Markus Andrews

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 More

A badly-needed test-and-trace system was delayed last spring because of Matt Hancock’s “stupid” plan to carry out 100,000 tests a day, Dominic Cummings has alleged.The ex-chief adviser said officials were told to “hold tests back” – so the health secretary could “go on TV and say ‘look at me with my 100k target’.”“It was criminal disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm,” Mr Cummings told MPs.The blunder led to the testing programme being taken out of Mr Hancock’s hands and given to a separate body headed by Dido Harding, the inquiry was told.Mr Cummings also stepped up his attack on the health secretary – having alleged he “lied” over PPE shortages – saying he pleaded with Boris Johnson to sack him.The prime minister was told “we are going to kill” lots of people, if Mr Hancock was kept in his job, but he remains health secretary one year later.The criticism of the 100,000 tests a day plan revives long-standing criticism that efforts to fight the pandemic were distorted by the target – announced while Mr Johnson was in hospital.Mr Hancock scrambled to hit the target, but was then widely accused of falsely claiming success when vast numbers of tests were still in the post and hadn’t been completed.Mr Cummings refused to “speculate” on why the prime minister refused to sack him – when “pretty much all senior people” were warning of “another catastrophe” in the autumn, without big changes.“He came close to removing him in April [2020], but fundamentally he wouldn’t do it,” he said.There was no plan for a South Korean-style test-and-trace system at the outbreak of the pandemic because the government was “going for herd immunity”, Mr Cummings said. More

Boris Johnson welcomed the “chaos” of the pandemic because it boosted the public’s support for him, Dominic Cummings has dramatically claimed.The ex-adviser said he planned to quit by the end of last year, but suggested to the prime minister that he was more frightened of him than he was of the Covid crisis.“Chaos isn’t that bad, it means people have to look to me to see who is in charge,” the prime minister allegedly replied.Mr Cummings also turned on the prime minister for refusing to shut the UK’s borders as the second wave of the pandemic loomed last autumn.At the start of the crisis, last spring, Mr Johnson was told such a crackdown would be seen as “racist”, but did not oppose tougher restrictions.Later, he was determined to prioritise the economy and regretted the first lockdown because he believed he “should have been the mayor of Jaws”.In the book and film, the mayor of Amity famously did not want to close the beaches because it would ruin the tourist industry – despite the presence of a man-eating shark.“Fundamentally there was no proper border policy because the prime minister never wanted a proper border policy,” Mr Cummings said.On his departure, Mr Cummings said he had threatened, in mid-March last year, to stage a press conference and quit unless the policy of delaying a lockdown was changed.In July 2020, he told Mr Johnson he would leave by the end of December because of the “chaos”, but suggested the prime minister feared him.“You’re right, I am more frightened of you having the power to stop the chaos around than the chaos”, Mr Johnson was said to have replied. More

There are thousands of people who could run the country better that “completely out of depth” Boris Jonson, Dominic Cummings has said.The prime minister’s former chief of staff told MPs that there were “profound” problems with the nature of the UK’s political system illustrated by the PM’s rise to power.And Mr Cummings also said it was “crackers” that someone like himself should be able to rise to the top of government.”I think there’s a very profound question about the nature of our political system. That means that we got at the last election a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson,” he said.”I think any system which ends up giving a choice between two people like that, as the people to lead is obviously a system that’s gone extremely, extremely badly wrong. “There’s so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two, and there’s obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties, if that’s the best that they can do.”The comments came at an explosive joint meeting of the Commons health and technology committees, where Mr Cummings lambasted the government’s approach to the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr Cummings helped Mr Johnson get elected and has been allied with since the EU referendum.He continued: “In any sensible rational government it is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position, in my personal opinion. “I’m not smart, I’ve not built great things in the world, it’s just completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it was cracker that Boris Johnson was in there and that the choice of the last election was Jeremy Corbyn. “It’s also the case that there are wonderful people inside the civil service – there are brilliant officials all over the place – but the system tends to weed them out from senior management jobs. “Arguing that the government’s response was characterised “very much lions led by donkeys”, the ex-aide said there were “great people further down the hierarchy who did brilliant things, but the leadership, people like me, and the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health, we let down the people on the frontline”.Arguing that politicians were “incentivised to play to the media” and officials were “incentivised to keep their heads down and to follow process”, he concluded: “We all should be asking, you guys in the political parties need to ask yourselves, what is it about your parties that give choices like Johnson versus Corbyn, and we have to ask what is it about Whitehall that promotes so many senior people who are completely out of their depth.” More

