Matt Hancock should have been fired by Boris Johnson for at least “15-20 things” including “lying” to officials, Dominic Cummings has insisted.
Answering MPs’ questions at a joint inquiry into the handling of the pandemic, the former No 10 adviser credited some officials in the Department of Health, but insisted they “were terribly let down by senior leadership”.
Taking aim at Mr Hancock, he said: “I think the secretary of state for health should have been fired for at least 15-20 things, including lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly.”
Pressed on whether people should be be worried about facing “corporate manslaughter charges”, Mr Cummings said he was unsure because he was not sure of the law behind such charges.
But he added: “I think that there is no doubt 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 he should be fired, so did the Cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people.”
Asked to provide evidence of the cabinet secretary’s “lying”, the prime minister’s most senior adviser until the end of 2020, said: “There are numerous examples. I mean in the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment that they required.
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“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.”
Mr Cummings who has previously described the Department of Health as a “smoking ruin”, said: “The procurement system with which they were operating was just completely hopeless. There wasn’t any system set up to deal with proper emergency procurement”.
Citing an example of a meeting, he claimed the department had been “turning down” ventilators during the height of the crisis because the price had been marked up.
“It completely beggars belief that was happening,” he told MPs. “The whole system was like wading through treacle. There wasn’t an emergency fast-track process to deal with these kind of things — that’s why I described it as a smoking ruin.”
He added: “That’s why the cabinet secretary [Sir Mark Sedwill] quite rightly said we’ve got to basically divvy up the secretary of state’s job because there’s just multiple huge things here that are being dropped. It was clear the department was just completely and utterly overwhelmed.”
Mr Cummings said that both he and cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill repeatedly urged Mr Johnson to sack the health secretary.
Sir Mark told the PM he had “lost confidence in the secretary of state’s honesty” and warned that “the British system is not set up to deal with a Secretary of State who repeatedly lies in meetings”, said Mr Cummings. And he said he himself warned that if Hancock remained in post “we are going to kill people and it will be a catastrophe”.
He said that Mr Johnson “came close” to removing the health secretary in April 2020, but “just fundamentally wouldn’t do it”. He said he could not explain why Hancock remained in post, adding: “There’s certainly no good reason for keeping him.”
When the health secretary was claiming that everyone was getting the treatment they needed in the first wave, many were in fact “dying in horrific circumstances”, he said. And he said that Mr Hancock had wrongly assured the PM that there was no problem with supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and later wrongly blamed the Treasury for shortages.
Mr Cummings said Mr Hancock – who will himself give evidence to the committees on 10 June – was “incredibly stupid” to make a public commitment to 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, which had “completely disrupted” the programme.
He told MPs that Hancock “should have been fired” for trying to divert efforts into meeting his target, telling MPs: “It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour which caused serious harm.” This was why testing was taken away from the Department of Health and put into a separate agency, he said.
And he said that Mr Hancock had given “categorical” assurances in March 2020 that people were being tested for Covid-19 before being discharged from hospital into care homes, when “we subsequently found out that that hadn’t happened”. Government rhetoric about “putting a shield around care homes” was “complete nonsense”, he said.
“We were told that people wouldn’t be sent back to care homes until after they’ve been tested for Covid and we were told that there was a plan for shielding,” said Mr Cummings. “It turned out that neither of those things was correct.
“We didn’t really understnd the catastrophe around people being sent back to care homes who were already Covid-infected until April.”
However, Mr Cummings did credit Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, for introducing the furlough scheme, which has paid the wages of millions of people in the private sector during the Covid lockdowns.
