Dominic Cummings says he pushed for lockdown 11 days before it was introduced by Boris Johnson, warning of “100,000 to 500,000 deaths” if he resisted.
But the ousted chief adviser said No 10 and scientific advisers were not ready to change course because there was no proper plan for doing so.
“By the 11th and 12th [of March] we had already gone terribly wrong,” Mr Cummings told MPs. The lockdown eventually came on 23 March.
Another aide to the prime minister told him: “I think we are absolutely f****d….I think we’re going to kill thousands of people.”
In potentially devastating evidence for Mr Johnson, Mr Cummings said he was distracted – on the “surreal day” of 12 March – by a Donald Trump bombing plan and a media row about his fiancée Carrie Symonds’ dog.
“Part of the building was arguing about whether to bomb Iraq, part of it arguing about whether to have a lockdown, and the PM’s girlfriend was going crackers about something completely trivial,” he told the inquiry.
The “we’re f***ed” warning was issued by Helen MacNamara, the former deputy Cabinet Secretary on the evening of 13 March, Mr Cummings told the MPs.
Crucially, Professor Neil Ferguson later estimated that a week-long delay in issuing a ‘stay at home’ order cost around 25,000 lives.
