Eye-opening messages sent between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings about the government’s handling of the start of the pandemic have been released for the first time.
In a WhatsApp exchange between the former prime minister and his then chief of staff, released by the Covid inquiry, Mr Cummings described the Cabinet Office as “terrifyingly s***”, and said it had no proper plans in place for lockdowns.
The messages also revealed that Mr Cummings told his boss that some civil servants wanted to delay ordering people to stay at home as they “haven’t done the work and don’t work weekends“.
The shocking messages also reveal Mr Johnson thought it was “wrong” for the prime minister to meet Scotland’s leader Nicola Sturgeon and Wales’s first minister Mark Drakeford regularly during the pandemic.
Mr Drakeford had been frustrated by what he saw as a lack of meetings with Mr Johnson’s government, but the PM believed working closely with the heads of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland would leave the UK looking like a “mini-EU of four nations”.
“That is not, in my view, how devolution is supposed to work,” he said.
In his witness statement to the Covid inquiry, Mr Johnson added that he often left Michael Gove to chair four-nation Cobra meetings, partly because he was a “target of nationalist ire” and did not want to provoke the Scottish National Party (SNP).
Mr Johnson said: “It is optically wrong, in the first place, for the UK prime minister to hold regular meetings with other DA [devolved administration] first ministers, as though the UK were a kind of mini EU of four nations and we were meeting as a ‘council’ in a federal structure.
“That is not, in my view, how devolution is meant to work. More importantly, I am afraid I was conscious that I tended to be a particular target of nationalist ire. Rather than provoking the SNP, I wanted to mollify and gain consent. I believed Michael would do a good job.”
As well as claiming civil servants wanted to delay the government making a stay-at-home announcement, Mr Cummings said the then civil service chief Sir Mark Sedwill “hasn’t a scooby” what was happening.
The then prime minister Boris Johnson with his senior aide Dominic Cummings
Mr Cummings said: “Mark is out to lunch – hasn’t a scooby what’s going on and his own officials know he doesn’t. We must announce TODAY – not next week – ‘if feel ill with cold/flu stay home’.
“Some CABOFF want delay cos haven’t done the work and don’t work weekends. We must force the pace today. We are looking at 100-500 thousand deaths between optimistic/pessimistic scenarios. 1918 was 250k for comparison.”
In a message on the morning of 12 March 2020, the day Britain moved from a contain phase to a delay phase in the fight against Covid, Mr Cummings said: “We got big problems coming. CABOFF is terrifyingly s***, no plans, totally behind pace.”
He added that political advisors including Lee Cain and James Slack were having to “drive and direct” the response.
The comments on civil servants’ working patterns sparked a row, with the head of the FDA union for senior civil servants hitting back. Dave Penman said: “The only lazy thing here is Cummings’ tired old tropes, self-aggrandising as the only saviour of the country.
“Our evidence shows a quarter of senior civil servants work more than 16 hours unpaid every week and more than 80 per cent work an extra day unpaid each week.”
