done so.

This was one of the reasons Mr Johnson delayed ordering a second lockdown in the winter, his former aide will claim.

It was after finally agreeing to a second lockdown that Mr Johnson reportedly said: ‘No more f****** lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands.’

Mr Cummings will say that he and others heard a frustrated Mr Johnson make the remark, first reported last month by this newspaper, moments after leaving the Downing Street meeting where he had approved the second lockdown.

Mr Cummings will also say that before the decision, Mr Johnson vowed: ‘I’m going to be the mayor of Jaws, like I should have been in March (when the first lockdown was ordered).’

The Prime Minister has said that he regards the mayor in the Jaws movie – who refuses to close the resort’s beach even after a shark has killed tourists, for fear of damage to the local economy – as one of his ‘heroes’.

In a round of interviews this morning , Mr Shapps has dismissed Mr Cummings’ appearance before MPs as a ‘sideshow’ and suggested the former No 10 aide ‘has his own agenda’.

‘I’ll leave others to determine how reliable a witness to all this he is,’ Transport Secretary Mr Shapps told Sky News.

‘He was there at the time, what his motives would be I will leave to others.’

Most people are interested in getting their vaccine rather than the ‘sideshow over a former adviser who has his own agenda, presumably’, Mr Shapps said.

Mr Shapps was asked on LBC radio if he had ever heard the Prime Minister use the term ‘kung flu’.

‘Never, no,’ he said. 

Asked if he had heard the Prime Minister say he wanted to be infected live on TV, Mr Shapps said: ‘No, never, again no.’

Mr Shapps added: ‘It’s a bit of a circus from someone who was there at the time and had the facility and the ability to influence a lot of these decisions, of course.’

Meanwhile, WhatsApps from March last year leaked to Politico are said to suggest that Mr Cummings ordered ministers to deny that the government had a ‘herd immunity policy’. 

Instead he reportedly suggested they should portray it as a secondary, long-term effect of the ‘mitigation’ approach of limiting the spread of the virus. 

A source close to Mr Cummings told the Mail: ‘From March through to the autumn, the PM said we should never have locked down. That was why he was so reluctant to do it again in November.

‘He said, ‘the big danger is not Kung-Flu but the harm caused in trying to stop it. I was right all along and should not have been pushed into the first lockdown. The economic damage caused by lockdowns is more damaging than the loss of life caused by Covid’.’ 

Mr Cummings’ extraordinary view is that by delaying a second lockdown, Mr Johnson is responsible for thousands of deaths.

Mr Cummings will tell MPs that one of the reasons Mr Johnson was late in reacting to the crisis was because he was on a ‘prolonged holiday’ with Miss Symonds at Chevening in Kent, one of the ministerial grace-and-favour homes, and had ‘personal distractions’. The couple stayed at Chevening in February after spending Christmas and the New Year in the Caribbean after the 2019 election.

MPs will be told by Mr Cummings that Mr Johnson did not want to interrupt the Chevening break, where they were ‘planning to announce their engagement and Carrie’s pregnancy’.

The announcement was made on February 29, days before the first Covid death was reported in Britain.

Mr Cummings will also take aim at Health Secretary Matt Hancock over claims that the Government initially planned to use ‘herd immunity’ to combat Covid.

The former No 10 aide is believed to be ready to hand over a key document which he says upholds his claim that Mr Hancock’s initial plan could have led to 250,000 deaths and there being ‘no NHS for months’.

Contrary to recent reports, Mr Cummings does not have tape recordings of private conversations with the Prime Minister. But he does have a large quantity of WhatsApp and text messages from senior Downing Street figures.

A Downing Street spokesman said last night: ‘Throughout this pandemic, the Government’s priority has been to save lives, protect the NHS and support people’s jobs and livelihoods across the United Kingdom.

‘There is a huge task for this Government to get on with. We are entirely focused on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the roadmap and distributing vaccines while delivering on the public’s priorities.’