No 10 has failed to deny Dominic Cummings’ claim that Boris Johnson considered sacking Matt Hancock during the height of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
The prime minister’s official spokesman twice declined to dismiss the claim, instead suggesting the prime minister and health secretary “worked closely” during the coronavirus crisis, with both focused on “saving lives”.
However, when asked whether Mr Johnson had full confidence in his senior minister, they replied: “Yes, the health secretary has been working closely with the prime minister throughout”.
During a committee hearing on Wednesday, the former senior No 10 aide repeatedly took aim at Mr Hancock, suggesting he should have been fired for at least “15-20 things” and later claimed Mr Johnson “came close” to removing him in April 2020, but “just fundamentally wouldn’t do it”.
He said he could not explain why Mr 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”, Mr Cummings suggested. And he said that Mr Hancock had wrongly assured the prime minister that there was no problem with supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and later wrongly blamed the Treasury for shortages.
Pressed on Mr Cummings’ claim that the test-and-trace system was delayed last spring because of the health secretary’s “stupid” plan to carry out 100,000 tests a day, the prime minister’s spokesman said the goal had a “galvanising effect on massively scaling up our testing capacity”.
They added: “It is simply the case we went from having a few thousand tests a day available in the UK to having many hundreds of thousands in a matter of months — that undoubtedly saved lives.”
During the evidence session, Mr Cummings also repeated allegations that Mr Johnson had offered to appear on live television and to be injected with Covid-19 – before contracting the virus – in order to reassure the public and so that “everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of”.
The Daily Mail reported ahead of the hearing that Mr Johnson had described the virus as “kung flu” at the onset of the pandemic, and that he was willing to be injected on television by England’s chief medical officer professor Chris Whitty.
Quizzed on the claim, the prime minister’s spokesman said: “I don’t plan to get into various allegations and claims that have been made today, our focus is on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the road map and distributing the vaccines.”
