Amid chaos in Downing Street ahead of England’s first coronavirus lockdown, Boris Johnson’s fiancée was “going completely crackers” about press coverage of their dog, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
On 12 March 2020, as officials scrambled to devise a strategy for fighting Covid-19 and held top-level meetings about potential military action in the Middle East, Carrie Symonds’ focus was allegedly captured by a story in The Times about her pet Dilyn.
The story in question, published a day earlier, carried claims the couple planned to have Dilyn re-homed once their baby was born because they had “grown weary” of it. Ms Symonds responded angrily that the suggestion was “total crap”.
Mr Cummings claimed in an explosive evidence session with MPs on Wednesday that Ms Symonds demanded the press office “deal with” the coverage even as ministers and national security officials tried to juggle the looming health crisis with demands by Donald Trump’s White House for joint bombing raids in Iraq.
The PM’s former adviser said 12 March began with him texting Mr Johnson at 7.48am to push for a lockdown announcement that day and to “force the pace”.
Once the country’s leaders assembled to begin addressing Covid-19 that day, however, they were derailed, Mr Cummings said.
He told MPs: “Suddenly, the national security people came in and said, ‘Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight’, and we need to start having meetings about that through the day with Cobra as well.
To sign up to The Independent’s free politics newsletters click here
“So everything to do with Cobra that day on Covid was completely disrupted because you had these two parallel sets of meetings, you had the national security people running in and out talking about, ‘Are we going to bomb the Middle East?’
“And then to add to it, it sounds so surreal it couldn’t possibly be true, that day The Times had run a huge story about the prime minister and his girlfriend and their dog, and the prime minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that.
“So, we have 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.
“And you have all these meetings kind of going on through the course of the 12th.”
The Independent has contacted No 10 for comment.
Later in his evidence, Mr Cummings claimed that Ms Symonds had been “desperate to get rid of me and all my team” in mid-2020, as his relationship with Mr Johnson soured.
He and the prime minister disagreed strongly about how to handle coronavirus and what lessons should be learnt from the pandemic, Mr Cummings added.
Additional reporting by Press Association