Dominic Cummings tweeted an image of a whiteboard on which the government’s supposed “plan B” for the first wave of coronavirus was sketched out, ahead of his evidence session to a joint select committee of MPs.The “first sketch” was drawn up in Boris Johnson’s study on the evening of 13 March and shown to the prime minister the following day, the former No 10 aide said in the post on Wednesday morning. Plan A “breaks” the NHS and results in a daily death toll of more than 4,000, Mr Cummings claimed, while plan B was for “lockdown, suppress, crash programs” – the accelerated drive to boost tests, treatments and develop vaccines in order to escape both the first and second waves. He promised to reveal further “details later”.Amid the graphs and text, though, was a single sentence likely to raise eyebrows: “Who do we not save?”It comes after Mr Johnson’s former adviser claimed last week the government’s original plan was for limited intervention with the hope of achieving herd immunity, but that was abandoned when it became clear the scale of the death toll that would result. In an ongoing stream of tweets, which he began publishing intermittently from 17 May, Mr Cummings claimed on Saturday: “The media have been generally abysmal on Covid, but even I’ve been surprised by one thing: how many hacks have parroted Hancock’s line that ‘herd immunity wasn’t the plan’ when ‘herd immunity by September’ was literally the official plan in all docs/graphs/meetings until it was ditched.”But appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the following day, home secretary Priti Patel said the government ‘s decision to delay lockdown was “absolutely not” because it wanted to let the virus rip through the population.“Our strategy was always about protecting public health, saving lives and protecting the NHS,” she told Marr. “Absolutely all colleagues involved in those meetings and discussions, working with the chief scientist and the chief medical officers, absolutely recognised that from the very difficult discussions that we had.”She continued: “At the time of a crisis when government is making very, very tough decisions, difficult decisions, we put public life and protecting the public at the forefront of all those decisions.”Speaking before MPs this morning, Mr Cummings said he “failed to understand” why No 10 “continued to deny” herd immunity was the government’s initial plan. Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Commons’ health committee and part of the team questioning Mr Cummings, further scrutinised the image of the whiteboard.Asked if it represented “the first time” he had told Mr Johnson that official consensus from scientists not to lockdown was wrong, Mr Cummings replied: “No, it wasn’t the first time.”Mr Cummings went on to claim he told the prime minister he believed England should officially shut down “on the morning of the 12th [of March]” – 11 days before it actually happened.The questioning can be watched live on Independent TV. More

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. More

Boris Johnson offered to be injected with Covid live on television to reassure the public and “show it’s nothing to be scared of” — before he contracted the virus and was hospitalised.The extraordinary claim came as Dominic Cummings gave evidence  on the government’s handling of the pandemic, stressing that actions from ministers and officials during the crisis “fell disastrously short of the standards” expected.Speaking at a Commons committee, the former No 10 aide told MPs: “The view of various officials inside No 10 was if we have the prime minister chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone ‘it’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of’, that would not help actually serious panic.”The Daily Mail reported before 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.In April last year — shortly after ordering the country’s first national lockdown — the prime minister was infected with Covid-19 alongside other senior officials, and later spent several days in intensive care.No 10 did not immediately comment on the specifics, but a government spokesperson said: “There is a huge task for this government to get on with. We are entirely focused on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the roadmap and distributing vaccines while delivering the public’s priorities.”“Throughout the pandemic, the government’s priority has ben to save lives, protect the NHS and support people’s jobs and livelihoods across the United Kingdom”.Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, earlier said he had “never” heard the prime minister used the term “kung flu”. Former US president Donald Trump used the phrase during a rally in June last year.Asked on LBC Radio whether he had heard the prime minister say he wanted to infected live on TV, Mr Shapps replied: “No, never, again no.”“It’s a bit of a circus from someone who was there at the time and had the facility and the ability to influence a lot of these decisions, of course,” he added.Before the appearance, the former No 10 aide posted an image of a whiteboard from 13 March — 10 days before Mr Johnson ordered the first lockdown — showing a “Plan A” and “Plan B”.He posted: “First sketch of Plan B, PM study, Fri 13/3 eve — shown PM Sat 14/4: NB. Plan A ‘our plan’ breaks NHS >4k p/day dead min.Plan B: lockdown, suppress, crash programs (tests/treatments/vaccines etc), escape 1st AND 2nd wave.”Quizzed on how concerned he was over the former No 10 adviser might say later this morning, Mr Shapps told Sky News in a separate interview: “Well, I think he’s probably tweeted most of what he’s going to say already”.He added: “I’ll leave others to determine how reliable a witness to all this he is. He was there at the time, what his motives would be I will leave to others”.On Tuesday evening, it was also reported Mr Cummings will tell MP that the prime minister justified delaying lockdown in the autumn by claiming “Covid is only killing 80-year-olds”. More

Dominic Cummings has claimed key officials in government were “literally skiing” in the middle of February, as he described the lack of “urgency” at No 10.Giving evidence to MPs, Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser described government pandemic plans as “hollow” as the crisis loomed, suggesting the government was not acting on a war footing “in any way shape or form”.Mr Cummings also said nations including Britain “completely failed” to see warnings about the virus in January 2020, as it emerged in China.“This is really important point to register,” he told a Commons joint committee. “The government itself and No 10 was not operating on a war footing in February in any way shape or form”.“Lots of key people were literally skiing in the middle of February. It wasn’t until the last week of February that there was again any sense of urgency in terms of No 10 and Cabinet Office”.The former chief aide added that “many institutions” failed early on in the coronavirus crisis, saying: “When it started, in January, I did think in part of my mind, ‘Oh my goodness, is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time?’“However, at the time the PHE (Public Health England) here and the WHO (World Health Organisation) and CDC, generally speaking, organisations across the western world were not ringing great alarm bells about it then.“I think it is in retrospect completely obvious that many, many institutions failed on this early question.”Mr Cummings also used his appearance on Wednesday to apologise for the government’s failures during the crisis, adding in a statement opening the session: “The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most the government failed.“I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that.” More